"We don’t really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep. It doesn’t seem worth compromising on the goods and projects of waking life so as to avoid the ordinary unpleasantness of dreams."
Except of course that people with particularly severe nightmares (or particularly good nightmare-memories) often do exactly this by putting off sleep - and it doesn't even work that well. Whether Schwitzgebel's argument goes through or not, I am skeptical his premises are true.
I think he’d say people do that because they care about how the nightmares will affect their waking life, not because the experience of the nightmares is itself a bad thing.
I’m coming into this discussion missing some broader context, but what moral value are you proposing to ascribe to dreams, exactly? This is so far removed from my own world view, where the concept of moral value seems so obviously disconnected from dreams. I suspect there’s a single missing piece you could provide which would help your argument make sense to me.
The people in Groundhogs Day have moral worth because they have experiences and consciousness. The fact that this resets at the end of the day complicates things but doesn’t negate the fact that they are conscious (in the “have qualia” sense of the term).
What’s the equivalent here for dreams? What exactly does “moral worth” mean here? If, presumably, I don’t care about my own dream state, and it affects no one else but me, why are we talking about morality at all?
Now, if you’re saying that putting in effort to improve the quality of your dreams is a worthwhile pursuit, I very much agree. But self improvement is very different from morality, even if they can be related at times.
The "missing piece" is basically that people are, in fact, conscious while they dream. Not to the same extent as waking consciousness, but you still have an experience that can be better or worse for you. Here's what Schwitzgebel wrote in the same blog post I quote above:
Is it because the positive or negative experiences in dreams aren't "real emotions"? No, this doesn't work either. Maybe we should reserve emotion words for waking emotions or maybe not; regardless, negative and positive feelings of some sort are really there. The nightmare is a genuinely intensely negative experience, the flying dream a genuinely intensively positive experience. As such, they clearly belong in the hedonic calculus as standardly conceived.
As for moral value, I can see how if you're approaching this as advice for individual readers, it wouldn't make sense to speak in moral terms. In this article, I'm advocating for philanthropists/government/society to invest money into dream research. Since that would enable others to improve their dream welfare, I attach moral significance to it.
Thank you. I would say actually the “missing piece” was that this piece was part of a discussion about the value of investing in dream research. Now everything makes sense and I would even say I broadly agree.
But I have two thoughts. The first is that I worry that “dream research” is much like an even more extreme version of climate change legislation - it’s easy to be in favor of it when asked, but when people actually try to rank their priorities it will always wind up at the bottom.
I know for myself it seems like the kind of thing worth funding at the margins, but given a choice to donate limited funds to either dream research or virtually any other morally valuable thing, I’d virtually always choose the other thing. This is because I expect the maximum possible utility of such research to be small.
My second thought is that the phrasing “moral value of dreams” still may not be the right phrasing. It sounds too strange to me, as if you were discussing the “moral value of rice.” One can speak of the moral value of producing more rice, or of distributing rice, or researching better rice, but rice itself isn’t really a moral action or obligation - it’s just rice.
Of course, “moral value of dreams” may be a standard phrase within the existing discussion, I couldn’t say, but even if it is I don’t think you’ll get many newcomers onboard if it isn’t obvious what’s being discussed. Perhaps a better choice would be to simply discuss the moral value of dream research?
You are conscious in your dreams too, though. Not in the sense of being aware of the external world, but in the sense of having experiences, which is what matters. If you think dream experiences aren't real (e.g., maybe we never actually felt the things we remember feeling in dreams, and the memories are just false), then the argument wouldn't apply, but I'm not aware of any evidence for that being the case.
True, but my moral obligation to my own consciousness is very very different from my obligation to others - this is a pretty foundational point of almost any moral system. Besides if I don’t care about my own sleeping consciousness, then it clearly has no “moral value” in the most literal sense.
>The moral of Groundhog Day is that self-improvement takes time: In fact, it takes an indefinite amount of time, and if you try to put a number to it, you’re always going to get it wrong for a lot of people. But it’s still possible for even the lowest forms of life — say, local TV weathermen — to live up to higher values like integrity and beneficence.
I might be misremembering the movie but the moral I took away from Groundhog Day was that it’s exceedingly difficult to get a good woman to sleep with a morally bankrupt man. Sleeping with Rita was Phil’s primary objective for most of his time in Punxsutawney. There’s a good argument to be made that had it not been for his infatuation with her, he never would’ve stumbled upon ethical behavior. Now it does take time to self-improve and learn the nuances of morality (let this be a lesson to you kids), but maybe more importantly within the context of the film, it often takes motivation outside a moral framework to discover the value of moral living.
