1. Dreams and a Sense of the Sacred

Sifting Through Trash: The Interpretation of Dreams 

Dreams are trash. The material reduction reduced dreams to random synapse firings and a brain adapted to pattern recognition even when there was none. Dreams are about nothing, which makes dream interpretation something like sifting through trash and telling a story about it. The impulse to narrativize about refuse is not compelled by the biological waste productions themselves, but by Homo Narratiosus whose love of story can be reduced, for a while, to Homo Economicus’s “love” of the patterns and codes necessary to transact with the world. Scientists used to not be sure what dreams were for because they were sure that a brain was for reducing uncertainty, and dreams didn’t seem to have a clear role in that. Most evolutionary biologists now theorized that dreams are reviews of past experiences to prepare and rehearse for possible new ones, and many neuroscientists who used to teach that dreams weren’t for anything, now seem to agree with this practicing-possible-scenarios view of dreams because they have seen a pattern in what they used to think were meaningless electrochemical “brainstorms.” The patterns that they recognize accord with the now familiar neuroscientific story of “correspondences,” the areas of the brain that “light up” with activity are the same as those when the waking brain is taking in sensory data and making up a story.  

Somnologists place dreams squarely in the wheelhouse of Homo Economicus because dreams are preparation for worldly transactions. It is unsurprising that Homo Narratiosus is ultimately economic in nature because this discovery accords with the scientific consensus that human beings are complex prediction machines. Dreams are like the narratives of waking life because they are yet another form of information processing. Sleep’s general, biological function is processing biochemical “waste” for more optimal brain functioning, and dreams process the psychological waste that is somehow epiphenomenal to those biochemicals. Thanks to science, sleep is no longer an unfortunate but necessary waste of time but has become yet another way to optimize human productivity.  

Neuroscientists observe areas of the brain associated with sensory perception “light up” when subjects are dreaming. For example, the Visual Cortex and both Broca’s Area (speech) and Wernicke’s Area (comprehension) are very active in dream states. Even the Motor Cortex gets in the act generally without moving the body. And the extremely primitive Limbic System (affect) may be the star of the whole show when dreaming, especially the infamous amygdala responsible for base emotions like fear. Basically, all of the brain systems responsible for a coherent waking life are fully engaged when dreaming, including, and especially, those associated with narrative coherence, such as the hippocampus (connection), the prefrontal cortex (prediction), and the master coordinator of all brain systems known as the “Default Mode Network.” 

In accord with the sciences’ radical turn towards empiricism, Neuroscience became, and remains for many, the only legitimate arbiter of psychology because of its third person, “objective” view of the brain. Never mind the impossible tautology of a brain and its activities appearing as an empirical object on the subjective field of the phenomenological intention, neuroscientists can “observe” dreams. And it used to be that when people were dreaming, their brains produced what “looked” like an uncoordinated, purposeless, electro-chemical torrent. Neuroscientists couldn’t see any independently verifiable meaning in there, so there wasn’t any. Dreams were illusions dreamt by illusions, and somehow neuroscientists had discovered the “reality” of this simulacrum via the empirical hallucination of “direct” observation. But since all empirical realities “emerge” out of the “controlled hallucination” of consciousness, it’s hard to know what the discoveries of neuroscience really mean, or to what “empirical” subjectivity it is meaningful since there are only material brains hallucinating the first-person perspective that can’t be observed from the scientific third-person.  

Dreams make clear the problem of what is called the “little man inside the brain,” or the "Homunculus." Who are dreams for? They must be for the brain, since “ultimately” that’s all there is, and the visible brain is not a self because the self isn’t visible. The mind is an emergent phenomenon, sometimes called “epiphenomenal,” of integrating various systems of information processes generated by the brain. The self emerges as the illusion of a homunculus at the immaterial, because nonlocal, point of active integration of passive information called the “Default Mode Network.” Neuroscientists must speak of the various systems of the brain as if they were little selves out of convention and convenience, but if there were any self somehow housed in the brain, it wouldn’t be one of those systems, but the integration of the systems in the Default Mode Network. So, dreams replay, or “re-construct,” in accord with more recent understandings of memories, the Default Mode Network’s interactions with the brain’s various systems, including systems of perception. affect, and language.  

At no point does the apparition of the homunculus-self of the Default Mode Network directly touch the outside world, which has always been a problem for radical Empiricism. So, dreams are like waking life in that the Default Mode Network is still integrating information, but it is the sensory information of the day as it was narrativized, or encoded with language, by the Default Mode Network at the time. So, what accounts for the strange forms that dream narratives take as opposed to the story telling of the day? The narrator has changed. If the narrator is the homunculus-self, then at least one of the censors that makes up its daytime formulation has stayed asleep, in particular, the one concerned with the “reality principle” of “consensus reality,” the one that oversees repressing contradiction. Since there is no longer any direct reality to push back on dreams, they go where they want, which is why Sigmund Freud used them to learn about desire itself.  

