"may be useful for learning about _how_ & _why_ to sleep better, won't help much in explaining why sleep happens."
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This is a somewhat uncomfortable thread to be writing. It's began with a throwaway joke from my point of view. I don't regard my own point of view above as especially serious or well-founded. It's just how I arrived at my priors, and may be wrong.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @danielgross
I see, then I'll have to look for these other explanations and make the case to you in a way you find convincing :-p I might email you at some point then
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I think MN means something like "why couldn't humans have evolved to not sleep?" And even if it's not what he meant, that's what I'd love to understand. :-)
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It's like Deutsch's point about good explanations being hard to vary. All of our sleep "explanations" are way too easy to perturb.
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The one thing with evo explanations (and the abundance of just so stories) is that they are not hard to vary, because there are various ways to achieve one end, evolution is somewhat random, there are spandrels, etc. There may be no reason why sleep instead of X, just chance and
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path dependence (in our species)
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Though there is an explanation for why we sleep, that why may not be unique. From a physics point of view this is unsatisfying, physics almost aims to look for things that must be that way, almost a priori.
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Well, the coccyx is fairly inconsequential, and so I'm fine accepting that the fitness function skips over it (after eliminating the expensive part of the tail!). But sleep is so extravagantly costly that there must be reason(s) as to why we weren't able to evolve to sleep less.
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It may be that sleep is helpful in optimizing population growth rate for non-functional reasons. E.g. a simple model, from Field and Bonsall's "The evolution of sleep is inevitable in a periodic world", shows this behavior:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201615 …
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Very interesting paper.
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