Ha! In the psuedoscience poker game, I'm All In!

[elfs]

One of the conceits in the Journal Entries is that sleep is still a necessity. Part of that is because the Journal Entries universe is highly stratified according to topospheric classification and I tend to write about characters down in the near-human toposphere, where you and I live, because that's where we find characters with whom you and I can emphathize.

Mostly I keep sleep because, like Transhumanist blogger George Dvorsky wrote recently, it's a source of pleasure. If it's an arbitrary pleasure so is Beethoven and if one deserves to survive the Singularity then so does the other. I like the dreamy, blissful states when one lies next to a loved one after a serious romp, and the sometimes sweet, sometimes confused, sometimes frantic moments the next morning as one emerges from sleep next to the right (or wrong) person. It's often a convenient place to end a chapter. I've had a character with post-orgasmic narcolepsy and another with morning amnesia (both of which are real, if rare, conditions).

Even my robots sleep. That's a serious skiffy conceit. The excuse given is that the hardware of a standard robot isn't sufficient to process all of the memories of events that happened that day and incorporate them into the gestalt of that being's self-identity. Instead, the memories get dumped serially into a medium-term bin and then, with the rest of consciousness "turned off" so it won't get in the way, the long-term identity management software rummages through that bin, incorporates and interprets those memories, and adds them to the individual's self-identity, keeping those that define or support that self-identity and its relationship to the world around it.

As it turns out, The New York Time's science section reveals that's really what the brain really does:

[P]art of the function of sleep is to let us process and stabilize the experiences we have during the day.

Because the fast signals in the neocortex tended to occur fractionally sooner than their counterparts in the hippocampus, the dialogue is probably being initiated by the neocortex, and reflects a querying of the hippocampus's raw memory data. The neocortex is essentially asking the hippocampus to replay events that contain a certain image, place or sound. The neocortex is trying to make sense of what is going on in the hippocampus and to build models of the world, to understand how and why things happen.

Comments

[edichka2.livejournal.com]

An ex-housemate of mine in SF had post-orgasmic narcolepsy, but it was a variant that occurred exclusively when preceded by a meal of garee gai (Thai yellow curry). This co-factor was frequently present, however, as one of the city's better Thai restaurants was just down the block, and their yellow curry remains unsurpassed, nay, unrivalled, in my personal experience. The housemate's episodes generally occurred with him, a strapping young lad, atop his petite but fiery Filipino girlfriend, leaving her rather stuck and occasionally unable to dislodge his inert, snoring form despite significant effort.

- Eddie

[sarienpalth.livejournal.com]

... which probably explains why my short and long-term memory are f____d to hell. So, getting bad or no sleep is much worse than I thought. Essentially, it would be like trying to write data from a swap space to disk when there's no I/O subsystem bandwidth.

Gotcha. I need to go buy a mattress and call it a day, then.

><; Sar

[bolindbergh]

Leading nuclear engineer cartoonists tend to agree.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Having watched the stock Microsoft disk defragmentation software, on Win9x, continually get a few percent through, then restart because a background process accessed the disk (in one case, taking four hours without getting more than 25% through, and when run in Safe Mode was done in half an hour), I can easily see where a much more complex collation process would want to have the system in a condition of minimal input before starting in order to keep the processing time down to a reasonable period.