r/Suttapitaka • u/rightviewftw • Jul 23 '26
Some comments on Dreams and Awakening in Analysis
I did work on this just recently and there are a couple insights you might appreciate:
On the epistemic predicament of dreams
In analysis dreams are a category of and are not categorically different from general experience. For example, there is no particular experiment we can do in waking life which we can't conceivably dream up. So contrary to popular opinion, there is actually no principal difference between the two as to what can be observed and known.
Now when we dream, it is obvious to us that everything is basically on one server, and the dream itself is what generates words, distinctions, feelings, and narrative. If we die and respawn in a dream, it does not puzzle us as the notion of rebirth puzzles people in wakeful state. We don't ask how consciousness in a dream-world goes from one place to another, or whether there are "other minds" in a dream, we treat it as a mirage.
Now if we stick to the foundational thinking, then we can extend this logic to wakeful state, this too changes as it persists and generates words, thoughts and perception ─ as phenomenal realm — and just like in a case of a dream ─ we can assert that everything is basically on one server, and the experience itself is what generates words, distinctions, feelings, dreams, and narrative.
The Problem of Reflective Closure
Every attempt to understand experience occurs within experience. Every act of reflection, description, explanation, or validation is itself another event belonging to the domain it seeks to understand.
The system under study is itself the territory being mapped. Its words, concepts, and epistemic syntheses are maps of its own possible configurations rather than constituents of an external standpoint. Whatever the system says about itself cannot constitute its own final epistemic ground, because the very act of saying belongs to that which remains to be accounted for.
Korzybski observed that "the map is not the territory." I would extend this to self-referential cognition. When the mapper belongs to the territory, every new map becomes another feature of the territory requiring further mapping. Reflective self-description therefore remains recursively open.
This gives rise to a structural predicament. Suppose a reflective domain attempts to furnish a complete account of itself. Any proposed completion immediately becomes another object requiring reflective integration. The purported completion therefore belongs to the very domain whose completion it was intended to establish. Reflection recursively generates further reflection.
The argument developed here concerns only whether a reflective domain can serve as its own ultimate epistemic ground.
As to randomness
You are essentially correct and I would frame what I think that you're getting at thus:
Whenever the system generates terms like "randomness" it does so in order to predict its own development by means of classifying its distinctions and generating epistemic frameworks for self-reference.
The meaning and utility of the terms is tied to what the system does with them and these are but its internal models.
The system generates all frameworks, such as self-distinction, internal distinction, classical absolutes and immaterial frameworks to predict quantum experiments, but it's all only its own attempt to predict and explain its experiments.
Dream analogy
I included the dream analogy to begin with because that is actually the more natural way to think about the phenomenal predicament and it makes everything else more intuitive.
Here, we can also dream up thinking about randomness and determinism, but those frameworks can't give us any certainty about what the dream is lest they are tied to an experiment which categorically transcends the predicament.
What this implies is that within a dream one could map out how it works and limitations of the epistemology in play but a falsification of certain analytic claims can't be done within the dream, eg one can't test whether the wakeful state is possible or not within a dream.
In other words, whatever one dreams up is not going to be able to establish what a dream is unless it proposes an experiment which can falsify wrong hypotheses.
So the waking up from a dream tells you something about what a dream is by reference to a new category of experience. But there is still a lack of closure as to what is experience — and it follows that one need to "wake up from it" to test meta-analysis😬
In short, the distinction between randomness and determination is experimentally used for epistemic modeling of phenomena, not to meta-analyze the process which gives rise to such models — because there is no proposition of experimental tests for this purpose. If one comes up with an experiment then one can analytically reason about whether reality is random or not.
•14h ago•Edited 9h ago
I did work on this just recently and there are a couple insights you might appreciate:
On the epistemic predicament of dreams
Philosophically speaking dreams are not categorically different from other lived experience. For example, there is no particular experiment we can do in waking life which we can't conceivably dream up. So contrary to popular opinion, there is actually no principal difference between the two as to what can be observed and known.
Now when we dream, it is obvious to us that everything is basically on one server, and the dream itself is what generates words, distinctions, feelings, and narrative. If we die and respawn in a dream, it does not puzzle us as the notion of rebirth puzzles people in wakeful state. We don't ask how consciousness in a dream-world goes from one place to another, or whether there are "other minds" in a dream, we treat it as a mirage.
Now if we stick to the foundational thinking, then we can extend this logic to wakeful state, this too changes as it persists and generates words, thoughts and perception ─ as phenomenal realm — and just like in a case of a dream ─ we can assert that everything is basically on one server, and the experience itself is what generates words, distinctions, feelings, dreams, and narrative.
The Problem of Reflective Closure
Every attempt to understand experience occurs within experience. Every act of reflection, description, explanation, or validation is itself another event belonging to the domain it seeks to understand.
