Exit the supersensorium
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Highlights
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The connection between dream and wake is so close, in fact, that the transition to wake, if allowed to occur naturally and spontaneously in the absence of alarm clocks, is almost always from REM. It is like an already online consciousness gets off to a running start by swapping out random internal sources with real input from sensory organs. What a lucky dream that last one is, the one that gets to be extended across the whole day, that gets to include the quotidian, the agony and ecstasy, the small pleasures and little horrors of a normal humanâs waking hours, before each dream of a day ends with our heads hitting the pillow once more.
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To explain the phenomenology of dreams I recently outlined a scientific theory called the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis (OBH). The OBH posits that dreams are an evolved mechanism to avoid a phenomenon called overfitting. Overfitting, a statistical concept, is when a neural network learns overly specifically, and therefore stops being generalizable.
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All learning is basically a tradeoff between specificity and generality in this manner. Real brains, in turn, rely on the training set of lived life. However, that set is limited in many ways, highly correlated in many ways. Life alone is not a sufficient training set for the brain, and relying solely on it likely leads to overfitting.
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An analogy: dreams are like the exercise of consciousness. Our cognitive and perceptual modules are use it or lose it, just like muscle mass. The dimensions are always shrinking, worn down by our overtraining on our boring and repetitive days. The imperative of life to minimize metabolic costs almost guarantees this. The opposite of the expanding material universe, our phenomenological universes are always contracting. Dreams are like a frenetic gas that counteracts this with pressure from the inside out (itâs worth briefly noting the obvious analogy to hallucinogens here).
- If the OBH is true, then it is very possible writers and artists, not to mention the entirety of the entertainment industry, are in the business of producing what are essentially consumable, portable, durable dreams. Literally. Novels, movies, TV showsâit is easy for us to suspend our disbelief because we are biologically programmed to surrender it when we sleep. I donât think itâs a coincidence that a TV episode traditionally lasts about the same
30 minutes in length as the average REM event, and movies last 90 minutes, an entire sleep cycle (and remember, we dream sometimes in NREM too). They are dream substitutions.
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These fictions include not just religions but also companies, money, and nations. Such things exist only because everyone agrees they do. In fact, it is the capacity for mass cooperation under the influence of fictions like myths, like religions, that explains the rise of humans and their planetary dominance. In a TED Talk Harari says: We can cooperate, flexibly, with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictionsâfictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fictions, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.
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Shared narratives solve coordination problems because everyone has the same framework. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, backing up Harari, called this capacity for cooperation humanityâs âsignature adaption.â Yet the binding power of stories applies as much within individuals as it does across themâthey bind together our very selves. Shakespeare posed the dissembled nature of humans as: All the worldâs a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.
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The better we understand narratives the better our ability to coordinate the fragments of ourselves that have been scattered across time. Artificial fictions serve as a set of examples, and they also allow us to randomly walk about different selves, exercising the experiential space that pertains to the governance and understanding of selves, in much the same manner that dreams do for perceptions, actions, and categories in general. In the end our artificial dreams are similar enough to natural ones, but the emphasis on selfhood and personal journeys indicate their constructed nature, their purposiveness. They avoid overfitting while also instructing, however subtly. The world is like this. A person is like this. A family is like this. Over and over again until we slowly get perceptual and cognitive processes generalized enough to deal with the dynamic world.
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All of which might explain this weird obsession of ours, our sensitivity, even hunger, for stories. And why weâre so drawn to them, especially now. After all, the risk of overfitting is greater for neural networks when what they are learning increases in complexityâperhaps then itâs unsurprising that as our world has complexified we turn ever more to fiction to ârelax,â a phenomenon which might not really be relaxation at all.
- In a world of infinite experience, it is the aesthete who is safest, not the ascetic. Abstinence will not work. The only cure for too much fiction is good fiction. Artful fictions are, by their very nature, rare and difficult to produce. In turn, their rarity justifies their existence and promotion. Itâs difficult to overeat on caviar alone. Now, itâs important to note here that I donât mean that art canât be entertaining, nor that itâs restricted to a certain medium. But art always refuses to be easily assimilated into the supersensorium.
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Art has both freshness and innate ambiguity; it avoids contributing to overfitting via stereotype. A nudge in one direction and it can veer to kitsch, a nudge in another and it can become too experimental and unduly alienating. Art exists in an uncanny valley of familiarityâart is like a dream that some higher being, more aesthetically sensitive, more empathetic, more intelligent, is having. And by extension, we are having. Existing at such points of criticality, it is these kinds of artificial dreams that are the most advanced, efficient, and rewarding, the most assuaging to our day-to-day learning.
- Entertainment, etymologically speaking, means âto maintain, to keep someone in a certain frame of mind.â Art, however, changes us. Who hasnât felt what the French call frisson at the reading of a book, or the watching of a movie? William James called it the same âoceanic feelingâ produced by religion. Which is why art is so often accompanied by the feeling of transcendence, of the sublime. We all know the feelingâit is the warping of the foundations of our experience as we are internally rearranged by the hand of the artist, as if they have reached inside our heads, elbow deep, and, on finding that knot at the center of all brains, yanked us into some new unexplored part of our consciousness.