lucid dreaming: really?

[nibot]

A few days ago I was discussing lucid dreaming -- that is, dreams in which you consciously control your actions -- with a few friends, and one of them (I think it was Emma) made the intriguing comment, "I think I had a lucid dream. But I might have just thought that I was in control." It's quite a subtle distinction, I'd say. I'm not sure we could actually tell the difference between believing we're in control and actually being in control. And in the language of theoretical physics we say if you can't tell, then it doesn't matter. What I find all the more attractive about this is that it's a perfect model for day-to-day conscious life. Do we just believe we have free will, or are we really in control? Like in the case with dreams, we can't differentiate between the two possibilities; yet the former seems more likely. Everything else we see in the universe is deterministic, so why not us?

Comments

Ditto..

[bom.livejournal.com]

I've come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as free will. We're all a part of this big huge web of life/matter/Tao/whatever, the connections within which we cannot perceive most of the time. We influence and are influenced by every particle in the universe to the extent that everything, including our thoughts (I think--heheh), are just a part of it all; they aren't independent/free. Some of us believe we have free will, some of us don't. Of course, I'd say that that belief in the existence of free will is pre-determined too, so..

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what free will is! The 'illusion' of free will is just the fact that the causal links causing the action go through our mind, rather than through the non-brain parts of our bodies.