[Kliment]

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.

[coldtea]

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.

[quonn]

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.

[dotancohen]

That is exactly why we study sleep.

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.