From: zorrilla@cattell.psych.upenn.edu (Eric Zorrilla)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Brain and Mind
Date: 10 Sep 92 20:29:08 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Pennsylvania

Someone wrote:

>>>> by measuring brainwaves and REM activity, we can tell,
>>>> _TO_ _GREATER_ _ACCURACY_ than the subject herself exactly
>>>> how much dreaming she has been doing.


Jon responded:

>>> The use of "dreaming" above is simply a category mistake.

I (Eric Zorrilla) responded:

>> Physiology and CNS events may be physical instantiations of the
>> phenomena that we experience as dreaming.  Clearly, however,
>> this is not 100% provable. I don't think it's a category mistake
>> as much as a problem in demonstrability.

Jon Kreuger responds:

>What we refer to when we say "dreaming" is different,
>and a different sort of thing, from what we refer to
>when we say "brainwaves" or "REM activity".

What _you_ refer to when you say dreaming is different.....What sleep
researchers refer to when they talk about dreaming IS brainwaves, REM
activity, phasic movements, etc.  One of the primary points of sleep re-
search is to take things out of the private realm (subjective reports of
dreaming) and into the observable public realm (EEG spikes in the pons-
geniculate-occipital cortex regions that are synchronized with eye move-
ments) by showing not that the latter are related to the former, but
that the latter ARE the former - simply described at different levels of
analyses.

>"The phenomena that we experience as dreaming" misses
>the meaning of the word.

No, I was being imprecise in my writing.  Phenomena here refers to the
neurophysiology NOT to any "mind" or "private" phenomena.  I concur that
dreaming is the experience.

>"Dreaming" is the experience.
>If we discover a physical process that causes the
>experience, we need a new word, because the process itself
>is not dreaming.

Then we have a fundamentally different view of mind/body relations.  I
don't argue that physiological changes in the brain CAUSE mind events,
I argue that physiological changes in the brain ARE mind events.  The
process itself IS dreaming but simply viewed from a different analytical
and phenomenological perspective.

"Dreaming" refers to images, typically experienced as uncontrolled and
variably coherent that humans report having experienced during sleep.
"PGO Spikes and asynchronous brain wave activity" are neurophysiological
events associated with dreaming.  If it can be shown that the latter do not
cause but ARE the former, simply at a different level of analysis, then it is
correct to say that the latter is "dreaming."

As the poster pointed out, people have trouble reporting during conscious
states how much "dreaming" they have been doing because that aspect of
their private world tends to become dissociated from their awake private
world.  We really know how much a person has been dreaming (in the private
sense) by looking at these public events in the same way that we know how
much clotting is going on by looking at the function of fibrinogen.

Clearly, my argument rests on the assumption that private events are
perfectly accessible by knowing their representation in public events.

[--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------]
| Eric Zorrilla - Dept. of Psychology  | zorrilla@cattell.psych.upenn.edu     |
| University of Pennsylvania           | 3815 Walnut, Philadelphia, PA 19104  |
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Newsgroups: sci.psychology