I have lucid dreams almost every night now. I'm talking about entire story arcs with plot twists.
Last nights had Donald Trump, my wife and Jennifer Love Hewitt. There were riots going on and people reading newspapers with moving video ink. There was an old book called "The Fall" that was filled with fascinating ink drawings of ritualistic acts (eg: a man sat cross legged on broken fragments of his own arms). Etc. That kind of stuff. Had a full story.
Noise on the line in Brain-space could still be the case, but if so we can learn something from that noise regarding the way brain structures work.
What I'm saying is if it is just noise, then the noise must be feeding into an entire projective area of creativity that amplifies that noise, not just locally but over time, and in ways that maintain consistency.
Consider a c struct describing a circle, with fields for position, radius, and color. Imagine you have a buffer full of random noise, and you cast it to an array of said structure. You then render the array to a screen, you'll get a bunch of randomly placed colorful circles, rather than a bunch of visual noise.
In this model a series of consecutive bytes has a predefined meaning existing outside of them (namely in the source code that defines the struct), so when they are read they are cast as a struct-circle object.
This also only works well for scalar fields, not associations (pointers in the C program's case) and more finely grained items.
Also, where would that (the definition of the "struct") happen with the brain? Is there any literature showing anything similar, that we have memory fields that pre-correspond to specific objects through some mechanism?
Besides, dreams can have very clear structure and narrative, which takes them outside the realm of what can be achieved with noise, unless the "struct" has fields that correspond to things like emotions, faces, narrative changes, etc.
You can also take other analogies. Complex systems usually have several layers of planning or decision making and if you randomize on the top layers, it will still appear to be structured, because the top layers have different degrees of freedom.
To take another example, a self-driving car might make a decision to switch the lane. If you randomize on that level, it will randomly switch, but the movement will still be smooth, because this is done one or more layers below.
We examine the circles not to learn about the data from which those circles are derived, but rather to learn about which structs and other properties are defined in the system. We might find circle struts, square structs, triangle structs, but never spheres, boxes, or pyramids. Or maybe some people (schizophrenics) have the metaphorical three dimensional structs and others do not.
Actual noise with no coherent structure is enough for the brain to start imagining patterns - can confirm that having tried it myself, with white noise in my eyes and ears for half an hour, I ended up having dream-like hallucinations while awake:
I want to say, pyramidal cell in visual cortex connectivity network decoherence - similar happens with mice after sleep deprivation, and is reminiscent of the phenomenon of HPPD, and with stochastic resonance.
Noise 'on the wire' in a neural network is going to look different from noise on an actual copper wire.
E.g. noise in the brain might be an increased incidence of errant impulses/signals. There's evidence that sleep involves pruning meaningless connections - noise in this case might mean signals propagating farther than they ought.
Noise was meant in an abstract way, not statistically random noise you see in physical circuits.
Only in the superficial way in which we see figures in clouds, tree barks, etc. that we can name. Not in the sense that somebody sees a specific figure in a Rorschach test. But in dreams we have the impression of very specific semblances and "movie-like" experiences.
> in the superficial way in which we see figures in clouds, tree barks, etc. that we can name.
Exactly!
I've seen very specific semblances in coffee spills, knot-holes, etc. The reason they're not movie-like is because they're still and static, and not connected directly to my brain.
Dreams have the advantage of being on the bare wires, whereas Rorschach tests and the like are air-gapped.
If it was actual noise it would have absolute minimal statistical chance of having any coherent structure.