While in the bathroom/restroom/toilet/loo/stall/John/washroom/WC/choo/baño the other day, I came across the following marking:
The sign reads “Do Robots dream of Electric Sheep”.
Ok, now the questions:
- Do robots dream?
- Do humans even dream?
- Why the heck do we count sheep to sleep? Is it because sheep and sleep rhyme? I find nothing relaxing about the baa’ing of sheep. Maybe it’s because I’m a city boy?
And the bonus question…
With which thing will we first empathize: A robot, chicken, monkey, or dog?
People don’t always actually experience a dream per se. More often than not, a dream is just an artifact of the short term memory that is created when the brain communicates memories from short term to long term. When it does this, it distorts the short term memory leaving behind random engrams that the brain then interprets as if they were actual memories; we remember these as dreams, though they didn’t actually occur.
The brain actually does this quite a lot. When you move your eye, for instance, your brain deletes the memory of the blur of eye movement with whatever image your eye lands on. You never remember the eye blur though you did actually experience it.
Distortion in long term memory might be the cause of deja vu.
None of this will actually be discovered until about eight years from now on this timeline. Just couldn’t resist. 🙂