[rotexo]

You know that thing in anxiety dreams where you feel very uncoordinated and your attempts to manipulate your surroundings result in unpredictable consequences? Like you try to slam on the brake pedal but your car doesn’t slow down, or you’re trying to get a leash on your dog to lead it out of a dangerous situation and you keep failing to hook it on the collar? Maybe that’s extra latency because your brain is trying to render the environment at the same time as it is acting.

[svdr]

Your brain does not need to render any environments, just the experience of being in them.

[frabcus]

Firstly it can render environments in detail. I'm (mostly) aphantasic even in dreams, so this wasn't obvious to me. But most people literally get visual renderings in their mind.

Secondly, it's fairly clear now that our sensory inputs are not being experienced as sensory inputs. We experience a reconstruction. Obvious basic sign of this is that we fill in the gap in vision where the optic nerve is. But generally, we're making an integrated world model all the time out of the senses, and are conscious of that world model.

You're right though, both the above are rendering the experience and can take shortcuts for that. It's sufficiently detailed in each case though that it kinda is rendering the world too, in some sense.

[dymk]

What do you think the difference is?

[svdr]

I guess I mean that we are awake experience the input from our senses, and that in a dream only the replication of the experience of seeing or hearing etc. is needed, not a replication of the input of the senses which then leads to the experience.