Hi, Lee, I would like to get this thread on dream memory going again.
You state the issue precisely. It goes back to a friendly argument that has been going on for years, and about which we tease one another, from time to time. Frank firmly believes in "privileged access" [Frank, please correct any of this I have wrong.] So, my tease was, to a person who believes in privileged access, how does one memory of a dream come to be the standard against which the other is judged. You are quite right that on a Peircean view, all experiences are "now", but some come with a "This is a memory" sign attached to them. So then, the question is, how do we come to categorize some of our experiences as memories, or as dreams, or as memories of dream. Good to hear from you Lee, Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2016 7:24 AM To: Frank Wimberly <[email protected]>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>; Nick Thompson <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unix Nightmare Frank writes: > Nick, > > Well, sometimes when I'm thinking about a dream, I suddenly remember > some detail that I had completely forgotten. But more often I fall > back to sleep. In my old age, I seldom remember dreams. in reply to Nick: > > Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory > > of a dream not be accurate?! I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly believed by *me*) that one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or an error of attribution?) if one thinks of "a dream" as some thing that existed--or some act that was undertaken--before one awakes, which can thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names "remembering the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of two behaviors--"dreaming while half-awake" and "attributing the quality of 'rememberance of the past' to 'awareness of an on- going behavior'" (pardon the awkward phrasings). Of course, often one also "thinks about a dream" when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may be (or incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type. In particular, to say that "I suddenly remember some detail that I had completely forgotten" *may* be begging the question: how can you know (and why should you suppose) that you are not simply (sic!) creating that detail anew, and simultaneously attributing pastness (and veridicality) to it? And I do mean to ask, literally, *how* can you know something like that? On an account like mine, Nick's question becomes vacuous; but maybe Nick phrased the question exactly as a succinct way of stating my more rambling account. Lee ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
