Without A Dream the People....?

You, more or less. Neurons growing in an electrode array: When they grow, they form themselves into a rudimentary form of the most complex thing in creation: the human brain. One of the best shows on t.v. right now is Through The Wormhole, hosted by Morgan Freeman.

I was re-watching the life-after-death episode tonight, and watching the peculiar growth of neurons into an "artifiicial" (?) brain, and thinking on the idea of soul.

The episode explores most interestingly the phenomenon of quantum states in the brain and the mysteries posed by them when it comes to the idea that we have "souls."  It touches on strict materialist views: that whatever consciousness we have is rooted in the physical brain and is irretrievably lost in death.

The episode is worth watching not least because of the way it situates our hopes and our knowledge about consciousness and death.

But what I'm interested in just now is the idea of consciousness itself.  It would seem that when we are asleep, our "self" is muted, that the different functions of the brain have some difficulty in influencing one another, just as during the night the members of a family who influence one another separate themselves for sleep and cease to act upon one another.  

Cool fractal.  The microcosm of the brain and the macrocosm of our relationships mimic one another in sleep.

Each part of our self is balanced precariously against the others.  There is no doubt that your "self" is a complex thing, comprised of competing desires that balance against one another and find an often-unsatisfactory resolution in your choices.

And it's sometimes thought that the dream might well be the insight into reality.Closeup: You, Right Now. Unsolved mysteries: what is consciousness at the quantum level, or even the cellular level? Deep waters. Whatever it is, when you're sleeping, you ain't it, apparently.

But the episode gave some fresh insights into the truth that the "self" is almost literally our daytime reality, the nighttime self a thing in which each part announces itself into a frustrated (and frustrating) isolation.  In dreams, we are not ourselves.  We are our parts, and they shift and choose which among them will speak into an ineffectual choice of rest.

It's when we wake that the startling clarity of our dreams finds choice, and other voices to oppose and guide it, and gains or loses the name of action.

 Neurons firing in the brain.