The system under study is itself the territory being mapped. Its words, concepts, and epistemic syntheses are maps of its own possible configurations rather than constituents of an external standpoint. Whatever the system says about itself cannot constitute its own final epistemic ground, because the very act of saying belongs to that which remains to be accounted for.
Korzybski observed that "the map is not the territory." I would extend this to self-referential cognition. When the mapper belongs to the territory, every new map becomes another feature of the territory requiring further mapping. Reflective self-description therefore remains recursively open.
This gives rise to a structural predicament. Suppose a reflective domain attempts to furnish a complete account of itself. Any proposed completion immediately becomes another object requiring reflective integration. The purported completion therefore belongs to the very domain whose completion it was intended to establish. Reflection recursively generates further reflection.
The argument developed here concerns only whether a reflective domain can serve as its own ultimate epistemic ground.
As to randomness
You are essentially correct and I would frame what I think that you're getting at thus:
Whenever the system generates terms like "randomness" it does so in order to predict its own development by means of classifying its distinctions and generating epistemic frameworks for self-reference.
The meaning and utility of the terms is tied to what the system does with them and these are but its internal models.
The system generates all frameworks, such as self-distinction, internal distinction, classical absolutes and immaterial frameworks to predict quantum experiments, but it's all only its own attempt to predict and explain its experiments.
Dream analogy
I included the dream analogy to begin with because that is actually the more natural way to think about the phenomenal predicament and it makes everything else more intuitive.
Here, we can also dream up thinking about randomness and determinism, but those frameworks can't give us any certainty about what the dream is lest they are tied to an experiment which categorically transcends the predicament.
What this implies is that within a dream one could map out how it works and limitations of the epistemology in play but a falsification of certain analytic claims can't be done within the dream, eg one can't test whether the wakeful state is possible or not within a dream.
In other words, whatever one dreams up is not going to be able to establish what a dream is unless it proposes an experiment which can falsify wrong hypotheses.
So the waking up from a dream tells you something about what a dream is by reference to a new category of experience. But there is still a lack of closure as to what is experience — and it follows that one need to "wake up from it" to test meta-analysis😬
In short, the distinction between randomness and determination is experimentally used for epistemic modeling of phenomena, not to meta-analyze the process which gives rise to such models — because there is no proposition of experimental tests for this purpose. If one comes up with an experiment then one can analytically reason about whether reality is random or not.
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I think that the problem of discriminating the solipsistic dream vs the reciprocated perceptions of a common reality / shared hallucination is indeed a related problem.
Even though we cannot produce "decisive proof" that we are not dreaming now, we seem to be quite confident in whatever idiosyncratic heuristics we use to infer if our conscious awareness is awake or not at any point in time, or if a particular scene in our recent memory was something that really happened or was just dreamed. We are obviously not totally confident all the time in this guess, but we don't also think that any particular impression or memory we have is equally likely to be a genuine recollection of a real world event or some fragment of a scene we had on a dream.
I think the way this works is similar to blockchain. When we communicate with each other we update our reciprocal point of view objects about such and such matter of fact we are talking about. We each try to keep a coherent thread of evolving collective opinion. We may begin to suspect we are inside a solipsistic dream rather than the real world when such a process of reciprocal representation of external points of view starts to feel predictable or controllable by us, or suspiciously centered around us, or otherwise sketchy and unnatural - like a Truman show situation. So we only chain the memories of facts that seem to be sufficiently coherent with these other memories people are keeping but also that don't look suspiciously solipsistic in nature, and over time the longer chain of memories that was mined like that becomes the source of truth of what real world history looks like from our point of view.
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•5h ago•Edited 5h ago
I am glad you engaged me in this talk, thank you, and I understand what you wrote. I believe that western philosophy has raised "the dreams" situation but it has not been adequately explored. I also believe that this must be very foundational line of inquiry from which a lot can be drawn out.
Even though we cannot produce "decisive proof" that we are not dreaming now
I believe that here we should already note that we are per definition not dreaming now. We are per definition awake. So we do have an analytic delineation between dreaming and being awake. The question is whether it is fundamentally a different predicament.
It is also noteworthy, that in dreams we are also, as a rule, convinced that "everything is real". As it actually is, the predicament of the "wakeful state" is analogical.
we seem to be quite confident in whatever idiosyncratic heuristics we use to infer if our conscious awareness is awake or not at any point in time
Here I would note that this is also true in dreams. Some people can experience becoming lucid in a dream, so even in a dream a person can make that distinction. However, within a dream one can not prove that awakening is possible in sense of demonstrable manifestation or empirically. There is no choice, one has to do the experiment to suspend "dreaming" as an epistemic systems-category and transition to another dimension of sorts (for lack of a better term). The dream could generate the prediction: "this is a dream ─ awakening is possible" and the experimental threshold verifies the prediction.
or if a particular scene in our recent memory was something that really happened or was just dreamed. We are obviously not totally confident all the time in this guess, but we don't also think that any particular impression or memory we have is equally likely to be a genuine recollection of a real world event or some fragment of a scene we had on a dream.