This difference between the daytime narrator and the nighttime one is an indication of the disunity within the self that is the basic contradiction that Freud and Jacques Lacan saw as the origin of the unconscious. What is repressed as the unconscious is the lack of a unified self, which is the contradiction of the self that has led many religious thinkers to the conclusion that there is no self, which is not the same as the materialist’s route to the same conclusion. The materialist denies a self because it can’t be empirically observed, even though they begrudgingly acknowledge that it is a useful, even necessary, illusion of the first-person. But it is also the lack of a unified self that allows for an “outside” of the determinations of the Default Mode Network. However deterministic neuroscientists are about the phantom self of the Default Mode Network, they generally agree that it is possible to step outside of it at times to intervene in it, which is what is happening in dreams when their narrator is asleep to the reality principle. The daytime self becomes the object of the nighttime self, and the difference is not their desire but their different relations to that desire outlined by Freud as the lack of the daytime censor of the reality principle. 

The Default Mode Network produces the illusion of a self for itself. But there is a classical phenomenological problem here of how an object can produce the subject, even, and especially, if subjectivity is an illusion. If subjectivity really is “nothing but” an object after the material reduction, how come the first person can’t be “cleared up” in the way that other illusions are, which is by the reduction to underlying, observable principles? And even more curious, how come the third-person must be generated from the first when the third’s primacy is the absolute bedrock of scientific inquiry? Not a single piece of neuroscientific data was collected without the frame of the “empirical” evidence of first-person experience, which is the frame of the first-person on the third, or on so called “objective” reality. This has led to the problem in the history of philosophy that subjects seem to generate objects and not the other way around, which was the meaning behind GWF Hegel’s strange statement that “subject is a bone.” The rock-solid, empirical basis of what is real, which is objective, third-person observation, is a production of an illusion i.e., first-person subjectivity.  

Waking life is a dream like any other dream because it is a “controlled hallucination” in the words of Anil Seth, or an adaptive “interface,” like a “computer desktop,” in the words of Donald Hoffman. But what is this dream for? For Seth the question was answered by the tautology of dreamer, in the biological, material register, dreaming a dream, in subjective, immaterial register, something like Zhuangzi’s dreamer dreaming that he was a butterfly getting lost in his dream. The problem for Seth, a Neuroscientist, is that tautologies are not scientific and are unbecoming a neuroscientist, especially since this tautology crosses the first-person / third-person barrier without any explanation as to how electrochemical interactions become experience.  

Hoffman, an evolutionary biologist, has a related problem, even though he considers consciousness to be fundamental, and therefore, not generated by matter, but rather a fundamental feature of matter. If consciousness is not an illusion than what is it? If the self is a temporary, individuated interface i.e., the material body centered in the brain, then what is the subject of the interface? This is to ask the question that has been asked in the history of Eastern religions since time immemorial, best articulated in the Advaita Venanta, or “Nondualism” tradition, as the question of the “face behind the face.” The same question applies to the face behind Hoffman’s “interface,” which Immanuel Kant had already discovered over three centuries ago and articulated as the “Transcendental Ego,” of the “a priori categories.” 

There have only ever been two answers to this question. The first is the East’s spiraling cycles of “turtles-all-the-way-down" approach exemplified in modern times by Douglas Hofstadter’s “Strange Loops” that Daniel Denet got so much mileage out of.  This position answers the question by positing another face behind the face ad infinitum, so that there is no self because there is no final landing place for it. The other form of an answer to this basic question is a brute fact like the Brahmin of the Vedas, which is often put as “consciousness itself,” in the Eastern tradition, or an “Uncaused Cause," “Unmoved Mover,” or “Necessary Being” in the Western tradition. As the concepts of Nondualism have been presented in the West, consciousness as such is often rendered as something like the “Silent Watcher,” in Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra, but “loving awareness” can also be used to describe the “True Face” behind the interface.  

Hoffman’s Interface bridges between first-person experience and third person reality in itself. So, what then is in the first-person position? For Hoffman the first-person is consciousness itself as it is in much Eastern thought, which puts consciousness into a sort of turtles-all-the-way-down tautology too, which materialist, or physicalists, or realists used to avoid like the plague because it is a form of the tautology, classically labelled “Idealism,” in which subjectivity is the basis of reality.

