Tag: dreams

Consciousness and Uncertainty Schematization

Mark DavisLeave a comment

If consciousness is an evolved function, the immediate question is what exactly is the currency of evolutionary selection in terms of traits and functions? In almost all of these kinds of arguments there is an explicit requirement that there is on average (or slightly greater than on average) value to survival that results in the maintenance and promotion of the relevant functions. In my Berggruen essay, I argued for a primarily social role to consciousness. Consciousness is a central monitoring framework for the complex web of social interactions that creates a reflective model of a person (and partially and uniquely in certain other species) that can be used to evaluate and plan for sexual pairing and other life choices related to status within social hierarchies. There are other hypotheses, as well, like the idea that predator-prey planning and avoidance is enhanced by a central consciousness experience, including some intriguing work on dreaming (when there is no active consciousness) that shows enhanced dreams for game players who are in the role of being prey within the game context as well as other forms of cognitive activation.

Abstractly, evolution is a distributed adaptation and learning algorithm that is the only robust solution to the complexity of natural environments. Wasteful though it may be, it is the invisible hand that drives forward enhanced prediction and survival using the knobs of genetics and the social relationships that are an extended phenotype in social species. There are a few theories of abstract learning that can be brought to bear on this topic, with the obvious candidate being inductive optimality via Kolmogorov complexity: minimize the model parameters to bottleneck against overtraining and avoid overfitting. This is central to all distributed learning but has layered complexity when considering the how to predict larger, more distal patterns, both temporal and spatial in activation and extent.… Read the rest

Evolutionary Oneirology

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I was recently contacted by a startup that is developing a dream-recording app. The startup wants to automatically extract semantic relationships and correlate the narratives that dreamers type into their phones. I assume that the goal is to help the user try to understand their dreams. But why should we assume that dreams are understandable? We now know that waking cognition is unreliable, that meta-cognitive strategies influence decision making, that base rate fallacies are the norm, that perceptions are shaped by apophenia, that framing and language choices dominate decision-making under ambiguity, and that moral judgments are driven by impulse and feeling rather than any rational calculus.

Yet there are some remarkable consistencies about dream content that have led to elaborate theorization down through the ages. Dreams, by being cryptic, want to be explained. But the content of dreams, when sorted out, leads us less to Kerkule’s Rings or to Freud and Jung, and more to asking why there is so much anxiety present in dreams? The Evolutionary Theory of Dreaming by Finnish researcher Revonsuo tries to explain the overrepresentation of threats and fear in dreams by suggesting that the brain is engaged in a process of reliving conflict events as a form of implicit learning. Evidence in support of this theory includes experimental observations that threatening dreams increase in frequency for children who experienced trauma in childhood combined with the cross-cultural persistence of threatening dream content (and likely cross-species as anyone who has watched a cat twitch in deep sleep suspects). To date, however, the question of whether these dream cycles result in learning or improved responses to future conflict remains unanswered.

I turned down consulting for the startup because of time constraints, but the topic of dream anxiety comes back to me every few years when I startle out of one of those recurring dreams where I have not studied for the final exam and am desperately pawing through a sheaf of empty paper trying to find my notes.… Read the rest