ON DREAMS, PAIN AND SEX: DARWIN WINS AGAIN

• The Purpose of Dreams: Rayne has been posting about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and asking for alternative theories to his “crap”. I’d never miss an opportunity to criticize psychologists. The most plausible explanation to me is that since all animals (even amphibians) have been shown to dream, the purpose of dreams is to imagine alternative scenarios. Any creature that dreams of other ways to handle a particular situation (and most dreams seem to be conceivable variations of potential real-life experiences, rather than pure fantasy) has a stronger arsenal for dealing with that situation if/when it occurs in real life. Hence I’d hypothesize that dreamers should tend to out-survive non-dreamers, and that’s why there’s so many of us around. This is, I’d guess, especially true of artists.
• The Purpose of Pain: A group of British wacko scientists has been torturing fish to find out if they feel pain, and to no one’s surprise concluded they do. Nevertheless, one small group (presumably creationist psychologists) continues to believe that animals other than humans cannot feel pain because they aren’t intelligent enough. Can educated people really be this dumb? Isn’t it obvious that the purpose of pain is to discourage repeat of the activity that led to it, in the Darwinian interest of survival? Really, I think we need to experiment on this nut group to see if they’re intelligent enough to feel pain. 
• Why is Sex Fun?: Somewhere in my readings I ran into a book with this title. I haven’t read it so I don’t know the answer (though if it’s written by psychologists, reading it probably wouldn’t help). But my instinctive answer would be that this, too, is Darwinian. If something is fun, you want to do it more often, and having sex more often would therefore tend to aid survival of the species. If you’re severely stressed and it isn’t fun, the cessation of sex under those circumstances would also seem Darwinian. Of course there’s always the Klingon alternative of having sex as an irresistable but excruciating imperative. But I think nature has a better sense of humour than that.

Psychologist readers, I’m just kidding in my jabs. Some of my best friends are psychologists, really. I’m an accountant, and turnabout’s fair play, so feel free to respond in kind. (How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? None, the lightbulb has to really want to change.)