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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: back to Park (ID:fanpu2019), author: gu Fan and

We usually think that human beings are the only creatures on earth that can dream. But David M.Pe ñ a-Guzm á n (David Pena-Guzman), an American animal behaviorist who specializes in critical animal research, has scoured the scientific literature and based on detailed data from domestic cats, rats, zebra finches, zebrafish and chimpanzees, has proved that animals can dream, and many animals perform "realistic simulations" while sleeping. In his new book, can Animals Dream? he also combines the dreaming behavior of animals with neuroscientific research and the philosophical theory of dreaming, and puts forward the view that animals are conscious creatures. and in-depth study of the thorny issues of scientific ethics. This book is not only a vivid interpretation of animal dreams, but also a fascinating interpretation of its philosophical and moral implications.

The following is a book review written by Gu Fanji, a translator of this book and a professor of the Academy of Life Sciences of Fudan University. It not only briefly summarizes the scientific evidence and methods presented by the author, but also makes his own comments on the philosophical and moral implications caused by the author's idea that animals dream.

Can Animals Dream: the Secrets of Animal consciousness (Shanghai Science and Technology Publishing House)

Write an article | Gu Fan and

Do animals dream? What kind of animal dreams? Orangutans? Monkey? An elephant? A dog? Birds? Octopus? Earthworm? As human beings, we know that we are conscious of dreaming. If animals can also dream, does that mean that animals are also conscious? If animals are conscious, how should we treat them? This is the theme of the new book, can Animals Dream?

Although from ancient times to the 19th century, people were full of curiosity about the inner world of themselves and animals, but they were always introspective and speculative. After the rise of behaviorism in the first half of the last century, it is generally believed that only behavior can be observed and studied by science, but it is impossible to study the inner activity, and even deny the existence of the inner activity. thus the study of inner activity is excluded from the category of scientific research. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that the study of cognition was put back on the agenda of scientific research due to the progress of neuroscience and technology. In the late 1980s, scientists began to talk about consciousness again, but the study of animal dreams and consciousness lags even more, because animals can't talk, and how to know whether animals can dream seems to be an unanswerable problem. It was not until 2020 that the first scientific paper on animal dreams was published. Of course, not to mention there are books devoted to this issue.

Animal behaviorist David Pena-Guzman's new book, can Animals Dream? With this theme, the Secret realm of Animal consciousness [1] collected a large number of experimental data from the three aspects of behavior, electrophysiology and functional anatomy, which unanimously supported the view that animals can also dream. Then the author raises the problem to the level of philosophy in order to make a reasonable explanation. He shows that these animals are also conscious through the fact that animals dream. Then, since the animals are not stimulated by the outside world during the dream, the root of this consciousness must be endogenous, and what is seen in the dream is not a repeat of the real experience, but a construction that shows that these animals can also imagine, have their own, different from our inner world of human beings. Therefore, the author thinks that we must change the contemptuous attitude of most people towards animals and reconsider our attitude towards them. Such an empirical and more comprehensive discussion of various issues related to animal dreams can naturally be regarded as the first work on this issue. The book is attractive not only because of its theme, but also because it collects a large number of interesting experimental materials, and the author can't stop reading it because of its ingenious description.

Do animals dream? The most interesting thing about the book is that the author strongly demonstrates that animals can also dream with a variety of facts:

Behavioral evidence American biologist David Schell, who raised an octopus Heidi, observed Heidi's strange behavior: Heidi was resting calmly at first, but suddenly Heidi's skin changed from snow white to flickering yellow. with orange spots-- which is usually what it does when she sees a crab when she's awake-- and then Heidi turns dark purple. "this is what octopuses usually do when they leave the ocean floor after a successful hunt," Schell explained. " After that, Heidi's skin turned into a series of light gray and yellow, but this time the colors were scattered across many strips and sharp horns. "it's a camouflage, as if it had just caught a crab and was about to sit down and eat without letting anyone notice it." What is striking is that Heidi's color change pattern and order are always exactly the same as when she is awake preying on crabs, which cannot be explained by coincidence. A reasonable explanation is that Heidi is having a predator dream.

