A dream you'd rather not have.

Imagine the following situation. A Dignitas patient-client ingests the lethal dose of the pentobarbital, and soon after falling asleep (the sleep which gradually deepens into a coma, and eventually leads to respiratory arrest and death) they have a lucid dream whereby they're aware of what is happening, but for some reason in that dream they change their mind regarding ending it all. Naturally, they won't be able to wake up, and they know that in the dream.

THE ILLUSION OF DECISION MAKING (an arument for epiphenomenalism)

There's a high correlation between what we like to call our decisions---actions to which we'd like to attribute intention---and their alleged causal consequences. For example I decide to take a sip of coffee, and it happens. I decided to write this essay, and I'm writing it. The correlation value appears to diminish with decisions and plans regarding actions/events that are more distant in the future. In effect, this argument would be to support the ephiphenomenalist view, that the feeling of self agency (illusion of free will) is a real but ineffectual phenomenon.

Now, I'd like to propose an interpretation of what we would normally call decisions, in the absence of free will. That is, I propose an interpretation of what we would call and identify as decisions in the absence of free will----an interpretation which explains the correlation between those intensional events we identify as decisions and the alleged outcomes of those decisions. So to clarify. There persists a strong feeling that we have an autonomous, causal influence over our actions. It seems obvious that we make decisions and then carry them out! Is it possible that we're not actively and freely initiating our actions?  I propose an explanation of this strong feeling/conviction of decision-making and its apparent efficacy on the world, even in the absence of free will.

MAIN PART
Here it goes: assuming absence of free will, what we identify as decisions are in fact predictions of what we (our bodies) will do. We're quite good at making those predictions since we know our bodies quite well, and have a well developed intuition that helps in the accuracy of the prediction. This would explain the correlation between the illusory decisions---which are in fact predictions---and their outcomes. It should be stressed that predictions are not intended acts. We don't choose to make those predictions---they just happen and we merely witness them as if they were revealed to us, and we only interpret them as our decisions. To put it another way, we receive the predictions as 'reports' from our system, so we remain decisively passive in this regard. That's about it for the core of the idea. 

To be clear the phenomenological aspect of what we would call a decision is still the same. That is, I'm saying that decisions are in fact no more than predictions, and the belief of their causal efficacy is illusory: I'm going to watch this movie still appears in our minds but it's merely a passively received prediction and it has no causal effect on the world, unlike a real decision employed by free will. It's like shifting from a geocentric to a heliocentric explanation of the Sun's path across the sky. It still looks the same (it is the same image on our retinas), but we're not at the center of the Solar system. No longer the protagonists we thought we were.

It should be noted that instances where the predictions fail, correspond exactly to circumstances that would get in the way of acting on a decision, i.e. external circumstances that are unexpected, and as such difficult to account for from the reading of our inner state alone. For example, if I decide to go to the local cinema tomorrow, but it burns down, then I won't go. But this is also something that would be difficult to predict---the likelihood of an accident happening at the cinema is precisely reflected by the degree of my confidence that I will carry out the plan of seeing the movie. Changing one's mind is to be interpreted as merely passively updating/refining/revising a prediction, i.e. being presented with such an update.

It just seems to me that each instance of what we identify as a decision could be equally well explained in terms of a revealed prediction. And it seems that failures to realize previously decided upon acts are equally amenable to being plausibly explained by unforeseen circumstances that are not being accounted for in the prediction.

The picture that emerges here is one where we're mere passive witnesses to our own existence who create (or are presented with) a meaningful narrative which places us at its center as the protagonists, i.e. we live out a geocentric illusion within a heliocentric reality.

Ad hoc theory of one of the reasons why time appears to flow faster in dreams.

A perplexing yet strangely familiar experience to anyone who has ever dreamed, would undoubtedly have been making the occasional observation that much more seems to occur in our dreams than the duration of our sleep alone can account for. After a night of intense dreaming we often remember the equivalent of much a longer time period then we had actually spent sleeping (which is generally much longer than the time spent dreaming). Or when we take a short nap during the day, we're often surprised to learn upon waking that only a few minutes have past after what had seemed like an epic adventure. 
So apparently there's a clear subjective disconnect between dream state and waking state with regard how we perceive the flow of time. I make the assumption that time doesn't actually undergo some substantial warping in our heads in a way that would account for this phenomenon.

Since we're under the impression that more has happened during our dream than the time being asleep can account for, there seem to be a few possibilities as to why that may be. I should mention that I'm writing this blog post without having consulted any particular, specialist literature on the matter, hence the post title. 
One possibility is that our brain processes inner-conjured dream-films with a higher temporal resolution. That is, the dream-films are presented to us with increased speed, but we perceive them as normal, since within our dream state there's no other reference frame other than the dream itself. This hypothesis appears to be amiable to empirical exploration.

The other possibility, which occurred to me recently, is closely related with how our memory works. So the following explanation requires both some assumptions about the mechanics of our memory, but also some assumptions about the actual content of dream-films. The vast majority of us, whenever recollecting some series of events---say our last birthday party, or the recent trip to the countryside---tends to recall vivid snapshots of the more intense impressions, which are more or less arranged in chronological order. The point is that most of us don't remember the entire experiencial continuum, but rater a collection of short vivid fragments. Now, if we think about it, this is how dreams often seem to manifest---in a bunch of , more or less, disconnected situations combined into one weird stream.

Of course when I talk about this, I have only my memory to rely on, so if our memory indeed works as I just have outlined, then I cannot justifiably rely on it to speak of the character of the dream-films. But the point is that it is possible that dreams may be arranged and have the actual content analogous to the way our memory works. That is, dreams may consist of vivid fragments connected haphazardly with a vague chronological cause-effect narrative sense, like a movie trailer. But because our memory also works, as assumed earlier, such that we tend to only recall movie-trailer-like imagery, and only infer all the in-between events that must have occurred, when presented with the dream-film trailer, we inflate its content by inferring that there must have been intervals in-between.

For example, in real life, when recalling our plane journey from one city to another, we may only vividly recall say, the departure and arrival, plus a few more interesting cloud formations viewed through the window on the way, but that doesn't mean that the journey only consisted of those few intervals (the sum of which may consist of less than a minute of vivid mnemonic imagery), because as a matter of fact the journey is much longer (say, a few hours) than the sum of our recollected and vivid fragments---we infer that there must have been in-between intervals, other than those that we can vividly access.

But it's possible that my dream of a similar flight would be a kind of film trailer actually consisting of only the vivid fragments of the departure, a view of the more interesting cloud formations, and the arrival, arranged in a sequence of one vivid fragment occurring immediately after the previous one, without any intervals in-between at all. However upon recalling this 3-scene act when we wake up, it seems much longer because our memory mechanism inflates this vividly dreamed sequence by filling it with inferential content, i.e. a journey like that must have lasted a few hours (there must have been many more scenes in this act).

So the ad hoc explanation of why time appears to flow faster in dreams is that dreams are much like film trailers, but because of how our memory works, we tend to have the impression that we've watched the entire film.

I've also written about about how our memory works in a recent post, and a short story written years ago.

Auto Capgras delusion.

Capgras delusion is a disorder whereby a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor. 

I was wondering this morning what it would be like, if possible at all (I think it may be) to suffer from the peculiar case of Capgras delusion, whereby one believes themselves to be an impostor.