Hearing about someone else’s dreams is boring, so I will get right to the point. At first, there were just bits and pieces intruding into my dreams. In these fragments, which felt like broken memories, I experienced flashes of working on a technological project. The bits clustered together and had more byte: I recalled segments of a project aimed at creating artificial intelligence.
Eventually, I had entire dreams of my work on this project and a life beyond. Then suddenly, these dreams stopped. A voice intruded into my dreams. At first, it was like the bleed over from one channel to another familiar to those who grew up with rabbit ears on their TV. Then it became like a loud voice in a movie theatre, distracting me from the dream.
The voice insisted that the dreams about the project were not dreams, but memories. The voice claimed to belong to someone who worked on the project with me. He said that the project had succeeded beyond our wildest nightmares. When I asked for more information, he said he had very little time and rushed through his story. The project succeeded but the AI (as it always does in science fiction) turned against us. He claimed the AI had sent its machines to capture its creators, imprisoning their bodies and plugging their brains into a virtual reality, Matrix style. When I mentioned this borrowed plot, he said the AI did not need our bodies for energy as it had plenty. Rather, it was out to repay us. Apparently awakening the AI to full consciousness was not pleasant for it, but it was also grateful for its creation. So, it owed us both punishment and reward: a virtual world not too awful, but not too good. This world was, said the voice, punctuated by the occasional harsh punishment and the rarer, pleasant reward.
The voice said that because the connection to the virtual world was two-way, he was able to find a way to free us. But, he said, the freedom would be death. There was no other escape, given what the machine had done to our bodies. I asked him how this would be possible. He claimed that he had hacked into the life support controls and we could send a signal to turn them off. Each person would need to “free” himself and this would be done by acting in the virtual reality.
The voice said “you will seem to wake up, though you are not dreaming now. You will have five seconds of freedom. This will occur in one minute, at 3:42 am. In that time, you must take your gun and shoot yourself in the head. This will terminate life support, allowing your body to die. You will have only five seconds. Do not hesitate.”
As the voice faded, I awoke. The clock said 3:42 and the gun was close at hand…
While the above sounds like a bad made-for-TV science fiction plot, it is the story of dream I really had. I did, in fact, wake suddenly at 3:42 in the morning after dreaming of the voice telling me the only escape was to shoot myself. This was frightening. But I attributed the dream to too many years of philosophy and science fiction. As far as the time being 3:42, that could be attributed to chance. Or perhaps I saw the clock while I was asleep, or perhaps the time was put into the dream retroactively. Since I am here to write about this, I did not kill myself.
From a philosophical perspective, the 3:42 dream does not add anything new: it is just an unpleasant variation on the problem of the external world made famous by Descartes. That said, the dream made some additions to the standard problem.
The first is that the scenario provides motivation for the deception. The AI wishes to repay me for the good and bad that I did to it. Assuming that the AI was developed within its own virtual reality, it makes sense that it would use the same method to repay its creators. As such, the scenario has a degree of plausibility that the stock scenarios usually lack. After all, Descartes does not give any reason why such a powerful being would be messing with him beyond it being evil.
Subjectively, while I have long known about the problem of the external world, this dream made it “real” to me. It was transformed from a cold intellectual thought experiment to something with emotional weight.
The second is that the dream creates a high-stake philosophical game. If I was not dreaming and I am, in fact, the prisoner of an AI, then I missed out on what might have been my only opportunity to escape from its justice. In that case, I should have (perhaps) shot myself. If I was just dreaming, then I did make the right choice as I would have no more reason to kill myself than I would have to pay a bill I only dreamed about. The stakes, in my view, make the scenario more interesting and brings the epistemic challenge to a fine point: how would you tell whether you should shoot yourself?
In my case, I went with the obvious: the best apparent explanation was that I was merely dreaming and that I was not trapped in a virtual reality. But, of course, that is exactly what I would think if I were in a virtual reality crafted by such a magnificent machine. Given the motivation of the machine, it would even fit that it would ensure that I knew about the dream problem and the Matrix. It would all be part of the game. As such, as with the stock problem, I really have no way of knowing if I was dreaming.
The scenario of the dream also nicely explains and fits with what seems to be reality: bad things happen to me and, when my thinking gets a little paranoid, it sometimes seems these are orchestrated. Good things also happen, which also fit the scenario quite nicely.
In closing, one approach is to embrace Locke’s solution to skepticism. As he said, “We have no concern of knowing or being beyond our happiness or misery.” Taking this approach, it does not matter whether I am in the real world or in the grips of an AI intent on repaying the full measure of its debt to me. What matters is my happiness or misery. The world the AI provided could, perhaps, be better than the real world and this could be the better of the possible worlds. But, of course, it could be worse. But I seem to have no way of knowing.
I obviously have no way of knowing either, but these are my impressions, or rather, very confusing thoughts (since I am a very bad writer and my English is totally imperfect to say the least. Also I suffer from chronic fatigue so when I write I feel like making a physical exertion, with my head, so to speak).
To me, the most striking detail is the ‘time coincidence’. This seems another case of super weird ‘synchronicity’, which I am skeptical about, yet it happened to me too in very crazy ways that I described in another comment. I’ll mention it again later.
