Author: Anhao Sun, Zeitgeist: An Open Quarterly for Ethics and Human Values, a UHHC partner organization
Philosophy and science have different approaches and research methods to a certain subject matter. Philosophy focuses more on the theoretical side that required logic and thinking, while science had more observations experiments and analysis. If we link them together the two can contribute together to understanding the mind.
Descartes wrote in his own philosophy about the mind as part of a dualism relationship between mind and body. The theory was built on his skepticism in which he subverted the previous understanding we had of the body. The skepticism, or more specifically the dream skepticism relies on the assumption that dreams are conscious experiences. In which dreams were like hallucinations where to the extreme we cannot identify that we are in a dream or in reality. If the assumption that dreams are conscious experience turns out to be false, that we won’t be able to be deceived during sleep, his skepticism of the body would not stand. His understanding of the mind which builds upon this skepticism would then be skeptical.
The most famous argument against dreams are conscious experiences is Malcolm’s concept of dream. Malcolm believed that if a person is conscious then it would imply that he would not be sound asleep. If he is not conscious in sleep then he would not be able to have a conscious experience while dreaming. The only way he thought that can support we are dreaming is by dream reports. He believes these are not verified or true. The so-called dream experiences we “have” and tell are mainly formed when we are awake when we are recalling the dreams. This leads to his denial of their implication that we are having conscious experiences while we are asleep.
Empirical evidence shows a different result. Modern scientific methods have allowed us to study dreams by using different sources of evidence that weren’t discovered in Malcolm’s time. We have now found that sleep doesn’t always happen when we are sound asleep, in fact, it could happen at different stages of sleep. REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep is a major part of sleep research. Research has shown that REM sleep’s EEG measures, the measurement of electrical activity in the brain, match that of the EEG measures when we are awake. This implies that during REM sleep, we are likely conscious like when we are awake. The aligned results between REM sleep and awakening of muscle tone losses and rapid eye movements have strengthened this finding. Also, REM sleep has more reports of dreaming, and these reports are more vivid and elaborate than non-REM sleep which indicates that one is dreaming. Malcolm’s theory doesn’t align with the empirical evidence of REM sleep.
Another theory that dreams are not conscious experiences is Dennett’s theory. He believes that dreams are instantaneous memory insertions at the time of waking as if it is a cassette inserted with a prescription dream ready to play in memory. For Dennett, He believes that we generally can not use retrospective recall to distinguish conscious experience from memory insertion. He supports this argument that a dream is not a conscious experience but a memory insertion with an empirical description of a dream. In this scenario, a man had a complex dream about the French Revolution and his execution when he woke up to his headboard falling onto his neck. Because the dream seems to have built up from this event of the headboard falling, he suggests that this scenario would best explained as instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of waking when the headboard fell on his neck.
However scientific research does not support this. Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer is conscious that they are dreaming. Lucid dream experiments have shown that people can show that they are conscious during lucid dreaming and are constantly engaging in dream activities by signaling. This shows that dreams are not the instant insertion of memory but a lengthy conscious experience as evidenced by the combination of dream reports and in dream signaling. Dream enactment behavior studies also show that they were consciously part of a series of dream events in sleep. In REM sleep, the contestants showed complex goal-directed behaviors like running or fighting off a person. Dream reports match these behaviors showing that they are literally acting them out in their dreams. This shows that we are consciously engaged in dream activities in our sleep. This clearly shows that our dreams are long conscious experiences rather than an instant insertion of memory.
As convincing as these scientific pieces of evidence really are, we might still need to question how much retrospective dream reports and actual dreams really match and show our consciousness in dreams. There are also concerns that sleep behaviors and collected data don’t really match and reflect actual dream experiences. While this is concerning, more and more new data have confirmed the existence of dream experiences and that they match the conscious experiences when awakening. While dream reports are not very trustworthy, sometimes even fabricated, failing to describe the experience during sleep, dream reports in laboratories under a controlled environment are often more trustworthy than other written ones for instance the dream report of Maury, ( the French Revolution execution dream related to the fallen headboard) the dream report used in the Dennett’s cassette theory.
We have found that scientific evidence has helped show that dreams are conscious experiences. The alignment between REM sleep and awakening have shown that we can be conscious in our sleep; the elaborate dream reports have confirmed that we are dreaming during REM sleep, proving that Malcolm’s theory of dreams is incorrect. Dream enactment behaviors and lucid dreaming shows that we have a lengthy conscious dreaming process in our sleep by studying signals and behaviors and their connection to dream reports. This would prove that dream is not an instantaneous memory insertion as described in Dennett’s cassette theory.
Since empirical evidence has proved these two theories wrong and dreams are conscious experiences, we can prove that we are able to be deceived during dreams. Thus, Descartes’ dream skepticism stands, and his dualism argument and his understanding of mind is less doubtful and can be seen as based on a firmer assumption than before. In this we can find that scientific evidence has helped in many ways to provide support for our philosophical understanding of the mind. In this process, philosophical theories like Descartes’ dreams are conscious experiences that provide scientific research with a direction, a hypothesis that they can work on. Dennett and Malcolm theories both serve directions of scientific research. On the other hand, scientific research has provided important empirical evidence helping us to judge which philosophical theory has more success in explaining how dreams are functioning. We can see that while science and philosophy have different methods and approaches, the two can work together to improve our understanding of the mind.
（This article is from Zeitgeist: An Open Quarterly for Ethics and Human Values, a UHHC partner organization. Edited by Peter Tian from UHHC, The picture is from the Internet. If it infringes any rights, we will delete it immediately. All the copyrights of this article belong to the author . Anyone who infringes will be held accountable by both the author Anhao Sun and UHHC to the fullest extent.)