#21 Antti Revonsuo - Dreams are a Gateway to Understanding Consciousness
Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra
English - September 01, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 57.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsScience science physics consciousness reality economy psychology evolution Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Why do dreams feel so real?
It's because the same mechanisms that generate are waking reality also generate our dreams. However, unlike the awake state, during dreams, we're disconnected from sensory input and locomotor actions. This isolation from the real world makes dreams a perfect model system for investigating the nature of consciousness.
I talk to Antti Revonsuo who is a philosopher and a scientist investigating dreams and their relationship with consciousness.
== What we talk about ==
0:04 - Introduction
1:54 - Why are you interested in consciousness? What aspect of it intrigued you to be interested in it?
4:55 - Is the mystery of consciousness a subject worth deep-diving into or is it a dead-end?
13:13 - The dreaming phenomenon
16:58 - We are dreaming all the time!
23:23 - All experiences are built inside our brains
28:30 - If it can be perceived, it is not consciousness
36:54 - Is consciousness a biological phenomenon?
43:50 - Psychophysical mapping of experiences
56:50 - Can we use your Dreamcatcher experiment in other species?
1:05:20 - The multiple levels of structures in our brain - and what makes them experienceable
1:18:00 - Views on panpsychism
== About the guest ==
Antti Revonsuo is a cognitive neuroscientist who’s interested in understanding consciousness as a purely biological phenomenon. He believes we shouldn’t invoke unnecessary metaphysics until we’ve given a good shot at understanding consciousness fully in biological terms.
Currently, he is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Skövde in Sweden and of psychology at the University of Turku in Finland. His work focuses on altered states of consciousness in general and dreaming in particular. He is best known for his Threat Simulation Theory, which states that dreams serve the biological function of rehearsing possibly threatening situations in order to aid survival.
Antti Revonsuo is an advocate of the dreaming brain as a model of consciousness and he’s written a book on the same, which I thoroughly enjoyed.