Heidi showed three different color patterns during sleep, probably because she hunted and ate her prey in her dreams. Source: "do Animals Dream?" Electrophysiological evidence in 2000, biologists Amish Dave and Daniel Magoliash recorded a group of zebra Finch chicks during sleep in the brain "birdsong system" of neural activation patterns. They found that the zebra Finch's brain switches back and forth between two states during sleep: one is a continuous but low level of neural activity, and the other is to spontaneously produce high levels of bursts at regular intervals. They then recorded the neural patterns that appeared in the same brain region when the birds practiced singing while awake. It was found that the pattern caused by singing while awake was exactly the same in structure as the pattern characterized by sudden bursts of high-level neural activity during sleep. The match was so perfect that they found that the two could correspond one by one on the notes. They concluded that zebra finches not only practice singing loudly while awake, but also play back spiritually during sleep without chirping. In addition, these finches sing about the same time when they are awake as they sing silently when they are asleep. At the same time, the auditory area of their brain is also activated. This means that in the extreme silence of sleep, sleeping birds also seem to "hear" their own "silent song". All this evidence suggests that zebra finches can sing in dreams.

The patterns of brain activity of zebra finches singing while awake match those shown when singing silently in sleep. This match is so perfect that scientists can match the two patterns one by one note by note. Source: "do animals dream?" functional neuroanatomy evidence why people do not show dream actions when they are dreaming. This is because sleep will produce biochemical changes, causing the sleeper to be in a state of muscle weakness and therefore unable to act at will. These changes "lock" the behavioral process in the heart of the sleeper. In most cases, REM is the only motor component in the program that can get rid of this inhibitory process and be shown externally. French neuroscientist Michel Ruwe has removed the dorsolateral part of the reticular structure of the pontine in a group of cats. Studies have shown that this damage to the brain structure suppresses myasthenia, but not REM sleep. The results are shocking. When cats with pontine injuries enter REM sleep, they do "perform" their dreams. They stand up, meow, walk around, comb their hair, and explore their surroundings. They show happiness, anger, fear, exploration, etc. Some cats stare at the open space as if to sneak up on their prey, while others run around their fences, fighting their imaginary enemies with all their strength, but they have been sleeping while doing so! Ruwei says he can easily compare his behavior with typical waking behavior to infer what each cat is dreaming.

A cat in Michelle Ruway's lab struggled with a hypothetical enemy after surgically removing neurons responsible for muscle weakness in the pons. Source: "can Animals Dream?" due to space constraints, each kind of evidence in this article cites only one of the many examples in the book. Indeed, it may not be convincing to look at one of the evidence alone, but putting these findings together forms a strong network of evidence to support the hypothesis that animals also dream.

Feynman, an American physicist and Nobel laureate, said: "so what we now call scientific knowledge is a bunch of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are the most uncertain; some of them are close to certainty; but there is no absolute certainty." [2] with all the above evidence, the probability that it is still a pure coincidence is very small, so the author thinks that the presumption that animals also dream is "almost certain".

The fact that animals dream means that animals are also conscious researchers generally agree that they are conscious when they dream, and one corollary is that dreaming animals are also conscious.

There is no public opinion on what consciousness is. The author believes that consciousness includes three important aspects: subjective consciousness, emotional consciousness and metacognitive consciousness. In order to show that dreaming shows consciousness, the author first emphasizes that dreaming also has these three aspects, thus generally demonstrates that dreaming is a sufficient condition for consciousness, but it is not necessary. Because animals can not speak, the author explains the problems through the study of human dreams in terms of subjective consciousness and metacognitive consciousness, and deduces that since animals can dream, they should have these aspects of consciousness like human beings. Of course, this is indirect reasoning after all, there is a lot of guesswork, we need to pay attention to. But in the aspect of emotional consciousness, the author has used more animal research results, and there is direct evidence.

Subjective consciousness has two aspects:

1. Subjective existence, that is, the feeling that one is at the center of one's own world and has been in that position for a long time.

two。 Incarnate self-awareness, that is, taking it for granted that you have a body.

On the relationship between dream and subjective consciousness, the author emphasizes that as long as you dream, you must have a self to realize, maintain and experience it. When we dream, this subjective center makes us feel that we are "there" and that what happens in the dream is happening to us. No matter how unstable, illogical or absurd, each dream is organized around a dream in which the self is "in" the dream, and it is the dreamer who finally agrees that the dream self is himself. We never just watch our dreams, but we are in them.