For Hoffman and many others for whom consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent, consciousness generates awareness of the phenomenal objects produced by the interface, but evolutionary pressures produce the interface. Evolution’s selection is “blind,” deterministic, and without a selector, which saves the “reality” of the material world from the idealism of never-ending homunculi. So, for most of these generally “Panpsychist” thinkers, consciousness is awareness that can’t play any role in the material world other than to be aware of it. The illusion here is not of awareness itself, but of choice, or more abstractly of freedom. Hoffman’s tautology takes first person subjectivity seriously as the foundation of the third, but he has been the first to admit that we still have no idea from what source first-person subjectivity is derived or how it is related to the phenomenological intention of the interface.

Why Do Prediction Machines Dream? 

The problem for dreams and their interpreters was the same problem as that for waking life and its interpreters, which was that the brain insisted on projecting meaning where there was none except that which was revealed by the material reduction. It was fine to engage in hermeneutics as long as you understood that those were stories, and that those stories were “nothing but” synapses firing on the most basic level, and on the level of evolutionary “hermeneutics,” stories were “nothing but” Richard Dawkins’s “Memes” passed on because they made an individual and her group better prediction machines.  

Graham Harmon’s notions of “Undermining” and “Overmining” may be useful here. Undermining is the material reduction of a whole to its parts typified by the procedure of analysis and the phrase, “nothing but.”  Objects are undermined by reducing them to some fundamental, underlying principle(s), so Harmon used the examples of statements like; a tree is nothing but its biology, or biology is nothing but chemistry, and chemistry is nothing but physics. Harmon noted that most people’s intuition about trees registers the loss of the tree itself as it is analyzed in such a reduction. Since Harmon is a Heideggerian, he formulated the tree that was lost by analysis as the tree that “withdraws” from the intention of the analysis of the tree’s “underlying” principles.  

Overmining is when wholes, or unified objects like trees, are reduced to their relations as in Structuralism, in which objects are “nothing but” their relations to other objects. This was the sort of “deconstructive” analysis that he associated with someone like Jacques Derrida, in which things were reduced to their location in a system of difference. What withdrew in this sort of analysis was presence because it was only the signified’s difference from other, absent signifiers that gave the signified its precarious ontological status. What withdrew from the interplay of signifiers in Derrida’s “Differance” was the signified because its signifier became primary, which was the meaning of Derrida’s famous “There is no outside-text,” which has been sometimes rendered, “There is nothing outside the text.” Because there was no outside-text, there was no outside authority to fix the meaning of the signifier, which included the authority of the signified itself. When Derrida wrote that textuality was primary to speech, it was to assert that textuality worked by way of difference from what was absent rather than the presence of the signified, which is what seemed to be guaranteed by the presence of the speaker in speech. To Harmon’s point, in the Overmining of Structuralism (there is no such thing as so called “Post Structuralism”) the signified took a back seat to the endless interplay of signifiers. 

What has withdrawn from the reduction of human psychology to the material brain is spirit. It sounds absurd and primitive to even bring it up because spirit was an illusion dispelled by Scientific Positivism long ago. It is considered both trite and laughable that Rene Descartes once thought the pineal gland was where the material and spiritual bodies met because everyone knows that there is “nothing but” matter. The neuroscientific model requires the tautology that the biology of the brain both projects meaning and the empirical awareness of that meaning as the controlled hallucination of consciousness. But who is this phantom tautology for? As discussed above, it is a useful illusion for a prediction machine to hallucinate a self, so it is for an apparition that somehow interfaces with and moves the body. Descartes’s pineal gland seems idiotic to the educated modern, but any interface is going to have to explain how an immaterial illusion effects the material body. It is common for both materialist and “Idealists” to say that thoughts move the body, but what gets lost is that how this gap between body and “spirit” is bridged is not at all understood. It can be described phenomenologically, but it can’t be explained mechanically in the physio-biological mode, and it can’t be account for spiritually in the religious mode. Materialist must take it on faith that quantities “just are” the qualitative experiences of them, which means that qualitative experience is a mode of affective measurement, but the mechanism by which that translation occurs is currently unknown, and even has its own name, “The Combination Problem.” In phenomenology the intention is both the projection and the screen, but who’s intention it is and how it arises from particular combinations of material systems is bracketed.  

Phenomenology brackets the question of how the material brain relates to the immaterial intention and just describes the “what it's like” of the intention. In neuroscience the material brain can project an immaterial illusion, particularly that of conscious awareness, without explanation of how the shift from third-person observable brain activity to first-person experience, however phantastic it may be, is accomplished. And it is sufficient for evolutionary biologists to account for consciousness as a useful adaptation for predictive processing without explanation of how material, quantifiable processes can make this incredible jump into something so unlike material quantities as the “qualia” of intentional aboutness are.  

