Our songs are pop-like in form and twisted in spirit. We write happy music about sad things, and sad music about happy things. We think that songs and arrangements should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. We think that music, particularly live music, should be fun, and that you should be able to dance to most of it.
We are The Brothers Frank, and this is our website.
Two girls are sitting across from one another, eating lunch. Chick chick chick chick chick. That is the sound of their iPhones being typed on, and it is the only sound coming from their table, because each girl is as immersed in her 3.5-inch color screen as anyone ever gets immersed into anything. Chick chick chick chick chick.
I hope they’re texting each other. I know they’re not, because when people get immersed in SMS exchanges, they make the same expressions of sympathy and attention they’d make in conversation, only they make them to their phones. As if the phones need to feel listened to. Maybe they do, I don’t know.
If I had an iPhone, and if I were the type to observe Lent, I might give up my iPhone for Lent. Last night in my dream someone said “For Lent, I’m giving up.” I hope no one actually said that.
There is a theory about consciousness which states that it (consciousness) cannot happen in the brain, that a brain alone does not suffice for producing conscious experiences. A brain is necessary, yes, but it must also have a world to interact with. Consciousness, in this theory, is fundamentally an interaction between an organism and its environment; and without both organism and environment, no consciousness. It is like the performance of a symphony. Where is the symphony in space? What one thing causes it? There are no answers to those questions.
If this view is right, then dreaming is something of a mystery. If we can have conscious experiences while dreaming, while we’re disconnected from the world and deep in sleep, then it seems like the brain is sufficient for consciousness after all.
One philosopher’s response is that dream experiences are not really very much like conscious experiences. Dreams are unstable, incoherent; our waking experiences are comparatively stable. Maybe the brain is sufficient for dream experiences, but not for consciousness proper. (The philosopher who says all this is Alva Noë, whose book Out of Our Heads is excellent.)
I think something is wrong with this response. Many of my dreams are indeed much stranger than waking life, but I wake from my most vivid dreams remembering events that never happened. These dreams feel real. If the brain is sufficient for dreams like these, it seems to me sufficient for conscious experience.
There is another response that, though wilder, tempts me. The force of the dream objection comes from the assumption that we’re disconnected from the world while we sleep. Perhaps we’re not. It’s conceivable that during vivid dreams, we’re interacting with the world in a way that the perception science can’t yet account for. If in fact this is what we’re doing, then it still makes sense to claim that consciousness is fundamentally an interaction between an organism and the world.
I recognize that to make this response is to posit a mysterious way of interacting with the world while dreaming. And yes, that may sound a little weird. But to someone who has dreamed a conversation and later discovered that the other person dreamed the very same conversation on the very same night, a mysterious way to interact with the world may strike him as just that—mysterious, but not implausible.
I am one such person.
posted 24 February 2010
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