[FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams

[Steve Smith]

<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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