Chapter 10 - Creating Artificial Dreams

Abstract

The visual process of film-making uses techniques that led to the science of optics, an understanding of cognitive visual processing, and the advent of psychoanalysis. Film uses many of the same cognitive systems that are part of dreaming. Terminology adopted from film includes eye-as-camera, projection, point of view, crossing the line, the subordination of time to motion, and flashback. The experience of film viewing requires audience familiarity with the technical procedures used in narration, genre, and projected illusions. The psychodynamic characteristics of film may provide the best evidence that psychoanalytic theory has some basis in fact. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can now be considered as intelligent independent of their roles in facilitating human functioning. AI systems demonstrate the capacity to achieve forms of tertiary consciousness such as cognitive feedback, self-recognition, and components of self-concept. The potential role for dreaming in creative problem solving and their function as a cognitive interface between waking and sleeping forms of consciousness have attracted the creators of AI systems to the area of dream science. However, current AI systems can easily meet criteria consistent with the accepted operational definition for dreaming: sleep/wake, report, and content. Yet AI dreaming and consciousness have significant limitations, lacking aspects of mind including self-reflexive consciousness, significance and meaning, inspiration, ecstasy, compassion, conscience, transcendence, and empathy.