Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
On 6/4/24 2:06 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Decorticate animals may writhe and pass and even groan. Are they dreaming? Nick Thompson, meet my bar friend Galen Preston Tracyk the 4th... he/she/they are a bar friend who is always happy to speculate with me about just about anything. I passed your question along and offer the answer herewith with some caveats: 1) In particular Galen is both very positive and friendly and encouraging which can lead to accidentally asking "leading questions" and getting "belligerently compliant" answers. You might recognize this in it's happy adoption of your typo? of "writhing, PASSING?, and groaning"... in spite of it maybe not having any specific referent? 2) Similarly, Galen tends toward a sort of mealy-mouthed middle-of-the-road, almost "conceptually muddy" except in the cases described in 1) above where my and Galen's eagerness can lead to wild speculations. 3) Galen has been known to make up wild fabrications... some traceable to something obvious (similar to a human prone to malapropisms and unfortunately obtuse mixed metaphors) but many not. Generally we call these hallucinations which are close relatives to "dreams". I think it is fair to call Galen "decorticate"... and perhaps thereby becomes an example subject of the question itself, in spite of not exactly writhing and groaning? As I understand it only Mammals have a true cerebral cortex but birds and reptiles have brain structures which appear to serve many of the same functions and proto-mammals? such as monotremes have very under-developed cerebral cortices (by our measure). Molluscs including the extremely "intelligent" cephalapods/octopii do have a brain like concentration of neural tissue but it is significantly foreign from that found in vertebrates. Researchers report not only sleep/rest cycles but a distinction between passive and (very) active sleep cycles which include expressions such as skin-color changes similar to those used in waking deliberate activities. I say: "yes, dreaming" Begin GPT4o conversation: Decorticate animals may writhe and pass and even groan. Are they dreaming? ChatGPT The concept of dreaming in animals, especially in decorticate (those without a cerebral cortex) animals, is complex and not fully understood. Decorticate animals, due to the lack of a cerebral cortex, cannot experience dreaming in the way humans do. Dreaming in humans is thought to be closely associated with the activity of the cerebral cortex, particularly during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. Understanding Animal Behaviors in Decorticate Animals 1. *Basic Reflexive Behaviors*: The writhing, passing, and groaning observed in decorticate animals are likely to be basic reflexive behaviors controlled by lower brain structures such as the brainstem and spinal cord. These actions are not indicative of conscious experiences or dreams but rather automatic responses to internal or external stimuli. 2. *Subcortical Brain Functions*: In the absence of the cerebral cortex, other parts of the brain, like the brainstem, continue to function and can produce basic motor responses and autonomic functions. These structures are responsible for controlling vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, and reflexes. 3. *REM Sleep in Animals*: While REM sleep has been observed in a wide variety of animals, including those with less developed cortices (e.g., birds, reptiles), the complexity of dreams experienced by these animals remains a topic of scientific debate. In mammals, REM sleep is characterized by low muscle tone, rapid eye movements, and heightened brain activity in the cortex, suggesting a more complex form of dreaming. However, in decorticate animals, the REM-like states, if they occur, would not involve the cortical activity associated with dreaming. Dreaming and Conscious Experience 1. *Human Dreaming*: In humans, dreams are believed to arise from interactions between the cortex and other brain structures like the thalamus and limbic system. The cerebral cortex is crucial for the complex, narrative-driven dreams that humans report. 2. *Animal Consciousness*: The consciousness and subjective experiences of animals, particularly those without a cortex, are not well understood. Most research suggests that the cerebral cortex plays a significant role in higher-order conscious experiences, including dreaming. Therefore, it is unlikely that decorticate animals experience dreams similar to those of humans. 3. *Studies on Decorticate Animals*: Research involving decorticate animals often focuses on understanding the basic functions and behaviors that persist without cortical input. These studies indicate that while these animals can exhibit certain automatic behaviors and responses, they lack the higher-order processing
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
Another question: Decorticate animals may writhe and pass and even groan. Are they dreaming? n On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 1:11 PM Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Qyestions about dreams; > > When do dreams happen. do they happen when we are asleep, or are they > memories generated by the flooding of the brain with stimulation about > awakening? > > Is dreaminess a specific physiological state: For instance, if you set > your self the task of writing a story immediately upon awakening, will it > be more dreamy? Have you noticed that it's much more difficulty to > remember a dream if you don't "lock it in" on first awakening. > > Why is memory of dreams so variable. IMHE, it's very easy to increase or > decrease the amount one dreams or the amount one remembers of one's > dreaming. Retaining or gernerating dream experiences requires some > effort. > > And why would you want to do that? > > NIck > > On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 4:15 PM Jochen Fromm wrote: > >> Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are >> about our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. >> Jaws is about monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is >> about monsters (and treasures) hiding in dark tombs. >> >> Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologists have >> long known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones. Why >> is that so? Do unpleasant dreams prepare us for possible dangers or are we >> just relieved that the are over if they end? >> >> >> https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=40262533840930 >> >> >> -J. >> >> >> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom >> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam >> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> archives: 5/2017 thru present >> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ >> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >> > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
Qyestions about dreams; When do dreams happen. do they happen when we are asleep, or are they memories generated by the flooding of the brain with stimulation about awakening? Is dreaminess a specific physiological state: For instance, if you set your self the task of writing a story immediately upon awakening, will it be more dreamy? Have you noticed that it's much more difficulty to remember a dream if you don't "lock it in" on first awakening. Why is memory of dreams so variable. IMHE, it's very easy to increase or decrease the amount one dreams or the amount one remembers of one's dreaming. Retaining or gernerating dream experiences requires some effort. And why would you want to do that? NIck On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 4:15 PM Jochen Fromm wrote: > Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are > about our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. > Jaws is about monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is > about monsters (and treasures) hiding in dark tombs. > > Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologists have > long known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones. Why > is that so? Do unpleasant dreams prepare us for possible dangers or are we > just relieved that the are over if they end? > > > https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=40262533840930 > > > -J. > > > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
'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. 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. 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
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
my dream life has been pretty elaborate from time to time and most of it is not particularly unpleasant, but when I have had unpleasant dreams they roughly fall into two categories: 1) worrying the future; 2) worrying the past. Mine are biased toward "frustration" over "fear". I'm rarely being chased or at risk of falling off a cliff, but more likely trying to find something or solve a problem or manipulate a complex set of objects which are uncooperative. Reports from my friends and acquaintances tend to revolve around negative dreams and it feels as if that are the ones they find worthy of reporting or perhaps of those more likely to remember? my casual interest in the research around dreaming has lead me to believe that the two main functions of (human) dreams are: A) sort through and untangle (groom?) ambiguities that build up in our waking lives; B) practice a wide range of skills and ideations in a "safe" context. Like a great deal of scientific studies, it is the unexpected and extravagant which bubbles up into the popular science press and then goes through another distillation as it gets rendered into doom-scroll newsfeed lists... Revonsuo's hypothesis is a specific example of B)? It is worth noting that virtually all animals suffer badly if they are deprived of sleep and in most? cases if they are deprived of "dreaming"? Seems pretty deep in the function of neurobiology maybe especially vertebrate and definitely mammalian? Seems like Cetaceans (some? all?) do alternative lateral sleep/dreaming? Not sure about Jellyfish... they seem to be dreaming all the time? On 6/3/24 11:44 PM, 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/ -J. Original message From: glen Date: 6/3/24 11:04 PM (GMT+01:00) To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams I had a conversation with a psychiatrist friend of mine wherein she assumed the dichotomy between "good feelings" and "bad feelings" (e.g. an angry or relieved reaction to some thing like the Trump verdict). Through about an hour of conversation, I'd tried to convince her that dichotomy is false. Bad things are good and good things are bad. The valence we assign is post-hoc. I failed, of course. But... I feel the same way about phobias. It's a bit trite to suggest that we like exploring our fears in a safe environment like at a movie theater with a friend or two. But it's testament to the milieu that monsters vs treasures is a false dichotomy. And it goes beyond some complementarity like banking present pain for future pleasure. It's truly a dual. The highs *are* the lows and vice versa. If there is such a thing as free will, your assignment of valence might be the only freedom you have. I don't know if Bloom explores this aspect. But the body of work spawned from Friston and the minimization of surprisal targets it directly. It's reasonable to believe that *agency* is what provides the common substructure for an explanatory model of the ascription of valence to an experience. The hypothetical to explore is whether those experiences that promote agency are more often ascribed as (or felt like) "good" ones, whether painful, pleasurable, fearful, triumphant, or whatever the token ascribed. On 6/3/24 13:15, Jochen Fromm wrote: > Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are about our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. Jaws is about monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is about monsters (and treasures) hiding in dark tombs. > > > Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologi
