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Why has nothing evolved to not need sleep?

Was this subject on your mind when you picked an ID with all of those Zs in it (particularly the consecutive ones)?
 
Zeuzzz said:
I think the best answer in this thread was by the guy that simply told the truth.
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Thanks!
There are many potential possibilities. But out of the ones mentioned here so far, I dont see that any of them hold up to scrutiny.

And I find it hard to see how we can ever know the answer to this definitively. Its related to all the unanswered questions about consciousness and how we experience what we experience, and why. That annoying question philosophers ask to scientists, 'why'. Is the universe how we consciously perceive it, or if we are receiving a radically altered version of events as our mind interprets the information our brain (supposedly) receives. The last century has worked wonders in unravelling the mystery of the body and brain, the next century is going to be about the nature of the mind and altered states of consciousness, like sleep. Sleep is unreal, our everyday experience is real, people on psychedelics are deluded, NDE's are tricks of the brain, lucid dreaming is co-incidence, meditating is useless, all positions are very hard to prove either way, and I think we are nearly at a point where we can start addressing some of the gaps in our explanatory knowledge of how the brain mechanistically works vs how it produces these subjective states of feeling and consciousness. People like to say that science has nearly uncovered everything we know about the universe, that we just need to collect that one more bit of data, tweak a tiny aspect of a theory, and our picture will nearly be complete, soon we will know nearly everything, even the true origin and destiny of the universe. Our current understanding is correct and based on loads of data so can't be disproven type attitude, the closed minded unhealthily skeptical approach. That’s bo**ocks. Anyone who says that is severely deluded, just as deluded as people that put their faith in religion. The history of science tells us something quite different. Who knows what surprises and mysteries are waiting around the corner. Science is cool.


Christ, I need to go back to decaff. Dont choose physics and philosophy at uni, very bad combination.
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Science is very cool as it is the only method we know of whereby we can achieve reliable knowledge (evidence) of how the world we find ourselves in, works. We know the knowledge obtained thusly is reliable because our electric bulbs light when we throw the switch. (And for a few other reasons).

The need for sleep in animals will likewise be revealed.
 
I read the other day a factoid that said that the only animals that don't sleep are toads and guinea pigs.

I did a bit of googling, and did not find anything that looked like solid evidence of that fact, so it could be an urban myth. However, most sites seemed to claim that those animals only need very little sleep. So sleep may be biologically essential, but those animals have evolved to only need very little sleep.

I haven't read this whole thread, so I don't know if this has been mentioned before.
 
Reproduction, at least in humans, often occurs before sleep, in a bed-like place.
Without sleep, how could we ever 'sleep' with him/her?

btw, toads hibernate, which may negate the need for sleep.
 
Well it's been touched on before but it bears repeating: energy.

It's pretty easy to forget in this time of plenty - for those here anyway - where obtaining enough energy to fuel one's activities for a year is within easy reach that most of life lives on the edge of survival. One cannot just go around wasting energy on a whim in those circumstances. The importance of spending as much time in low power states cannot be understated.
 
cyborg said:
Well it's been touched on before but it bears repeating: energy.
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Bah. energy shmenergy. The question is why evolution has not chosen the path of animals that rest to save energy without becoming unaware of their surroundings when they rest. In essence, why is the altered state of consiousness required. And someone already gave the answer: we dont know. Theres nothing wrong with that. The nature of consiousness is one of sciences great myserties.

Soon in this thread, I'm optomistsic we will have solved all the puzzles of sleep and what its purpose is. I can feel it :) No better place to test the validity of a hypothesis than on a skeptics forum.
 
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I accidently overslept for 18 hours one random day. I just thought, thats wierd, never slept that much before. Then for the rest of the day I felt really strange. It seriously felt like I was on some psychoactive drug, everything I did would feel really nostalgic, things sort of felt mystical, and I made some strange decisions the next few days. I thought I was going mad, and entering psychosis or somthing. Its hard to explain the feeling, my perspective of the world was distant, I felt as if nothing was real (whatever "real" is). After about three days of normal sleep (slightly less than normal in fact, I didn't want to exasserbate the effects of the night before by getting too much again) I was back to normal, and have been ever since. Ever since then I've been fascinated with the brain, sleep and how it prodcuces these altered states of consciousness. Because it certainly altered mine when I was sleeping; and continued even when I was awake.
 
Zeuzzz said:
Bah. energy shmenergy. The question is why evolution has not chosen the path of animals that rest to save energy without becoming unaware of their surroundings when they rest. In essence, why is the altered state of consiousness required.
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Required? There's nothing "required" about it - you've got this entirely backward.

The "state" of "consciousness" flows, necessarily, from the "state" of the being as a whole, i.e. there is no reason to expect that an entity in a low activity state should be as "aware" or "conscious".

It must be pointed out again: your brain uses a considerable amount of energy. It runs hot. It's using real wattage. To expect to experience the same thing when it's not being supplied with the same energy seems quite bizarre to me.

Soon in this thread, I'm optomistsic we will have solved all the puzzles of sleep and what its purpose is. I can feel it :)
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There is no purpose to the fact that our spine is an upright suspension bridge - purpose doesn't enter into it. Purpose is entirely void.
 
If I recall whales and dolphins are always awake. When sleeping one side of their brain is asleep with the other awake allowing them to the best of my knowledge to be always (in some capacity) to be awake.

