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What is the real reason we sleep?

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Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#11

Post by AndyNemmity »

I tend to believe it's tied quite closely to memory and emotional states. I had very bad sleep apnea that was untreated, and for the time that it was untreated my memories are extremely vague compared to most.

I also had very high anxiety which is completely gone now. Now that I use a machine to sleep my memory is sharp again.

I also eat much less now, so I believe that calories were a way the body would attempt to counter act the lack of rest.

These are just my thoughts, I honestly don't have any scientific background on it. Just my own experiences.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#12

Post by JumpCrisscross »

carsongross wrote: post #8

Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.

Couldn't it go the other way, too? With weak AIs, we get a sandbox of rough sketches of consciousnesses with which to experiment. Some optimisation here or there which looks uncannily like sleep may shine light on the biological version.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#13

Post by lamby »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #11

I tend to believe it's tied quite closely to memory and emotional states. I had very bad sleep apnea that was untreated, and for the time that it was untreated my memories are extremely vague compared to most. I also had very high anxiety which is completely gone now. Now that I use a machine to sleep my memory is sharp again. I also eat much less now, so I believe that calories were a way the body would attempt to c…

How did you discover you had sleep apnea?

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#14

Post by gonehome »

carsongross wrote: post #8

Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.

Might just be recalculating weights of the Neural Net for learning which can't be done with the system "on line" or concious.

Would make sense with the learning connection and memory.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#15

Post by cdetrio »

gregatragenet3 wrote: post #10
carsongross wrote: post #8

Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.

Probably related. Mammals dream, and we humans experience time in dreams much faster than the actual passage of time. Dreaming is likely the same mechanism as 'experience replay' used in AI reinforcement learning. We're just training our neutral networks using minibatches of our experiences from our waking hours.

I read somewhere a conjecture that sleep for human brains is analogous to regularization schemes (such as dropout) for neural networks. Dropout helps the net avoid overfitting; nets that are overfitted have a difficult time distinguishing noise from signal. Sleep for mammals might serve a similar purpose, to help the brain avoid overfitting to noise (imagine if you had difficulty distinguishing dreams from reality).

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#16

Post by waddabadoo »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #11

I tend to believe it's tied quite closely to memory and emotional states. I had very bad sleep apnea that was untreated, and for the time that it was untreated my memories are extremely vague compared to most. I also had very high anxiety which is completely gone now. Now that I use a machine to sleep my memory is sharp again. I also eat much less now, so I believe that calories were a way the body would attempt to c…

What machine do you use?

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#17

Post by meowface »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #11

I tend to believe it's tied quite closely to memory and emotional states. I had very bad sleep apnea that was untreated, and for the time that it was untreated my memories are extremely vague compared to most. I also had very high anxiety which is completely gone now. Now that I use a machine to sleep my memory is sharp again. I also eat much less now, so I believe that calories were a way the body would attempt to c…

Note that sleep apnea can also lead to oxygen depletion, so it could be difficult to discern which of those symptoms were caused by brain damage from lack of oxygen vs. sleep deprivation.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#19

Post by argonaut »

carsongross wrote: post #8

Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.

I think you guys are interepreting carsongross a little too literally. The bigger point is we understand very little about sleep - we understand even less about how neurons learn and how the brain functions.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#20

Post by argonaut »

gregatragenet3 wrote: post #10
carsongross wrote: post #8

Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.

Probably related. Mammals dream, and we humans experience time in dreams much faster than the actual passage of time. Dreaming is likely the same mechanism as 'experience replay' used in AI reinforcement learning. We're just training our neutral networks using minibatches of our experiences from our waking hours.

"Likely" is not the word I would go for. "according to my wild guess" is a more accurate term.
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