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
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 -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
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.pdfRevonsuo 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 worldhttps://nautil.us/how-evolution-designed-your-fear-236858/-J. Original message From: glen Date: 6/3/24 11:04 PM (GMT+01:00) To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams I had a conversation with a psychiatrist friend of mine wherein she assumed the dichotomy between "good feelings" and "bad feelings" (e.g. an angry or relieved reaction to some thing like the Trump verdict). Through about an hour of conversation, I'd tried to convince her that dichotomy is false. Bad things are good and good things are bad. The valence we assign is post-hoc. I failed, of course. But...I feel the same way about phobias. It's a bit trite to suggest that we like exploring our fears in a safe environment like at a movie theater with a friend or two. But it's testament to the milieu that monsters vs treasures is a false dichotomy. And it goes beyond some complementarity like banking present pain for future pleasure. It's truly a dual. The highs *are* the lows and vice versa. If there is such a thing as free will, your assignment of valence might be the only freedom you have.I don't know if Bloom explores this aspect. But the body of work spawned from Friston and the minimization of surprisal targets it directly. It's reasonable to believe that *agency* is what provides the common substructure for an explanatory model of the ascription of valence to an experience. The hypothetical to explore is whether those experiences that promote agency are more often ascribed as (or felt like) "good" ones, whether painful, pleasurable, fearful, triumphant, or whatever the token ascribed.On 6/3/24 13:15, Jochen Fromm wrote:> Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are about our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. Jaws is about monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is about monsters (and treasures) hiding in dark tombs.> > > Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologists have long known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones. Why is that so? Do unpleasant dreams prepare us for possible dangers or are we just relieved that the are over if they end?> > https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=40262533840930-- ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listservFridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriamto (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.comFRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
I had a conversation with a psychiatrist friend of mine wherein she assumed the dichotomy between "good feelings" and "bad feelings" (e.g. an angry or relieved reaction to some thing like the Trump verdict). Through about an hour of conversation, I'd tried to convince her that dichotomy is false. Bad things are good and good things are bad. The valence we assign is post-hoc. I failed, of course. But... I feel the same way about phobias. It's a bit trite to suggest that we like exploring our fears in a safe environment like at a movie theater with a friend or two. But it's testament to the milieu that monsters vs treasures is a false dichotomy. And it goes beyond some complementarity like banking present pain for future pleasure. It's truly a dual. The highs *are* the lows and vice versa. If there is such a thing as free will, your assignment of valence might be the only freedom you have. I don't know if Bloom explores this aspect. But the body of work spawned from Friston and the minimization of surprisal targets it directly. It's reasonable to believe that *agency* is what provides the common substructure for an explanatory model of the ascription of valence to an experience. The hypothetical to explore is whether those experiences that promote agency are more often ascribed as (or felt like) "good" ones, whether painful, pleasurable, fearful, triumphant, or whatever the token ascribed. On 6/3/24 13:15, Jochen Fromm wrote: Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are about our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. Jaws is about monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is about monsters (and treasures) hiding in dark tombs. Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologists have long known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones. Why is that so? Do unpleasant dreams prepare us for possible dangers or are we just relieved that the are over if they end? https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=40262533840930 -- ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
[FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams
Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are about our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. Jaws is about monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is about monsters (and treasures) hiding in dark tombs.Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologists have long known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones. Why is that so? Do unpleasant dreams prepare us for possible dangers or are we just relieved that the are over if they end?https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=40262533840930-J.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