I would love to not have nightmares anymore, particularly since they often wake me up in the middle of the night. And I would really love to never experience sleep paralysis again. But I must say I’m a skeptic of dream research. First, dreams may have a purpose, be it preventing overfitted brains or something else that we would be wise not to mess with too much. Second, what would be the fix? A sleeping pill? While they have their place, years of experience with basically every sleep aid under the sun have taught me that sleeping pills usually make you tolerant AND dependent, thus sleep quality degrades over time with their use.
I wouldn't care what happens to other people in an indefinite groundhog day situation (barring the only concern that the situation may cease).
It's not simply that these people won't remember anything. It's that everything resets, not only their memories. There's absolutely no analogy with dreams which, remember them or not, continue to have effects. The choking man in GHD will reset regardless of if you save him or he dies.
Good thoughts. Some of the worst cognitive experiences I’ve felt followed a nightmare. Worth placing dreams on the radar of possible areas to intervene to improve quality of life.
The fact that we don’t care about dreams because we forget about them is a point in his favor. We don’t actually value happiness on its own. We value our memories. Hedonism would say that spending a bunch of money to improve your dream life is a good investment even if you forgot all of your dreams because you are still racking up hedonism points. That’s absurd.
Do you mean forgotten in like a cosmic sense? Because if I have a very good experience, I’m going to remember it. If someone told me I could spend a bunch of money on a great experience but then I would forget it the instance it was over, that would be a colossal waste of money.
No, I don’t think you’re going to remember it, oftentimes even in the short term. I’m sure that a week ago, when you decided what to eat, you were at least partly motivated by taste, and spent some resources to prepare food that you think tastes better, and then forgot that sensation within a few hours. And I bet you’re probably going to do the same thing again this week. I don’t see what makes a dream that you forget in 30 seconds substantively any different.
I don’t see the mild pleasure I got from eating a sandwich as having much value in determining what makes a good life.
So let me ask you: if you could spend a bunch of money on a great experience but then you would immediately forget about it afterwards, would you do it or would you see it as a waste of money?
But you think the soon forgotten pleasure of the sandwich has nonzero value, no? Otherwise you’d just eat nutritionally appropriate slop. The argument here isn’t that dream welfare is necessarily worth as much as waking welfare, but it matters enough that we should be willing to do significantly more than we’re currently doing (nothing) to improve it.
So, “a bunch of money?” Possibly, depends how great the experience is. To my knowledge, there are people who spend copious amounts on fine dining that they forget almost immediately. At the very least, I’m willing to (and do) expend some effort (a few minutes a day) on exercises to make it more likely that I lucid dream and improve dream quality.
I can't tell if you're serious or are trolling us for engagement. Or maybe, more benignly, you intend this as some sort of playful philosophic exercise, ludic rather than ludicrous.
I will let others point out the obvious flaws in the argument on its own terms. I will instead ask why your argument does not take into account what research tells us about why we dream? I'm almost certain that you are aware of this research, which is why I doubt your seriousness here, since you don't even mention it.
Here's a very different philosophical take on do-overs:
Because why we dream has nothing to do with the argument. The argument is that we have a lot of experiences during dreams - not as many as we have while awake, but likely a much larger amount than we think, since we forget most of our dreams. Since it's good to improve people's experiences, it stands to reason that it's also good to improve people's dreams. I don't know what you think is obviously absurd about this claim. Surely it would be good, all else equal, to make people happier while they're dreaming, even if they won't remember it in the morning.
I'm serious, but I'm flattered you think I'm an intelligent version of Poe's Law.
I agree with Plasma Bloggin's response here. The cause of dreaming isn't necessarily germane to the argument. If you're insinuating that the cause of dreams is X and X is something we can't influence, that just doesn't hold up empirically. Plenty of research suggests we can do things to influence our dreams in predictable positive or negative ways. See the Piovarchy paper linked in the article for some examples.
"We don’t really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep. It doesn’t seem worth compromising on the goods and projects of waking life so as to avoid the ordinary unpleasantness of dreams."
Except of course that people with particularly severe nightmares (or particularly good nightmare-memories) often do exactly this by putting off sleep - and it doesn't even work that well. Whether Schwitzgebel's argument goes through or not, I am skeptical his premises are true.
