I would also add that the fear responses, while participating in the hallucinations, aren’t themselves hallucinated, not any more than wakeful fear is hallucinated, at any rate. They’re just emotional responses to the contents of our dreams.
Since pain involves both sensory and affective components which rarely come apart, and the sensory precedes the affective, it’s enough to not hallucinate the sensory.
I do feel like pain is a bit different from the other interoceptive inputs in that the kinds of automatic responses to it are more like those to emotions, but one potential similarity is that it was more fitness-enhancing for sharp pain (and other internal signals going haywire) to wake us, but not so for sight, sound or emotions. Loud external sounds still wake us, too, but maybe only much louder than what we dream.
It’s not clear that you intended otherwise, but I would also assume not that there’s something suppressing pain hallucination (like a hyperparameter), but that hallucination is costly and doesn’t happen by default, so only things useful and safe to hallucinate can get hallucinated.
Also, don’t the senses evoked in dreams mostly match what people can “imagine” internally while awake, i.e. mostly just sight and sound? There could be common mechanisms here. Can people imagine pains? I’ve also heard it claimed that our inner voices only have one volume, so maybe that’s also true of sound in dreams?
FWIW, I think I basically have aphantasia, so can’t visualize well, but I think my dreams have richer visual experiences.
the fear responses, while participating in the hallucinations, aren’t themselves hallucinated
Yeah, maybe I should have said “the amygdala responds to the hallucinations” or something.
pain is a bit different from the other interoceptive inputs in that the kinds of automatic responses to it are more like those to emotions…
“Emotions” is kinda a fuzzy term that means different things to different people, and more specifically, I’m not sure what you meant in this paragraph. The phrase “automatic responses…to emotions” strikes me as weird because I’d be more likely to say that an “emotion” is an automatic response (well, with lots of caveats), not that an “emotion” is a thing that elicits an automatic response.
not that there’s something suppressing pain hallucination (like a hyperparameter), but that hallucination is costly and doesn’t happen by default
Again I’m kinda confused here. You wrote “not…but” but these all seem simultaneously true and compatible to me. In particular, I think “hallucination is costly” energetically (as far as I know), and “hallucination is costly” evolutionarily (when done at the wrong times, e.g. while being chased by a lion). But I also think hallucination is controlled by an inference-algorithm hyperparameter. And I’m also inclined to say that the “default” value of this hyperparameter corresponds to “don’t hallucinate”, and during dreams the hyperparameter is moved to a non-”default” setting in some cortical areas but not others. Well, the word “default” here is kinda meaningless, but maybe it’s a useful way to think about things.
Hmm, maybe you’re imagining that there’s some special mechanism that’s active during dreams but otherwise inactive, and this mechanism specifically “injects” hallucinations into the input stream somehow. I guess if the story was like that, then I would sympathize with the idea that maybe we shouldn’t call it a “hyperparameter” (although calling it a hyperparameter wouldn’t really be “wrong” per se, just kinda unhelpful). However, I don’t think it’s a “mechanism” like that. I don’t think you need a special mechanism to generate random noise in biological neurons where the input would otherwise be. They’re already noisy. You just need to “lower SNR thresholds” (so to speak) such that the noise is treated as a meaningful signal that can constrain higher-level models, instead of being ignored. I could be wrong though.
I would also add that the fear responses, while participating in the hallucinations, aren’t themselves hallucinated, not any more than wakeful fear is hallucinated, at any rate. They’re just emotional responses to the contents of our dreams.
I disagree with this statement. For me, the contents of a dream seem only weakly correlated with whether I feel afraid during the dream. I’ve had many dreams with seemingly ordinary content (relative to the baseline of general dream weirdness) that were nevertheless extremely terrifying, and many dreams with relatively weird and disturbing content that were not frightening at all.
I would also add that the fear responses, while participating in the hallucinations, aren’t themselves hallucinated, not any more than wakeful fear is hallucinated, at any rate. They’re just emotional responses to the contents of our dreams.
Since pain involves both sensory and affective components which rarely come apart, and the sensory precedes the affective, it’s enough to not hallucinate the sensory.
I do feel like pain is a bit different from the other interoceptive inputs in that the kinds of automatic responses to it are more like those to emotions, but one potential similarity is that it was more fitness-enhancing for sharp pain (and other internal signals going haywire) to wake us, but not so for sight, sound or emotions. Loud external sounds still wake us, too, but maybe only much louder than what we dream.
It’s not clear that you intended otherwise, but I would also assume not that there’s something suppressing pain hallucination (like a hyperparameter), but that hallucination is costly and doesn’t happen by default, so only things useful and safe to hallucinate can get hallucinated.
Also, don’t the senses evoked in dreams mostly match what people can “imagine” internally while awake, i.e. mostly just sight and sound? There could be common mechanisms here. Can people imagine pains? I’ve also heard it claimed that our inner voices only have one volume, so maybe that’s also true of sound in dreams?
FWIW, I think I basically have aphantasia, so can’t visualize well, but I think my dreams have richer visual experiences.
Yeah, maybe I should have said “the amygdala responds to the hallucinations” or something.
“Emotions” is kinda a fuzzy term that means different things to different people, and more specifically, I’m not sure what you meant in this paragraph. The phrase “automatic responses…to emotions” strikes me as weird because I’d be more likely to say that an “emotion” is an automatic response (well, with lots of caveats), not that an “emotion” is a thing that elicits an automatic response.
Again I’m kinda confused here. You wrote “not…but” but these all seem simultaneously true and compatible to me. In particular, I think “hallucination is costly” energetically (as far as I know), and “hallucination is costly” evolutionarily (when done at the wrong times, e.g. while being chased by a lion). But I also think hallucination is controlled by an inference-algorithm hyperparameter. And I’m also inclined to say that the “default” value of this hyperparameter corresponds to “don’t hallucinate”, and during dreams the hyperparameter is moved to a non-”default” setting in some cortical areas but not others. Well, the word “default” here is kinda meaningless, but maybe it’s a useful way to think about things.
Hmm, maybe you’re imagining that there’s some special mechanism that’s active during dreams but otherwise inactive, and this mechanism specifically “injects” hallucinations into the input stream somehow. I guess if the story was like that, then I would sympathize with the idea that maybe we shouldn’t call it a “hyperparameter” (although calling it a hyperparameter wouldn’t really be “wrong” per se, just kinda unhelpful). However, I don’t think it’s a “mechanism” like that. I don’t think you need a special mechanism to generate random noise in biological neurons where the input would otherwise be. They’re already noisy. You just need to “lower SNR thresholds” (so to speak) such that the noise is treated as a meaningful signal that can constrain higher-level models, instead of being ignored. I could be wrong though.
I disagree with this statement. For me, the contents of a dream seem only weakly correlated with whether I feel afraid during the dream. I’ve had many dreams with seemingly ordinary content (relative to the baseline of general dream weirdness) that were nevertheless extremely terrifying, and many dreams with relatively weird and disturbing content that were not frightening at all.