The dreams of animals

[Ninshub]

FWIW, I'm choosing option 2, David!

Those spiders in REM (and possibly dreaming) are beautiful, btw.

Why didn't you choose one of my options?

I would bet that dogs and cats have some pretty complex dreams. Of course, theirs will include a vastly richer landscape of odours!

I think denying dreams to dogs and cats is akin to solipsism.

Because I didn't see the point of picking an option.

You can "bet" they have "pretty complex dreams".  That doesn't tell us anything (obviously) nor did I deny animals dream.  Hell, read my earlier post in this very thread where i describe my own dog dreaming.  Sheesh.

My entire contribution to this thread, to which you responded, was to question whether animal dreaming is evidence that animals have similar/analogous consciousness to humans.  Full stop.

(I really wonder if you comprehend what I write.  So often you respond and take your response on some tangent of your own invention and not at all relevant to what I'd actually written.)

Because I didn't see the point of picking an option.

You can "bet" they have "pretty complex dreams".  That doesn't tell us anything (obviously) nor did I deny animals dream.  Hell, read my earlier post in this very thread where i describe my own dog dreaming.  Sheesh.

My entire contribution to this thread, to which you responded, was to question whether animal dreaming is evidence that animals have similar/analogous consciousness to humans.  Full stop.

(I really wonder if you comprehend what I write.  So often you respond and take your response on some tangent of your own invention and not at all relevant to what I'd actually written.)

The new article on insect consciousness by Daniela C. Rößler and co-authors published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the investigators studied 34 young spiders while they slept and found that there were eye movements that seemed analogous to the eye movements of human beings and other higher animals that occur during REM sleep and are associated with dreaming. They pointed out that this seems to suggest that arachnids may have mental states and dreams that are more akin to those of human beings than previously thought. 

But akin or similar/analogous to human beings? That remains to be seen.

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has some thoughts on this. He focuses on the apparently fundamental deficits of of the truly existent
animal consciousness as compared to human. From https://evolutionnews.org/2022/08/what-i...-a-spider/:

"(The) property of aboutness is called intentionality and it distinguishes thoughts from physical objects. Every thought is inherently about something — I can think about my car or about justice or about the future. No physical thing is inherently about anything — physical things are just what they are. In my view, the concept of consciousness is too vague to have any useful meaning in either philosophy or neuroscience. A more precise and relevant question about animal minds would be: Do life forms aside from humans have intentionality? If they do, then they have mental states that are about something, as Franz Brentano (a 19th century German philosopher) pointed out.
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So, the question about dreaming spiders and spider consciousness is perhaps better stated as: Do spiders have intentional states, which means do they have the capacity to think about things? The presence of what appears to be rapid eye movement during sleep in spiders suggests that (in dreams) they may be thinking about things in a manner analogous to human beings (during dreaming). So, the question then would be: What do spiders think and dream about?
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I believe it is undeniable that at least many lower forms of life have mental states of some sort — they have intentional mental states directed at particular physical objects. For a spider, this intentionality would likely be directed toward its web and to unwary insects trapped in it or to predators that might threaten it. These spider mental states would undoubtedly represent “consciousness” of a sort as the term is commonly understood.

But what distinguishes a spider mental state from human mental state is most fundamentally the capacity for abstraction, which humans have and spiders don’t.
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....the answer to the question “What is it like to be a spider?” is that we don’t know and we can’t know. That spiders do have intentional states and therefore do have minds seems undeniable — spider behavior demonstrates that there is an “aboutness” to their internal processing that seems inexplicable in the absence of some kind of mental stateS. And there’s no reason to doubt that spider’s mental states may also entail dreams about juicy insects trapped in the web."

But this animal consciousness is quite apparently fundamentally existentially inferior to human's. No surprise.

But this animal consciousness is quite apparently fundamentally existentially inferior to human's. No surprise.

Isn't he just speculating here? I mean I don't think that spiders have as complex a mind as humans but it's not clear to me how he has ascertained they don't have thoughts.

Isn't he just speculating here? I mean I don't think that spiders have as complex a mind as humans but it's not clear to me how he has ascertained they don't have thoughts.

Egnor isn't claiming spiders don't have thoughts (that are invariably about something), in fact he specifically says they do. He just claims that these spider thoughts are fundamentally simpler and of a different existential category that what human thoughts usually are (that is, human thoughts are often abstractions of various sorts relating to immaterial things and concepts that have no physical existence). He assumes that the very much less elaborate consciousnesses of spiders have nothing like abstract thoughts (he assumes that the "somethings" the spider thoughts are about are always concrete material things and their doings that are of concern to the spiders), and that seems reasonable to me.