The two pieces of evidence I mentioned are not inconsistent with your model, but they seem to certainly be weak evidence for mine.
I will chalk it up to minds being more different than I expected. If you can offer any testable predictions about the “confabulation hypothesis” I’d be happy to try them, but it seems far-fetched to me.
Again I want to emphasize that I’m not making any specific, strong claim. “Confabulation” is one possibility (broadly speaking), but there are several ways to construe what I’ve described, under some of which “confabulation” is not really the best way to describe what’s going on.
As for testable predictions, well… it’s hard to say. Certainly if what I describe as my experience is nothing at all like yours, then that’s evidence against my “model”[1] of dreams—at least in your case! My model would predict my experiences, and antipredict yours, after all.
I again refer you to Dennett, who, in his aforementioned essay, gives some interesting differences in predictions between types of theories about the nature of dreams. I do warn you, however, that little of what he has to present is stronger evidence for the individual case than individual experience is. In other words, whatever Dennett has to say, I don’t expect it’s likely that you’ll change your mind about what sorts of things your dreams are. (Not impossible, mind you; just not likely.)
As you say, minds are different.
[1] It’s not really a model, of course, but more like an anti-model—a set of intuitions / anecdata / considerations / etc. that rule out certain models.
The two pieces of evidence I mentioned are not inconsistent with your model, but they seem to certainly be weak evidence for mine.
I will chalk it up to minds being more different than I expected. If you can offer any testable predictions about the “confabulation hypothesis” I’d be happy to try them, but it seems far-fetched to me.
Again I want to emphasize that I’m not making any specific, strong claim. “Confabulation” is one possibility (broadly speaking), but there are several ways to construe what I’ve described, under some of which “confabulation” is not really the best way to describe what’s going on.
As for testable predictions, well… it’s hard to say. Certainly if what I describe as my experience is nothing at all like yours, then that’s evidence against my “model”[1] of dreams—at least in your case! My model would predict my experiences, and antipredict yours, after all.
I again refer you to Dennett, who, in his aforementioned essay, gives some interesting differences in predictions between types of theories about the nature of dreams. I do warn you, however, that little of what he has to present is stronger evidence for the individual case than individual experience is. In other words, whatever Dennett has to say, I don’t expect it’s likely that you’ll change your mind about what sorts of things your dreams are. (Not impossible, mind you; just not likely.)
As you say, minds are different.
[1] It’s not really a model, of course, but more like an anti-model—a set of intuitions / anecdata / considerations / etc. that rule out certain models.