Techie Papers

Serial VS Consciousness

Is consciousness serial? (This was a question presented to me by Strick. [ actually, it was by Virgil --strick ] ) In a way consciousness could be perceived as serial because humans have two basic forms of consciousness, awake or asleep. So it’s sort of like the way serial communications like most electronic devices these days work, digitally. So you could perceive consciousness as being awake (1, being productive) or asleep (0, being less productive, more on this statement for another away message). So in closing, yes, consciousness is similar to serial communications. Another note to take in this conversation is what parity is consciousness or even the baud rate. Hmm, this is a good topic to think about on those late night episodes before i fall asleep.Hmm, well in further thought, baud rate could be a measure of useful sleep, being that the deeper in sleep you are, i.e. REM compared to light nap, could be a difference in baud rate. Parity is another story, I really don’t know the difference between parities enough to elaborate on this sub-note. Maybe someone could enlighten me on this subject?

-Shadow

Why do we dream?

As intelligent beings we have the gift of dreaming. And with this gift comes many questions. What are dreams for? What do dreams mean? Is there a way to control these dreams? Do dolphins, one the smartest species on the planet dream like us as well? These are all good questions. One that I would like to address to begin with is on the basis of dreams and their meaning?

When First examining this question I realized that meanings are relative only to the person who had the dream. The same exact dream for someone else, could mean something tottaly diffrent. As my Psychology proffesor pointed out dreams have many diffrent meanings. One that he said is what our ID is thinking, cause this is about the only time we are relaxed enough to let this side of us out.

One dream I had involved one of my ex-girlfriends that I had not thought about much since we broke up. This girl I went out with for 6 months so we had an extended relationship that was very deep. So she was a large part of my life in the 20 years i've been alive. What this dream en-tailed was one of me seeing her for the first time since we broke up. I was glad to see her which would of not of been my first reaction if this were to happen in real-life. We had dinner and saw a movie together in this dream as well.

Upon waking up from this dream I had a flood of thoughts coarse through my mind. Many of thoughts that had been pent up in hiding for a while b/c I did not personally want to address them. Either it was for my own good, or I just didn't want to deal with it at this time. But the mind and body has ways of making u deal with it as I later found out. Some of these feeling were some of regret, sorrow and unhappyness. Some were of remembering the good times. Some of jealousness. These were only a few. Since this dream I have done alot of thinking about this girl. Of which I have not come to a conclusion on. This is one example of a dream having actual meaning.

The next question I would like to try to anser or at least jabber on about, is why do we dream in the first plave. I personally think that dreams seem to happen because we are intelligent beings, and even at complete rest (sleep), we are always thinking. As a result, we have to find a way to protray these thoughts. As everyone knows, thoughts are formulated in the mind. And when we try to remember what something looks like, we formulate an image in our mind. And as I said before we are always thinking, even in sleep.

Put all these things together at one time, you begin to form a dream. The fact is, the reason we don't dream while awake is because we have self-control and our higher mind takes over to control these functions. In people that are narcoleptic, the switch that decides what mind is in control, is permanently malfunctioning. Only with medicine can this switch be controlled to an extent. This sorta helps define the reason for dreaming.

As I stated above, intelligent beings like us dream. Are we the only intelligent beings on Earth that are able to dream? I think not! Scientist have learned through many scientific experiments that dolphins are typically able to use complex thought in problem solving and everyday tasks. They are also able to protray abstract thought. This proves that they don't use their mind for just survival. The experiment also proves they are intelligent beings.

Do dolphins dream? It's really hard to tell if they dream or not. This is where it got tricky for scientist to find out if they do dream. The dolphin mind is made up of 2 parts. Part of the time 1 side is awake and the other asleep and vice versa. So it's really hard to tell if they sleep or not.

So to have a more controlled experiment for this question we will use our everyday household dog, preferrably a dalmation.