What do you think?
Rate this book
Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research
A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming , Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research.
824 pages, Hardcover
First published May 29, 2015
4 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 9, 2017
Just wow, oh, wow.
This is a very well-researched, finely argued work. Windt sets aside a new framework for understanding what goes on when we dream. Drawing from dream accounts, philosophy of mind (both old and new), and the latest neuroscience research, she builds the case first for the notion that dreams are experiences, and then works to support a claim that we can generally rely on dream reports as evidence in studying those experiences. From there she constructs a series of incrementally more complete hypotheses for what happens when we dream and why, providing each step of the way with both supporting evidence and ideas for how to test those hypotheses.
I'm neither a philosopher nor a cognitive scientist, although in recent years I've tried to expose myself to some of both. I found Windt's work to be more approachable than most --- she generally does a good job giving background in both fields, because she aims this work at practitioners in either field, so she has to assume that practitioners in one field may not be deeply schooled in the other. This alone is worth the price of admission --- her references are an excellent resource to shore up personal deficiencies. As a result, the book is usually reasonably easy to follow, even for the layperson.
Highly recommended if you're interested in recent work on philosophy of mind, consciousness research, and dreaming.
This is a very well-researched, finely argued work. Windt sets aside a new framework for understanding what goes on when we dream. Drawing from dream accounts, philosophy of mind (both old and new), and the latest neuroscience research, she builds the case first for the notion that dreams are experiences, and then works to support a claim that we can generally rely on dream reports as evidence in studying those experiences. From there she constructs a series of incrementally more complete hypotheses for what happens when we dream and why, providing each step of the way with both supporting evidence and ideas for how to test those hypotheses.
I'm neither a philosopher nor a cognitive scientist, although in recent years I've tried to expose myself to some of both. I found Windt's work to be more approachable than most --- she generally does a good job giving background in both fields, because she aims this work at practitioners in either field, so she has to assume that practitioners in one field may not be deeply schooled in the other. This alone is worth the price of admission --- her references are an excellent resource to shore up personal deficiencies. As a result, the book is usually reasonably easy to follow, even for the layperson.
Highly recommended if you're interested in recent work on philosophy of mind, consciousness research, and dreaming.
November 20, 2022
This is a terrific book, the most interesting nonfiction I’ve read in years. I’m a little late coming to it, but I’m glad I did. Every chapter, every page, offered up difficult, thought-provoking ideas about the nature of dreaming and of consciousness itself. It’s depth and breadth make it a landmark in consolidation of what we know and don’t know about dreaming at a point in time.
The book is easy to read and the concepts are well-explained, but it is addressed to professional philosophers and scientists working in the field of sleep and dream research (I am neither). It is intense, not for the casual reader. The vocabulary is high and the concepts sophisticated, although everything is well-documented. There are ninety dense pages of references at the end.
The writing is fluid, well-organized, and easy to follow. At times it seemed overwrought, explaining the pros and cons of every idea down to the last molecule, and I got frustrated and bored. That approach explains the thickness of the book. Nothing is left out.
But at the same time, that thoroughness gave me confidence that the author was not doing any hand-waving. She really does get to the bottom of things. Over time, her deep dives into every idea gave me complete confidence that I was getting a fair overview of the actual state of the art and science.
She also puts forward her own point of view, defending the mainstream view that dreams are “experiences,” meaning there “is something it is like” to have a dream. You might wonder who could doubt that. Many philosophers and researchers do. It depends on what you think “the dream” is. Is the dream the same as the brain activity represented by certain EEG recordings? In other words, does the brain do the dreaming? Or is the dream a collection of memories, which may be accurate, distorted, or fabricated? (All dream reports are memories. It is virtually impossible to report dreams while they are happening.) Some have argued that there is no dream outside of the report of a dream. The report is the dream. Or, is the dream some phenomenal mental experience that the report is about?