I think he’d say people do that because they care about how the nightmares will affect their waking life, not because the experience of the nightmares is itself a bad thing.
I’m coming into this discussion missing some broader context, but what moral value are you proposing to ascribe to dreams, exactly? This is so far removed from my own world view, where the concept of moral value seems so obviously disconnected from dreams. I suspect there’s a single missing piece you could provide which would help your argument make sense to me.
The people in Groundhogs Day have moral worth because they have experiences and consciousness. The fact that this resets at the end of the day complicates things but doesn’t negate the fact that they are conscious (in the “have qualia” sense of the term).
What’s the equivalent here for dreams? What exactly does “moral worth” mean here? If, presumably, I don’t care about my own dream state, and it affects no one else but me, why are we talking about morality at all?
Now, if you’re saying that putting in effort to improve the quality of your dreams is a worthwhile pursuit, I very much agree. But self improvement is very different from morality, even if they can be related at times.
The "missing piece" is basically that people are, in fact, conscious while they dream. Not to the same extent as waking consciousness, but you still have an experience that can be better or worse for you. Here's what Schwitzgebel wrote in the same blog post I quote above:
Is it because the positive or negative experiences in dreams aren't "real emotions"? No, this doesn't work either. Maybe we should reserve emotion words for waking emotions or maybe not; regardless, negative and positive feelings of some sort are really there. The nightmare is a genuinely intensely negative experience, the flying dream a genuinely intensively positive experience. As such, they clearly belong in the hedonic calculus as standardly conceived.
As for moral value, I can see how if you're approaching this as advice for individual readers, it wouldn't make sense to speak in moral terms. In this article, I'm advocating for philanthropists/government/society to invest money into dream research. Since that would enable others to improve their dream welfare, I attach moral significance to it.
Thank you. I would say actually the “missing piece” was that this piece was part of a discussion about the value of investing in dream research. Now everything makes sense and I would even say I broadly agree.
But I have two thoughts. The first is that I worry that “dream research” is much like an even more extreme version of climate change legislation - it’s easy to be in favor of it when asked, but when people actually try to rank their priorities it will always wind up at the bottom.
I know for myself it seems like the kind of thing worth funding at the margins, but given a choice to donate limited funds to either dream research or virtually any other morally valuable thing, I’d virtually always choose the other thing. This is because I expect the maximum possible utility of such research to be small.
My second thought is that the phrasing “moral value of dreams” still may not be the right phrasing. It sounds too strange to me, as if you were discussing the “moral value of rice.” One can speak of the moral value of producing more rice, or of distributing rice, or researching better rice, but rice itself isn’t really a moral action or obligation - it’s just rice.
Of course, “moral value of dreams” may be a standard phrase within the existing discussion, I couldn’t say, but even if it is I don’t think you’ll get many newcomers onboard if it isn’t obvious what’s being discussed. Perhaps a better choice would be to simply discuss the moral value of dream research?
You are conscious in your dreams too, though. Not in the sense of being aware of the external world, but in the sense of having experiences, which is what matters. If you think dream experiences aren't real (e.g., maybe we never actually felt the things we remember feeling in dreams, and the memories are just false), then the argument wouldn't apply, but I'm not aware of any evidence for that being the case.
True, but my moral obligation to my own consciousness is very very different from my obligation to others - this is a pretty foundational point of almost any moral system. Besides if I don’t care about my own sleeping consciousness, then it clearly has no “moral value” in the most literal sense.
Love this! I wrote a post a couple years ago on the EA forum about reducing nightmares as a cause area that generated a surprising amount of interesting comments: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AexFu2RmYRApNStS5/reducing-nightmares-as-a-cause-area
Great post.
>The moral of Groundhog Day is that self-improvement takes time: In fact, it takes an indefinite amount of time, and if you try to put a number to it, you’re always going to get it wrong for a lot of people. But it’s still possible for even the lowest forms of life — say, local TV weathermen — to live up to higher values like integrity and beneficence.
I might be misremembering the movie but the moral I took away from Groundhog Day was that it’s exceedingly difficult to get a good woman to sleep with a morally bankrupt man. Sleeping with Rita was Phil’s primary objective for most of his time in Punxsutawney. There’s a good argument to be made that had it not been for his infatuation with her, he never would’ve stumbled upon ethical behavior. Now it does take time to self-improve and learn the nuances of morality (let this be a lesson to you kids), but maybe more importantly within the context of the film, it often takes motivation outside a moral framework to discover the value of moral living.
