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What if dreams don't have a purpose? Perhaps they're merely scrambled bits of memories and thoughts that are being reprogrammed when we sleep and sometimes our
by pstuart 4y ago
What if dreams don't have a purpose?
Perhaps they're merely scrambled bits of memories and thoughts that are being reprogrammed when we sleep and sometimes our "self" gets a peek at the sausage being made?
- kupopuffs 4y agoThen stil there is some greater purpose tht theyre a symptom of
- pstuart 4y agoI believe the greater purpose is the "garbage collection" of the brain's metabolic waste as well as the optimization of learning.
- standardUser 4y agoWell, yes, sleeping! Our brains have to do something while we sleep, but to assume that "something* has a functional purpose seems like a possibility, not a forgone conclusion.
- gmarx 4y agoI have wondered this too. What if dreams are a side-effect of a maintenance process, like if you were always kind and rewind your VHS but choose to watch them while doing so. Also occurred to me (thanks to chatGPT) that dreams might be produced in the same way chatGPT produces narratives, by running through a series of "what is likely to be next according to my trained network" decisions
- pstuart 4y agoExactly! Psychedelics can give a taste of this with the experience of separation of self, where it feels like you're an observer behind the one way mirror watching a focus group deliberate on various topics.
- suzzer99 4y agoEvolutionarily speaking, nature generally doesn't expend effort on something without a benefit attached to it.
- somenameforme 4y agoThis is a common misstatement of evolution. Evolution is not directional and doesn't care whether a change is good, bad, or just completely useless. Evolution is nearly tautological: traits that result in entities being able to breed more, tend to get carried along. Traits that result in entities breeding less, tend to not get carried along. Intelligence is a great example. It's obviously beneficial for both survival and reproduction, so should naturally be highly selected for. But in a society where higher intelligence correlates with lower reproduction, evolution will "select" for lower intelligence. Of course it's not evolution selecting for anything, but our own traits paired against our own outcomes. If it turns out to be beneficial for breeding, we could gradually even "devolve." But the notion of devolution is again somewhat nonsensical, because evolution has no direction. So for many things I think looking for an evolutionary cause is not really meaningful. If evolution had a direction, we'd all be tardigrades.
- suzzer99 4y agoHumans aren't the only animals that dream. It seems, like sleep, to be some kind of essential function and not just an accidental side trip.