What if dreams don't have a purpose?
Perhaps they're merely scrambled bits of memories and thoughts that are being reprogrammed when we sleep and sometimes our "self" gets a peek at the sausage being made?
Perhaps they're merely scrambled bits of memories and thoughts that are being reprogrammed when we sleep and sometimes our "self" gets a peek at the sausage being made?
Also occurred to me (thanks to chatGPT) that dreams might be produced in the same way chatGPT produces narratives, by running through a series of "what is likely to be next according to my trained network" decisions
Psychedelics can give a taste of this with the experience of separation of self, where it feels like you're an observer behind the one way mirror watching a focus group deliberate on various topics.
Intelligence is a great example. It's obviously beneficial for both survival and reproduction, so should naturally be highly selected for. But in a society where higher intelligence correlates with lower reproduction, evolution will "select" for lower intelligence. Of course it's not evolution selecting for anything, but our own traits paired against our own outcomes. If it turns out to be beneficial for breeding, we could gradually even "devolve." But the notion of devolution is again somewhat nonsensical, because evolution has no direction.
So for many things I think looking for an evolutionary cause is not really meaningful. If evolution had a direction, we'd all be tardigrades.