If they went completely asleep while swimming they'd probably automatically start breathing and would drown as they need air just like us.


INRM
 
cyborg said:
Required? There's nothing "required" about it - you've got this entirely backward.

The "state" of "consciousness" flows, necessarily, from the "state" of the being as a whole, i.e. there is no reason to expect that an entity in a low activity state should be as "aware" or "conscious".
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And why not? When people are deprived of sleep their bodeis need to sleep so much that peoples EEG brainwaves start to show (even though the person is awake walking around and speaking to people) that they are comletely asleep, in the REM phase, and dreaming. Like in the case of DJ peter Tripp.


It must be pointed out again: your brain uses a considerable amount of energy. It runs hot. It's using real wattage. To expect to experience the same thing when it's not being supplied with the same energy seems quite bizarre to me.
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hm. So when we sleep, what recharges our wattage then?

There is no purpose to the fact that our spine is an upright suspension bridge - purpose doesn't enter into it. Purpose is entirely void.
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Purpose is entirely void. I agree.

If you consider sleep from a gaia theory way, you could explain the need for sleep, as a teleogical argument, where the real selection is not for survival of an individual, or for a species, but for survival of an ecosystem. In other words, an ecosystem that has complementary predator-prey relationships is more likely to be stable in the long run. Unfortuntely, the Gaia hypothesis isn't really the strongest scientific theory i've seen out of many :)
 
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Zeuzzz said:
Bah. energy shmenergy. The question is why evolution has not chosen the path of animals that rest to save energy without becoming unaware of their surroundings when they rest. In essence, why is the altered state of consiousness required.
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Not energy shmenergy, it's all about energy. Consider this: currently we are evolving things like laptops and PDAs, and guess what, most support a 'sleep' mode, in which you want the device to consume as little energy as possible but also be ready to quickly wake up. And then some have a 'hibernation' mode, which uses even less energy but takes longer to wake. These features are in response to a need: sometimes the device's active state is not required, so you need to shut it down without consuming too much battery power. So why shouldn't biological organisms not adopt a similar strategy in response to a similar need?
 
Speaking of computer analogies, Americans now spend almost as much time viewing screens as they do sleeping. Perhaps we're hard-wired to default to the lowest energy useage. Watching tv is like a semi-sleep state.
 
Anyone worked this out yet?

Seems to me, for whatever reason, that sleep is uber-evolutionary since nothing seems to have evolved to perform the job sleep does while in an aware state. There are no advantages to being not aware of your surroundings.

And Sol brought up essentially the exact opposite question, which would be good if someone could answer too, as it has me stumped.

sol invictus said:
My own summary is that the whole question is nonsensical. You might as well ask why living things are ever awake.
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It has been a few years; so I can't give any particulars;but...

I watched one of the Science channel shows about sleep. They said that a certain species of South American anteater was the highest form of life known; that did not require sleep. It also said that this animal also had a very large brain, yet was very unintelligent.

Presumably, while it is possible to come up with a brain that can process all data in an ongoing manner; that it is a very inefficient way to alocate brain cells. Better to cut out most incoming signals occasionally, to catch up.

Also, humans sleep much less than most mammals. Dogs, with their smaller brains sleep much more than(most) people. Cat's with their tiny brains, require a nap about every two-and-a-half hours.

Reportedly, cats will start falling asleep while WALKING in the middle of the fourth hour of sleep deprivation.

(What a remarkably tedious job, depriving cats of sleep...)

.....RVM45 :cool:
 
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Zeuzzz said:
Anyone worked this out yet?

Seems to me, for whatever reason, that sleep is uber-evolutionary since nothing seems to have evolved to perform the job sleep does while in an aware state. There are no advantages to being not aware of your surroundings.

And Sol brought up essentially the exact opposite question, which would be good if someone could answer too, as it has me stumped.
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The reason you're stumped is that you are phrasing the "problem" incorrectly.

Rather than,
"There are no advantages to being not aware of your surroundings."
(You will be hard pressed to support this assertion, let alone prove it)

try

"There are no evolutionary disadvantages to being temporarily unaware of your surroundings."
Support / proof of the statement is easy. The facts are that organisms that sleep have survived and continued to evolve.

My statement isn't quite precise enough, because I've tried to phrase in a similar fashion to yours. Better might be,

"The disadvantages of being temporarily unaware of your surroundings are not sufficiently severe as to endanger your continued survival."

One of the mistakes many people make about evolutionary theory and natural selection is that they assume it implies a tendency of evolution to select for constant improvement of an organism. Most people misinterpret the "survival of the fittest" to mean better, faster, stronger etc.
 
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Zeuzzz said:
Anyone worked this out yet?

Seems to me, for whatever reason, that sleep is uber-evolutionary since nothing seems to have evolved to perform the job sleep does while in an aware state. There are no advantages to being not aware of your surroundings.

And Sol brought up essentially the exact opposite question, which would be good if someone could answer too, as it has me stumped.
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Hi Zeuzzz, if I recall, I suggested that creatures with complex brains require sleep to reset and avoid a state of hyperexcitation. And we may have discussed the dolphins and the seperation of bilateral sleeping of the brain.

So, if you are paranoid and hallucinating, there is little advantage to not sleeping?

So perhaps it is not uber-evolutionary, as different critters have evolved different sleep patterns?
 
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