[FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams

[glen]

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/

-- 
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