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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

If dreaming is the point, then my dog has mastered the skill. Until I met him I never considered dogs could dream so prolifically.

I wish I could plug a TV into his brain and watch the reel running through it.

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Same with my cat. Every time I go to sleep it will always pick me to snuggle with usually in between my head and elbow. Within a few mins it’s purring and its limbs twitch and I get poked by claws. It’s in deep sleep and seems happy.

I have some pretty wild dreams myself, and what’s wilder is that I have those dejavue (sp?) moments regularly irl.

Dejavue sounds like a great name for a new 2024 Frontend Framework™

It's already the name of a visualization and debugging tool built for vue.js:

https://github.com/MiCottOn/DejaVue

> it

I don't think I could bear to call any of my pets, or even any familiar animal, by such a distant term.

In some languages , like German, children are referred to as “it” for quite some time as they grow

Yes, but each language splits reality up differently, and with different implications.

I've noticed several native German speakers, when using English, would say things like "I spilled coffee on my table and now he is wet" — I don't think they were asserting that the table was objectively male, just because it was grammatically male.

Yes gender in a language is odd when English got rid of it.

Cool

What's your point though. Are you suggesting you care more for your animal than this other person?

I'm sure the commenter loves their cat - enough to endure the claw pokes and keep snuggling, at least!

Yeah dogs are cute when they are dreaming. You can see them run in green grassy fields.

The last thing you would do is to interrupt this moment of happiness.

(Off topic : dogs are so good)

You don't know if he's dreaming really. He could just be twitching and shuffling in his sleep, without dreaming.

They also growl and do stifled sleep barks, and sometimes they are clearly running.

You don't even know, if the dog exists. Might all be a dream or simulation after all.

But going for the most likely explanation, surely dogs can dream. They are also mammals, have quite similar brains and act similar in sleeping from the outside, so why shouldn't it be dreaming?

We only know that humans dream because we tell each other about our dreams. There's no evidence that any other species dreams, as they don't tell us about it and we don't have access to their qualia.

There's plenty of evidence, just not conclusive evidence perhaps. Birds and mammals both have REM sleep, the stage where we experience most dreams. This feels like slothful induction because we have almost as much evidence for animals dreaming as we do for other people dreaming, just lacking verbal reports.

They may act like humans do when we dream, and their brain activity while they sleep looks similar to ours when we dream. But neither of these facts allows us to conclude that they're actually dreaming.

The verbal reports are key to our shared understanding that most humans experience dreams when sleeping. We do not have this for dogs or any other species.

When it comes down to it, we can't say for sure that dream reports aren't the unconscious actions of philosophical zombies either. If we're willing to accept dream reports on the assumption that other people have conscious experiences, then it's not unreasonable to allow closely related animals the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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