Emotional consciousness We are either happy or sad in our dreams, that is to say, we also have emotional consciousness in our dreams. Dramatic emotional changes are also often the driving force for animals to dream. British neuroscientist Olaf Stautti and her team came up with a clever two-phase experiment to study the problem.

They asked a group of rats to perform space tasks. Nobel laureate O'Keefe found that the activation of cells in different locations in the hippocampus corresponds to the different locations of the animals in the familiar environment, so by recording the activation sequence patterns of the positional cells in the hippocampus, we can know the animals' inner understanding of their position changes in the surrounding space. They compared hippocampal activation patterns during awakening and sleep.

In the first stage, they adapted the rats to a T-shaped maze in which the passage to the two smaller arms of the maze was blocked by a transparent barrier. Rats can run up and down the main road of the labyrinth and see two branching arms, but can't actually explore them. The experimenter then introduced motivation into the scene, marking one arm with a reward (a few grains of rice) and leaving the other arm empty. This attracted the attention of the rats, who ran to the junction of the labyrinth fork and stared longingly at the pile of delicious rice close in front of them. Once you are familiar with this setting, remove the rats from the maze and let them take a nap. While they were asleep, the researchers recorded the discharge order of each hippocampal cell, which formed a "neural map" of the rats, reflecting the "journey" of the rats in their dreams. Olafstadty and her colleagues speculated that the rats explored the arm marked in the maze "in advance" and placed their small claws on the object they wanted.

In order to verify their conjecture, in the second stage of the experiment, they put the rats back into the maze, but this time, the transparent barrier blocking the entrance of the rice arm and the rice itself were removed. After putting the rats back in, as predicted, the rats ran to the junction of the T-maze and immediately turned in the direction of the arm that had the bait, indicating that they remembered which arm had a delicious prize and expected to find it there. Even after realizing that the rice was gone, the animals took longer to explore the arm than the control rats.

As the rats ran back and forth on the previously prized arms, the researchers recorded discharges in the hippocampus and found that the patterns associated with exploring this particular part of the maze were the same as those recorded when the rats were napping. When the rats fell asleep after seeing but not actually exploring the award arm, and when they explored the arm after a nap, they discharged the same number of hippocampal cells in the same order. This undoubtedly confirms that the hippocampus did the same thing at both moments: one was when the rats went to sleep after seeing the prize, and the other was when they were disappointed to find that there was no prize in the place they had explored. In other words, the rats remembered many aspects of the real environment that emotionally aroused their interest and actively imagined a "future experience" that made their wishes come true. This imagination occurs when they are asleep.

In addition, there is plenty of evidence that animals that are severely traumatized in childhood, even in adulthood, often show panic in their sleep, and some primates even use sign language to indicate that they are having nightmares. This is strong evidence of emotional consciousness in dreams.

Waxiu, a captive chimpanzee, "speaks" with the ASL gesture in his sleep. Here, it makes the ASL gesture of the word "coffee", including the shape of the right hand and the shape of the "C" with the left hand, and the former revolves around the latter when both hands move from the chest to the ceiling. Source: "do animals dream?" metacognitive consciousness occasionally, we restore metacognitive ability during dreaming and realize that we are dreaming in a clear-headed moment. The dreamer experiences a "lucid dream" in which the dreamer shifts the focus of their inner attention from the content of their inner state to their whole inner state. In other words, the dreamer no longer pays attention to what appears in the dream, but to the dream itself.

Animal dreams show that animals also have imagination. In the spatial dream experiments of rats studied by Olafstadty and his team, when the rats took a nap, they had to imagine what it would be like to cross a place they had never been to before. To do this, they can't just search and replay them from past memories; they have to use many pieces of old experience to create new subjective experiences. Rats need to imagine a possible scenario they have never encountered in the real world. The rats are not remembering; they are speculating that it is a kind of "mentally anticipating themselves". The ability to deal with possible future events that have never been encountered before.

Animal dreams are clear evidence of the creation of inner images without stimulation from the outside world, indicating that animals have imagination.

Do animals have moral status? From the point of view that animals can dream, the author discusses that animals are conscious and imaginative, thus negating the popular idea that animals are just animals without inner world. The fact that animals dream shows that next to our world, there are endless other worlds-completely "other", non-human worlds. This also raises the ethical question about the status of animals as moral subjects, and how we should deal with them.

