<glen sed> 'I might restate Rvonsuo as "dreams help us find the nooks
and crannies in the hull of constraints presented to us by reality - the
edge cases'
This aligns with my experiences, observations, mildly founded
beliefs. Game theory experts here might be able to add something
about the asymmetries of positive/negative reward dynamics to
explain why maybe the negative rewards might dominate in our
experiences or at least our decisions about relating them?
My pets (currently a young dog and cat, each about 2 years old)
spend a lot of time sleeping (or resting aggressively/convincingly?)
and at least some of it in apparent dream states... the dog more
(obviously) than the cat. From the vigor of his faux running and
barking (and sometimes whimpering) his dreams seem like they are
reflections of his waking life which involves no small amount of
running and posturing aggressively (he is small)... and some barking.
<just-so hypothesis>
As the product of thousands? of generations of selective breeding,
one might imagine that any recent evolutionary pressure to survive
in a harsh environment (Kristi Noem's kennel as a notable exception)
has been very mellow and replaced by a pressure to please their
primate familiars... particularly by being cute but also by being
useful. The (excessive?) barking in wake and sleep my dog engages
in seems to be performative to remind me that he is, if nothing
else, a hair-trigger alarm system. My bigger dogs have rarely
barked aggressively outside the context of a clear and present
threat. Small ones (at least this 20 pounder of mine) seem to
recognize that they aren't quite as useful in other ways (couldn't
retrieve anything bigger than a robin or pull anything heavier than
small tricycle or bite through any appendage larger than a small
finger). He is a good footwarmer, but I'd be asking for a 6 dog
night if I was depending on him for that kind of contribution.
</just-so>
On 6/4/24 9:27 AM, glen wrote:
Evolutionary psychology is one of those disciplines where you see
whatever you want to see. Now, I haven't read Nesse. But wherever
anyone tries to reduce a high dimensional, dynamic space like whatever
it is evolution operates over and within to a single cause-effect
narrative, I get suspicious. Do bad feelings prevent "us" from doing
things bad for us? My friends who've committed suicide might disagree.
E.g. in one case of bipolar disorder, the bad (and good) feelings
seemed purely cyclic and physiological. The highs caused him to do
"bad" things. And the lows clearly did not prevent him from doing bad
things. Of course, stories don't make for good science. So it's a wash
either way. I suppose a charitable way to reword it is "bad feelings
emerged from the milieu as a way to bias behavior toward
self-sustenance and away from self-dissolution" ... like an amoeba
extending a pseudopod along a gradient. But we already knew that
without the sophisticated story telling in EvoPsych.
Re: dreams - I had a dream last night where I was living in an
unfamiliar house with a bunch of people I didn't know. The house
caught on fire. My cat Scooter was there. There was fire coming down
the chimney and in through the back door ... like it was more the
outside was on fire than the house, I guess. Scooter, confused, tried
to run up the chimney and all his fur burnt off, after which he came
back out and I tried and failed to grab him. Then he ran out the door,
into the fire, and burnt up the rest of the way. Does this dream help
me prepare for unknown danger? I doubt it.
What's more likely is that it's an artifact of predictive processing
where your brain is a random number generator (rng) and, while
sleeping, there's no reality against which to impedance match. So the
random numbers it generates can just propagate on however long, to
whatever sequence obtains. Such exercises help with the rng's
expression, making it more active and robust so that, while awake, one
can think more energetically about, within, and around one's world of
constraints. Again, charitably, I might restate Rvonsuo as "dreams
help us find the nooks and crannies in the hull of constraints
presented to us by reality - the edge cases - by exercising our random
number generator brain". But this doesn't imply "danger" so much as
interestingness ... or something like a fractal or a space-filling curve.
On 6/3/24 22:44, Jochen Fromm wrote:
I do not find Paul's book completely convincing. Randolph M. Nesse's
book "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of
Evolutionary Psychiatry" shows much more clearly that bad feelings
prevent us from doing things which are bad for us. They are threat
avoidance programs from our genes.
His remark about dreams are interesting nevertheless. He mentions for
instance this paper from Antti Revonsuo, "The reinterpretation of
dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming" in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6) (2000). 877–901; 904–1018;
1083–1121.
http://behavioralhealth2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/The-reinterpretation-of-dreams-An-evolutionary-hypothesis-of-the-function-of-dreaming.pdf
Revonsuo argues one function of dreams may be to simulate threatening
events. They may help to improve threat prevention by predicting
dangerous situations and preparing us for unkown dangers. Some fears
seem to be hardcoded but this method has limits. For example we are
much more afraid of spiders and snakes than of cars and fast food
which are more dangerous to us in the modern world
https://nautil.us/how-evolution-designed-your-fear-236858/
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