Animal Dreams

  I’ve been reading “When Animals Dream” by David M. Peña-Guzmán.  The book summarizes an array of evidence supporting the claim that many animal species (not just mammals) do dream and evidence providing clues about the possible nature of those dreams – I will probably be writing more about it as I work my way through it. 

What especially caught my eye in the first chapter was Peña-Guzmán’s discussion of scientific resistance to the claim that the observed behavior is evidence of actual dreaming, comparable to the phenomenal experience of humans.  According to his analysis of the literature, the underlying issue pits phenomenology (the interpretation of behavior as experience) against a computational view in which the observed behaviors of sleeping animals is nothing more than the result of an algorithm running in the animal’s brain, associated with no subjective experience.  The sleeping animal jerks its legs, snaps its teeth, and so on – but does not experience any of this. 

I have recently criticized the computer model of human cognition (and the related code model of language and other signaling behavior); the algorithmic view of animal sleeping behavior criticized by Peña-Guzmán seems to be an extension of the computer model to animal brains, subject to many of the same criticisms.  It also seems part of the continuing ideology of human uniqueness, a defense of the sharp line between human and animal, that is becoming increasingly blurred as a result of new research in animal behavior, cognition, and communication.