[Davidzheng]

By the way, on dreams: Doesn't the existence of dreams mean that consciousness is like a subprogram in the brain that is usually "plugged in" to reality (or rather some rendering of reality done by the rest of the brain) but the rest of the brain can in fact simulate other scenarios for the consciousness to plug into?

Also I think split brain experiments basically support that you can split a consciousness into two tbh...

Anyways obviously above is speculation

[plakspin]

You know how a loud sound or a flash of light can alter your dream ... For example you hear your alarm clock and all of a sudden you are dreaming you are in an ambulance?

My theory is that we are always in a "dream" state. Stimuli that manage to reach our conscious attention will alter this dream.

When a asleep only very strong stimuli will reach us so for the most part our "dream" is in a feedback loop mostly doing its own thing. When awake though we have a much more weaker filter for stimuli . The direction that our "dream" takes is fully controlled by it.

[mitthrowaway2]

That's one way to think about it I guess! I always think of it more like the channels that write to the sensory input registers get switched, just like when I configure my microcontroller's ADC0 to read from INT_REF instead of EXT_REF by flipping a bit at a certain memory address.