assimov did a story about dreaming. summarized:
the robot said
in my dream i saw a man, came to tell the robots to stop working for man and
to be free. when i saw his face i saw i was that man.
the robot was immediately destroyed.
"Mentifex" <mentifex at my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8pg9rm$k68$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
> For a robot to have a dream, its AI mind software must shut down the
> input sensorium of strong sensations coming in from the outside world
> or from a virtual world. In humans, the same process is known as
> falling asleep. Then the AI software must permit minor "brainstorms"
> of free associations in the mind of the sleeping robot.
>> If a kind of self-sustaining "weather-pattern" of internal association
> develops, the activity reestablishes a non-waking consciousness in the
> mind of the sleeper.
>> Because the robot dream is happening after all inside a computer,
> all robot dreams may be monitored as images and sounds in a kind of
> theater of the unconsciousness for analysis or even for reentry by
> the robot into one of its former dreams. In other words, robots may
> have a much more active dream life than humans do, with such robot
> options as re-experiencing dreams or even of sharing dreams in the
> same dream state with other robots. However, such co-dreaming by
> robots would be a human programmer's nightmare, because the
> associative vortex in one robot mind would have to be coordinated
> with an identical or at least similar associative vortex in another
> robot mind. It may even be necessary for a master-slave relationship
> to be agreed upon before two robots can share a mutual dream,
> so that the shared consciousness will flow freely under the
> associative direction of one unitary mind at a time.
> Of course, two robots could take turns in directing the stream of
> consciousness central to the experience of the dream, with a more
> experienced robot digging up a greater variety of old memories
> and transferring the memories as shared mutual dream content to
> a perhaps younger, less experienced robot. However, there could
> not be too great a gap in the levels of experience between the two
> robots sharing a dream, or the junior robot may not have the conceptual
> and epistemological wherewithal to absorb the conceptual constructs
> being transferred from the more advanced mind to the neophyte mind.
>> --
>http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/dreams.html : AI Dreams
>>> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/> Before you buy.