Evolutionary psychology reduces the fantasies of meaning and purpose to predictive processors’ tendencies to make “over-generalization” errors. Our evolutionary biology gave us a psychology for pattern recognition, but there was an incentive build into the operant conditioning of this psychology that has caused us to over-predict, usually in the form of over-assigning causal agents to non-correlated effects. This has become the now platitudinous story of the primitive man who hears a slight rustling in a near-by bush that ninety-nine out of a hundred times turns out not to be a predator, but because he jumps all one hundred times, he survives the one time when it is something that wants to eat him.  

It pays to be anxious according to this story, so anxious dispositions are somehow passed down to the next generation in the genetic code of those members of the species who happen to be anxiety ridden. According to evolutionary psychology, over-generalization errors are the underlying conditions of all impositions of meaning onto the meaningless, and why we have become such excessive storytellers. The illusion of meaning is beneficial for survival and reproduction, too bad that the Meaning Crisis is the inevitable result of us outgrowing that illusion. We must do what Steven Jay Gould famously advised and “take a cold bath” in the meaninglessness of the universe and just get it over with. However, it is again unclear how psychological dispositions are inherited because psychology crosses the observable / unobservable line of quantity and quality. This is also the problem with defining information in general because while there are methods for measuring Shannonian information, there are famously no known methods of measuring the amount of information in the redness of red because redness is experiential, whereas red is a color that can be identified by a spectrometer. 

The basic move of evolutionary psychology is to reduce subjectivity to observable behaviors, and then observable behaviors to their underlying, material causes.  The unsolved problem with this description of the human being is that its psychology “emerges” from its material causes at some unknown level of “integrated complexity,” but if psychology is anything beyond BF Skinner’s Behaviorism, then it includes the “something it is like,” in Thomas Nagel’s famous words, of being a biological information processing system. The evolutionary psychology folks reply that “awareness” is an obvious advantage to information processing but can offer no explanation for how awareness is produced by biological processes.  

Ned Block’s distinction between “Phenomenal Consciousness” and “Access Consciousness” explained the difficulty that the material reduction has with awareness. Access Consciousness would allow an information processing system to process and respond to information without Phenomenal Consciousness because Phenomenal Consciousness is the “what it’s like” of information processing for biological systems. Evolutionary pressures can only shape Access Consciousness because it is the situational awareness that takes in information and formulates appropriate responses to the environment based on learned or inherited behavioral routines. Donald Hoffman put it bluntly when he said, “Evolution can select for behavior but not for experience.” And he put the mystery of how Phenomenal Consciousness could have ever “evolved” from the operant conditioning of the material world even more bluntly when he said that “Absolutely no scientific progress has been made on the correlation between the material reduction of the Neuroscientist and the ‘what it’s like’ of subjective experience.” 

Sleep has been somewhat difficult for the material reduction because it has been unclear what material function it served. The biological processes of regeneration that sleep performed were always obvious because of the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation. So, observing the buildup of harmful “waste” products of the chemistry of waking life and their subsequent reduction after a good night sleep was easy once looking at a sleeping and then a waking brain became more accessible. However, the purpose of having dreams on top of those chemical processes was more of a stubborn mystery. Nowadays, the point of dreams is to review, consolidate, and remember lessons from the day, that will be useful for future prediction processes.  

However, there is an irreducible remainder of weirdness and the uncanny about dreams that may allow them to remain ambiguous indefinitely, for those who find dreams to be one of the last bastions of mystery. Dreams were once capable of producing the sort of mythology that sent one beyond this world of instrumentalization and uncertainty reduction and into the sacred world of the unknown and the unknowable. If Freud was right about the Death Drive, then Homo Naratiosus’s desire for a good story may rival its desire for predictability. It is pointless to play the game of trying to find in dreams a uselessness beyond the material reduction because evolutionary psychology is a story that can’t and shouldn’t be denied. However, it is worthwhile to see in Homo Religiosus’s desire for the transcendent, something irreducible to the imminent, natural world that somehow produced it. Many religiously inclined folks, especially in the meaning crisis community, have had to find a sort of synthesis between natural selection and transcendence that is sometimes called “imminent transcendence” because they have found that Fundamentalism, Originalism, and Literalism cannot return them to the primary naiveté of “primitive” belief. But they have also found that “Scientism” is leading to the unbearable nihilism of meaninglessness.