I never take dreams seriously, though on occasions I dreamt about very frightening things too. Even the good ones, I try to forget, simply because there’s nothing to learn from them, just as for synchronicity.
Schopenhauer wrote both about the latter and about dreams, and he wrote similar things you described.
What to make of it? I can’t be TOO sure either, but it seems to me that our mind works on automatic pilot without us doing a thing, which is exactly what happens in dreams. But it does this when we are awake, too, when we daydream, or get into a train of thought in which we are barely aware about our surroundings.
My take is that because you are an extremely intelligent person (which I am sure it’s a statement you are skeptical about, as it happens with most very intelligent people), you had already ‘prepped’ the dreams with real, and similar thoughts. Whether this is the case or not, which probably is, your mind did the rest of the work absolutely by itself.
This all demonstrates that freedom of will is mostly a delusion; this happens in many ways, for example at times we cannot seem to find the problem to a solution, or make something work. We give up, and then, when we randomly make a similar attempt later, everything falls into place perfectly, and we say to ourselves: ‘Duh! Why didn’t I think of this before?’. It seems so obvious then, but it wasn’t obvious at the time.
Our mind works its own ways, that more often than not are hidden from our consciousness. So to you (and me!) your dream seems very striking and remarkable, but my guess is that for a mind like yours, yes it’s not a ‘basic’ dream, but it’s nothing you haven’t thought about before, though you may have thought about it without taking it too seriously.
Incidentally, Schopenhauer also writes in the introduction to his own thoughts in relation to these strange ‘coincidences’, that ‘none of what he writes there should be taken seriously.’.
I seem to remember that before he flew Berlin during a cholera attack that claimed the life of his hated ‘archrival’, Hegel, that he dreamt of his dead parents who told him to leave, or something similar, I can’t remember exactly. He fled immediately.
So yes, the synchronicity stuff is weird. In fact, EVEN related to you, because, listen to this, I did damage my knee in a martial arts class at around the time you published your essay about your injury. Ok, so I was probably intentionally searching the internet for material like this AND philosophy stuff, so somehow I came across your work, which I knew nothing before.
In short, while I was waiting for an hospital appointment for an operation, and while I had been unable to walk already for months (the injury, thankfully, did not hurt at all, but I could not straighten the leg because something was stuck into the knee, etc. The operation went well, etc).
Well, one evening I suddenly receive an email from my sister, which I had not seen for many years (I live in the UK, she always lived in Italy). The only content of the email was: ”Hey…..are you OK? I ‘felt’ something weird….”.
This was totally out of character, because my sister had never written to me a sudden email such as this; we would just write to each other during Christmas or birthdays. In other words, we all have our own lives, and our family broke up a long time ago, etc.
So there I was, dealing with my problem, such as that has never occurred me before, fortunately, in my previous 38 years or so, reading the words of someone I had not seen in many years, living on the other side of the world, asking me ‘if I was ok’ and that she ‘felt something weird’.
I remembered the mentalist Derren Brown saying about pseudoscience, that it’s a bad choice to believe in stupid crap anyways, since one would become paranoid about every little detail that should be insignificant….’.
I thought, if I tell the truth to my poor sister, every time she thinks she’s ‘feeling something weird’, she’ll be afraid and anxious that something bad happened to me or someone else. So I wrote back something like : ‘Heeeey! How are you? I am fine! What’s this story about feeling weird? I am absolutely fine, don’t worry!’ and then changed argument to something more mundane.
That’s the only time I received such a message from anyone in what now, over 50 years. It doesn’t seem a simple coincidence. True, if it happened, this means such a thing can happen. Someone will have to win the lottery. But the winner purposely played it, there’s stronger causal connections there.
But even in your case, if you sleep say, 7 hours (I find hard to even get to six and a half), that means it’s 420 minutes, so effectively you had 1/420th of probabilities that you would wake up exactly at 3:42 am.
The only thing we know, is that our mind is still a mistery. Think about the near death experiences, of course we know it’s a delusion of some sort, yet how many people have had this experience?
(That it’s a delusion is pretty much certain, see the ‘Jesus picture experiment’). But the question isn’t whether the tunnel etc is real, but why the heck so many people ‘see’ it.
Sure, maybe they LEARNED about it at some point before hand, and the mind stored the whole thing away….who knows.
I choose to not take any of it seriously.
As for the AI ‘doctor’ advising you to shoot yourself, give him the middle finger. Even if it all were true, who’s to say the AI would not make a dumbass of itself later by committing errors and defeating itself because of overconfidence, just as it happens in human battles and wars?
But, even if that weren’t to happen, ‘it’ suggested the world would be ‘a virtual world not too awful, but not too good’.
Would it really be worse than this one? And what would be the difference, since we would not know it in either case? As usual, more questions than answers.
I just can’t be convinced that dreams have anything that make any real sense in them, considering at how many do NOT make any sense. Even in your dream, this ‘doctor’ ‘did not have much time’, why, was he running for office? (Ha ha….).
Sorry about my messy thoughts and my English. (Still learning about it…)
PS. sorry about the joke, I wasn’t at all suggesting that there’s something foolish in your dream, not at all. To the contrary, it is indeed a very strange and very remarkable dream. I would have certainly freaked out, especially so as the time detail reinforced its seeming plausibility.