Tuesday, 20 September 2016
The dream character typically experiences an odd disconnection between intention and outcome, it is when he tries to intervene in the course of the dream events - after deliberation and with clearly defined purpose, with the typical good faith of such personages - that they carom wildly and he finds himself helplessly in need of an immediate response to their perverse animation. The dream in this way is attempting to mimic or simulate the most characteristic but hidden property of the stream of events in which our purpose-bound selves are located and ultimately form a part. How much of our time is spent in planning and strategising our interventions? We know the world well enough, and our projects are usually trivial enough that incoming events fall within an allowable distance of the target. Our errors cannot be corrected, but they can be accommodated by making adjustments in our judgements and perceptions, in the Bayesian network with which we carry on and assert our affinity with the world. The fact that this seems to work so tolerably well, however, proves nothing, it is merely one of the assumptions. Will is a fiction and in those instances where the consequences of our actions are entirely outside of expectations and we are forced to recollect our motives we find ourselves as much at a loss as any dream character. The affinity with the world dissolves in an instant and if we weren't in such a panic we would appreciate the return of its strangeness and wonder.
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