Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Oct 30, 2016; 8:57pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/How-can-the-memory-of-a-dream-be-inaccurate-L-WAS-Unix-Nightmare-tp7588056.html
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-----
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Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2016 7:24 AM
To: Frank Wimberly <
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Complexity Coffee Group <
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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
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