Windt’s story begins with the history of thought on sleep and dreams, from Aristotle, up through Descartes to Malcolm, Dennett, Hobson, and contemporary students of the phenomena. She gives a good history of the discovery, in the 1950s, of the correlation between REM EEGs and the occurrence of dreaming. That radically changed thinking about sleep and dreams.
Throughout her discussion, I appreciated the care she took with language, rarely falling into the trap of assuming or unconsciously presuming that the brain causes the dreams. We have only correlations, no causal evidence for such a connection. However, she does eventually make a case for abduction: inference to the best explanation, which leads to the conclusion that yeah, probably we should believe that dream reports are "about" actual dream experience. I believe that argument fails. “Best explanation” is a value judgment, not a logical necessity, and the practice of abductive reasoning conveniently reinforces the status quo paradigm.
A serious flaw in my copy of the book (hardcover, 2015 edition) is that index is inaccurate. I don't know if that's the author's fault or the publisher's, but it renders the index almost useless and greatly diminishes the value of the book.
She rejects the anti-experience explanations of dreaming offered by Malcolm and Dennett, re-asserting the received view that dreams are actual experiences that happen during sleep. I disagree with that view (while not accepting Malcolm’s or Dennett’s accounts), but even where I disagreed with Windt, the argumentation was challenging of assumptions and always provocative. That’s my idea of a good time.
Windt, Jennifer M. (2015). Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 798 pp.
The book is easy to read and the concepts are well-explained, but it is addressed to professional philosophers and scientists working in the field of sleep and dream research (I am neither). It is intense, not for the casual reader. The vocabulary is high and the concepts sophisticated, although everything is well-documented. There are ninety dense pages of references at the end.
The writing is fluid, well-organized, and easy to follow. At times it seemed overwrought, explaining the pros and cons of every idea down to the last molecule, and I got frustrated and bored. That approach explains the thickness of the book. Nothing is left out.
But at the same time, that thoroughness gave me confidence that the author was not doing any hand-waving. She really does get to the bottom of things. Over time, her deep dives into every idea gave me complete confidence that I was getting a fair overview of the actual state of the art and science.
She also puts forward her own point of view, defending the mainstream view that dreams are “experiences,” meaning there “is something it is like” to have a dream. You might wonder who could doubt that. Many philosophers and researchers do. It depends on what you think “the dream” is. Is the dream the same as the brain activity represented by certain EEG recordings? In other words, does the brain do the dreaming? Or is the dream a collection of memories, which may be accurate, distorted, or fabricated? (All dream reports are memories. It is virtually impossible to report dreams while they are happening.) Some have argued that there is no dream outside of the report of a dream. The report is the dream. Or, is the dream some phenomenal mental experience that the report is about?
Windt’s story begins with the history of thought on sleep and dreams, from Aristotle, up through Descartes to Malcolm, Dennett, Hobson, and contemporary students of the phenomena. She gives a good history of the discovery, in the 1950s, of the correlation between REM EEGs and the occurrence of dreaming. That radically changed thinking about sleep and dreams.
Throughout her discussion, I appreciated the care she took with language, rarely falling into the trap of assuming or unconsciously presuming that the brain causes the dreams. We have only correlations, no causal evidence for such a connection. However, she does eventually make a case for abduction: inference to the best explanation, which leads to the conclusion that yeah, probably we should believe that dream reports are "about" actual dream experience. I believe that argument fails. “Best explanation” is a value judgment, not a logical necessity, and the practice of abductive reasoning conveniently reinforces the status quo paradigm.
A serious flaw in my copy of the book (hardcover, 2015 edition) is that index is inaccurate. I don't know if that's the author's fault or the publisher's, but it renders the index almost useless and greatly diminishes the value of the book.
She rejects the anti-experience explanations of dreaming offered by Malcolm and Dennett, re-asserting the received view that dreams are actual experiences that happen during sleep. I disagree with that view (while not accepting Malcolm’s or Dennett’s accounts), but even where I disagreed with Windt, the argumentation was challenging of assumptions and always provocative. That’s my idea of a good time.
Windt, Jennifer M. (2015). Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 798 pp.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews