This gives additional evidence to my personal hypothesis that the normal state of living beings is sleeping. The awake state only appeared as a survival strategy, to better adapt to the natural environment.
Well. Given that "awake" creatures react to stimuli, that might not be too far off the truth. If we could passively survive and not have to forage or hunt for food, what's the point of 'waking up'?
Sleeping is advantageous (less energy use). Efficiency is usually selected for, unless there's some other kind of environmental pressure.
Maybe that's why we haven't found other civilizations. They are all 'sleeping'. Maybe consciousness is also unnecessary (on that front, I love https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)
In the earth animal kingdom, yes.
But what if there was some king of being that "shed" their spawn in a totally passive manner, perhaps using all that surplus energy from not needing to be awake most of the time?
But the "multicellular organism" mode they switch while we're awake is necessary for them to be more than a pile of cells. Which indeed is very important for our survival, as complex behaviors that only multicellular organisms have, are crucial to our ability to adapt.
Lots of fascinating stuff there, highly recommend if you're interested.
We shouldn't be asking what's the purpose of this pesky thing called sleep (which evolution turns to always incorporate into animal life, however inconvenient it is[1]; to route around the inconveniences as it were, rather than the other way around). We should rather be asking, is there a single function which isn't improved by sleep (Walker thinks no). End of preach rant :)
[1]: e.g.: some birds appear to sleep in patterns such as when there's a row of birds sleeping, the two birds at each end sleep with one hemisphere each - but opposite ones - so that the field of vision is maximised. At midpoint in time however they swap places. The rest of the birds sleep with both hemispheres. That sounds pretty cool.
[2]: though apparently there's criticism directed at Walker re: this, and re: him not mentioning that mortality appears to increase beyond the 7 hour mark (but I'm just learning this, so basically, just a fair warning not to take all of this at face value, there's nuance).
Regarding mortality and the 7 hour mark, this is such unfortunate bullshit, that keeps being propagated by people who should know better. Ill people sleep more (even if you catch a cold, once you get past the peak, you sleep more for a few days) because their body requires more recovery.
In chronically ill people this continues for a long time and the body never is able to catch up to the problem it's trying to solve.
But despite all the "correlation not causation" mantras repeated by everyone, we keep citing this as if we decide to sleep a bit more that'll make it more likely to die, which is nonsense.
Unfortunately a lie repeated a thousand times (by media) becomes truth. And it's just too juicy of a news to say "sleeping too much bad for health". Especially managers, they love that kind of news ;-)
BTW my frustration is pointed at general media and society, not you in particular, I wasn't clear.
I wouldn’t call that “naps”. That’s not what it is.
[1]https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ [2]https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...
This matches some other theories as well, where humans and a few other always awake organisms are the extreme, due to selective pressures. For example, humans "feel bored" because having nothing pressing to do for survival is usually the wrong option. Whereas that isn't true for many other organisms and they likely wouldn't have an opinion about staying still in the same place for prolonged periods of time.
For your hypothesis to work, and I think this is what you mean by the article supporting it, sleep would have had to evolve very early. Because being awake activates a great deal of a modern organism’s complexity, and that complexity wouldn’t have evolved in an always-sleeping organism that doesn’t benefit from it. So either the predecessors were awake, or sleep came before all the complexity that is now activated only when awake.
For the first wakers, then, being awake was little more than a period of increased activity. A boost mode. And indeed we’ve already seen the utility of boost modes across a variety of technology, from CPUs to cars to high output flashlights.
But does that make the predecessors really asleep? To use a very HN analogy, were pre-boost CPUs always idling?
Well, not directly, but we can certainly talk about the appearance a distinct state, which would now be called awake state in comparison to previous organisms that had a single state. After this appearance it makes sense to talk about previous life forms as "sleeping".
This is reminiscent of the claim that zebras are black with white stripes (or is it the other way around?)
Like in many other cases, we can take clues from embryonic development. We know for example that fetuses spend at least 95% of their time sleeping. So we know from pretty early stage that sleeping seems to be the norm. Sleeping is also the most efficient, energy-wise, state for an organism. Even nowadays certain animals are able to hibernate for months. Humans can do this too in extreme situations, it is called comma.
So, when we go to sleep we're not just "recharging". We're going to our normal state, and while it is possible to stay that way for long periods, I never heard of anyone staying awake for more than a few days.