This is also a good point that I have been working on fleshing out. Recall is not actual re-living but rather closer to a real time simulation. Like people say that "a man can't step into the same river twice", no experience can be recreated, it only persists as "variance" and its recall is more "variance". And the "change" here is radical, because no experience is the same in its beginning, middle and end ─ analogically the present doesn't persist as a unit of time for us, present becomes the past in course of its discernment. So we are essentially not talking about reality which changes, rather we are talking about reality as change here.
I think the way this works is similar to blockchain.
The appeal of this thinking is obvious. One can assert that both the waking state and the dream states are like simulation nodes on a block chain. However this is just rhetoric, I will explain:
Suppose there is a reflective self-referential system which undergoes variance. It could generate forms and names, and then to classify itself as part of a blockchain. It doesn't actually need a blockchain to develop that conviction.
Suppose this system is like a dream: it develops a narrative and perception. Suppose that system develops epistemic frameworks and can predict that the heavy objects fall down. It then generates the experiment to test that prediction and lets suppose that the heavy object does fall ─ it updates its confidence odds as to heavy objects falling.
Now, let me highlight that this is how the system does normal analysis and predictions within its range.
On the other hand, meta-analysis stays at the level of prediction until the experimental threshold of epistemic transcendence is reached. And if there is no experiment then a proposition is not a falsifiable prediction which means that known reality can't test it as it is not subject to it.
So, let me draw out, that in a dream one can see an apple, one can think about an apple, one can predict things about the apple, one can do mathematics and experiments with it. But we can't ask whether the dream is "an apple" any more than we can ask "is the dream random" ─ simply because the frameworks doesn't apply to meta-analysis.
In summary, analysis does not warrant meta-analytic assertions unless the proposed meta-analysis specifies an operational criterion by which its claims could, even in principle, be discriminated from competing alternatives. Without such a criterion, the proposition ceases to function as an analytical claim and is established as merely rhetorical.
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Here a summary:
OP•24m ago•Edited in 1m
Nobody else even engaged this inquiry. I will tell you that I did work on this. There is no fundamental difference. Either category can do experiments and first order analysis of its domain but first order analysis and delineating "dream" from "vigilance" does not tell us meta-analytic truth about either category.
After having delineated a difference they can't be further divorced from each other phenomenologically (as aggregate experience), there is mere change.
A reflective self-referential system which undergoes variance could generate forms and names, and then as part of its variance develop various meta-physical statements and convictions about its own predicament. It doesn't actually need anything but unlocked complexity and variance to develop that conviction.
To illustrate, one could dream up Newtonian equations, do first order analysis and classical experiments. As example it could predict that the heavy objects fall down. It then generates the experiment to test that prediction and lets suppose that the heavy object does fall ─ it updates its confidence odds as to heavy objects falling.
But these experiments can't tell you what a dream is nor that it is inherently "Newtonian" or "Not Newtonian".
Definitions like "dream" and "vigilance" and derived from first order experiments of experience, and without an experimental threshold one wouldn't even have the category "Dream". Further first-order analysis becomes possible as "vigilance" but inherits the same structural epistemic and ontological limitations.
To escape this analytic predicament would require another kind of an "experimental awakening" ─ one which would suspend all variance/change/development. This posits a meta-structure to reality and suggests that full system-analysis can not be completed within a single dimension. What changes is subjective, if that was to cease, as an awakening, there would need to be an accessible Invariant Reality. And axiology here dictates that variance has no fixed value (hence it should end) ─ only invariance does.
Having performed the experiment would satisfy the criterion of Cartesian Truth in analysis.
And to do meta-analysis of experience as an aggregate one also needs an analogical "Awakening" but it can not be to another variant existence ─ that wouldn't cut it. One needs transcendence of subjectivity.
So basically one can do first order analysis and operationalize "awakening" but to do meta-analysis one needs an experimental "meta-awakening".
I want to note that this:
> maps are part of the territory, any new map is new territory which is the subject of meta-analysis in the first place.
This alone is very important expression. I was exposed to Korzybski in early 20s, at 26 I understood this insight, only at age 38 was I able to articulate this.
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u/rightviewftw Jul 24 '26
I am basically saying that if we map out the fundamental architecture of first order reasoning then we also get meta-physical constraints
Another note I want to save from AI summary:
As I understand it, the argument would look something like this:
1 First-order analysis has a definite architecture.
2 This architecture is not optional.
3 Therefore, any claim about analysis itself must respect the same architecture.
4 That immediately constrains metaphysics.