It is generally believed that consciousness is the basis of moral status, but consciousness has many aspects. Which aspects of consciousness are the basis of moral status? The philosopher Bullock divided consciousness into two types: "access consciousness" and "phenomenal consciousness". Entering consciousness refers to a symbolic state of mind, whose content can be used by a wider cognitive system to perform functions such as reasoning, decision-making and language reporting; perceptual consciousness is non-functional. They have nothing to do with performing any particular cognitive operation. They do not lead to inference, random action, or communication. In addition, their content is perceptual, not symbolic, which means that they have a sense of certainty associated with them, but they do not represent anything in the outside world. I can only describe it to you metaphorically, or let you try it yourself. However, even if the tongue is full of words, my metaphor will come to nothing in the end. Because, for example, there is always a gap between my first-person experience of red wine and my description of it. This gap is its taste, which can only be experienced through personal experience. As a result, two camps have been formed.

Theorists who enter consciousness first believe that entering consciousness is the basis of moral value, while theorists who give priority to perceptual consciousness believe that moral status is produced by perceptual consciousness. The differences between the two camps can be attributed to two different views on moral life: one is cognitive, rational and linguistic, while the other places less emphasis on rational methods. Instead, priority is given to the roots of our subjective, emotional and incarnation in the world.

The author believes that perceptual consciousness is the key to moral status. In the author's view, it is the perception that makes it possible to give value. It enables living organisms to introduce value into a universe where there is no value. A creature without perceptual consciousness will have no vivid experience of the world, no feelings of the here and now, and it doesn't matter what is positive or negative (or good or bad). Even if such a creature could perform many cognitive functions, it would never have values. Without perceptual anchoring, there is no basis for giving value, and there is no preference, interest, or desire. Such creatures have no incentive to prefer one thing to another. A universe inhabited only by this creature will be a universe with no subject to give value, and therefore a universe with no value at all.

From the author's point of view, the author thinks that whether animals have moral status is based on perceptual consciousness rather than entering consciousness, but the author thinks that perceptual consciousness is only a necessary condition for moral status, not necessarily sufficient. Although in the book the author imagines a creature that only enters consciousness but does not perceive it, on individual occasions it simply takes the autonomous robot that only enters consciousness as an example to show that entering consciousness has nothing to do with moral status. But the author suspects that there are such creatures in the world, and it is even more doubtful that a robot is conscious because it can reason logically, move and speak. For creatures that enter consciousness, the author thinks that this kind of creature has perceptual consciousness in the first place. The autonomous robot that the author says only "enters the consciousness" but does not have the "perceptual consciousness" should not have the moral status is the scarecrow that he set up himself, because such a robot has no consciousness at all, naturally there is no moral status. The real question that should be considered is whether animals with perceptual consciousness should have moral status, or whether animals with both should have moral status. The author just did not answer this question in the book.

In the end, the author thinks that dreamers should be recognized as members of the moral community, and as similar creatures, they should be cared for, respected and dignified. If a subject has a moral status, then we can't treat it at will. In this regard, although the author agrees that the author should not abuse conscious animals, I also agree that human beings are not the only creatures who dream, are conscious and have moral status. However, in view of the fact that this problem is beyond the scope of natural science and is a matter of opinion, the author has expressed that we should not industrialize the breeding of animals, nor should we do traumatic experiments on animals for scientific research. there are even doubts about the view that animals should be treated like human beings. It is true that some scientists have become vegetarians after studying the problem of consciousness, but I do not want to do so myself. This may be an issue that will always be debated.

In a word, this is the first masterpiece to systematically introduce animal dreams and their significance. Although the reader (including the author) may not agree with each of his arguments, in any case, the author's views have his basis, and even if he disagrees, his arguments and arguments should be carefully considered. Generally speaking, the whole book is interlinked and mixed into one; it is not only interesting, but also rigorous. This book can be said to be the first masterpiece to discuss animal dreams from the beginning of science through philosophy to ethics. It is worthwhile for all readers who are interested in these issues to read, think and draw their own conclusions.

reference

By David Pena-Guzman, Gu Fan and translation (2023) can animals dream? The secret realm of animal consciousness. Shanghai: Shanghai Science and Technology Press.

[2] edited by Michelle Feynman, translated by Wang Zuzhe (2020) Feynman Quotations. Changsha: Hunan Science and Technology Press.

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