"180–240 minutes of sleep per night"
Should I be concerned for you based on this number? That's only 3-4 hours of sleep per night.
That's a slight undercount for me, though I do pull an all-nighter about once a week so many days it's not out of the question.
Why are you sleeping so little?
I would love to not have nightmares anymore, particularly since they often wake me up in the middle of the night. And I would really love to never experience sleep paralysis again. But I must say I’m a skeptic of dream research. First, dreams may have a purpose, be it preventing overfitted brains or something else that we would be wise not to mess with too much. Second, what would be the fix? A sleeping pill? While they have their place, years of experience with basically every sleep aid under the sun have taught me that sleeping pills usually make you tolerant AND dependent, thus sleep quality degrades over time with their use.
I wouldn't care what happens to other people in an indefinite groundhog day situation (barring the only concern that the situation may cease).
It's not simply that these people won't remember anything. It's that everything resets, not only their memories. There's absolutely no analogy with dreams which, remember them or not, continue to have effects. The choking man in GHD will reset regardless of if you save him or he dies.
Carl Jung, greatest moral philosopher of the 20th century...?
Good thoughts. Some of the worst cognitive experiences I’ve felt followed a nightmare. Worth placing dreams on the radar of possible areas to intervene to improve quality of life.
The fact that we don’t care about dreams because we forget about them is a point in his favor. We don’t actually value happiness on its own. We value our memories. Hedonism would say that spending a bunch of money to improve your dream life is a good investment even if you forgot all of your dreams because you are still racking up hedonism points. That’s absurd.
If we value memories then why do anything that’s going to be forgotten?
Do you mean forgotten in like a cosmic sense? Because if I have a very good experience, I’m going to remember it. If someone told me I could spend a bunch of money on a great experience but then I would forget it the instance it was over, that would be a colossal waste of money.
No, I don’t think you’re going to remember it, oftentimes even in the short term. I’m sure that a week ago, when you decided what to eat, you were at least partly motivated by taste, and spent some resources to prepare food that you think tastes better, and then forgot that sensation within a few hours. And I bet you’re probably going to do the same thing again this week. I don’t see what makes a dream that you forget in 30 seconds substantively any different.
I don’t see the mild pleasure I got from eating a sandwich as having much value in determining what makes a good life.
So let me ask you: if you could spend a bunch of money on a great experience but then you would immediately forget about it afterwards, would you do it or would you see it as a waste of money?
But you think the soon forgotten pleasure of the sandwich has nonzero value, no? Otherwise you’d just eat nutritionally appropriate slop. The argument here isn’t that dream welfare is necessarily worth as much as waking welfare, but it matters enough that we should be willing to do significantly more than we’re currently doing (nothing) to improve it.
So, “a bunch of money?” Possibly, depends how great the experience is. To my knowledge, there are people who spend copious amounts on fine dining that they forget almost immediately. At the very least, I’m willing to (and do) expend some effort (a few minutes a day) on exercises to make it more likely that I lucid dream and improve dream quality.
Let’s say it’s an amazing experience but you’re going to forget it. Would you spend the money?
I can't tell if you're serious or are trolling us for engagement. Or maybe, more benignly, you intend this as some sort of playful philosophic exercise, ludic rather than ludicrous.
I will let others point out the obvious flaws in the argument on its own terms. I will instead ask why your argument does not take into account what research tells us about why we dream? I'm almost certain that you are aware of this research, which is why I doubt your seriousness here, since you don't even mention it.
Here's a very different philosophical take on do-overs:
https://logosandliberty.substack.com/p/van-inwagen-vs-van-inwagen-on-freedom
Because why we dream has nothing to do with the argument. The argument is that we have a lot of experiences during dreams - not as many as we have while awake, but likely a much larger amount than we think, since we forget most of our dreams. Since it's good to improve people's experiences, it stands to reason that it's also good to improve people's dreams. I don't know what you think is obviously absurd about this claim. Surely it would be good, all else equal, to make people happier while they're dreaming, even if they won't remember it in the morning.
I'm serious, but I'm flattered you think I'm an intelligent version of Poe's Law.
I agree with Plasma Bloggin's response here. The cause of dreaming isn't necessarily germane to the argument. If you're insinuating that the cause of dreams is X and X is something we can't influence, that just doesn't hold up empirically. Plenty of research suggests we can do things to influence our dreams in predictable positive or negative ways. See the Piovarchy paper linked in the article for some examples.