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<p> <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'</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><just-so hypothesis> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p></just-so><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/4/24 9:27 AM, glen wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:6df29068-649a-44bc-a3b6-a2f5a68117ed@gmail.com">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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 6/3/24 22:44, Jochen Fromm wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">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.
<br>
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://behavioralhealth2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/The-reinterpretation-of-dreams-An-evolutionary-hypothesis-of-the-function-of-dreaming.pdf">http://behavioralhealth2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/The-reinterpretation-of-dreams-An-evolutionary-hypothesis-of-the-function-of-dreaming.pdf</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://nautil.us/how-evolution-designed-your-fear-236858/">https://nautil.us/how-evolution-designed-your-fear-236858/</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</blockquote>
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