Blinking and breathing are not will induced, but neither is closing your eyes to sleep. So why can you accept thw first two without an issue, but not the third?
If you are thinking that we don’t need it because it ia not as necessary as breathing, you’re doing it wrong. You must consider than during the evolutionary history of mammals, there haven’t always been perfect pitch dark places to sleep, that different branches of mamalians endes up being nocturnal, sleeping during most of the day to avoid exertion during peak temperatures, or to avoid predation… there is a number of reasons why evolution would favor some sort of willess mechanism to shut the eyes before sleep. It doesn’t matter if now we are able to close the blinds and make perfectly dark rooms, the mechanism is already in place.
You’re also assuming that sleep starts when the eyes close, which is not entirely acurate. Similarly to hearing a lullaby or being stroked, being in a low lit room is soothing and conductive to sleep, not just pitch dark rooms. Think about falling asleep during watching a movie for example. Based on the fact that you can’t really tell exactly when it happened, sometimes you are still able to remember certain sound s or scenes even though you have no idea of what was going on in the plot anymore… that indicates that your brain had probably fallen to some lower wavelength of operation while your eyes were still capturing stuff.
About nose and ear flaps, other animals have them, but they seem to be more related with keeping impurities out than with shutting down the senses.
Another interesting thing to consider is how sensitive some animals are to smell and noise even during sleep. How a dog’s ears still turn toward noise when they are sleeping for example. Perhaps evolutionarily speaking it has been necessary to keep other senses somewhat alert during sleep since vision can’t be relied on for protection.
Next thing you’ll think about of course is why do we need to shut down vision to be able to rest. Because image processing is our primary sense and it is hugely expensive in terms of energy consumption and brain processing time. Take a look at some googled images of how the brain processes vision. That’s the one system that you really need to shut down in order to let the brain rest.
I am quite surprised that you didn’t get ben’s obvious attempt at humor.
I thought it was funny.
About stepping on a thorn, there is no mind involved at all. It is known as withdrawal reflex and it happens without any cortical/cognitive participation.
Sorry guys, another thread consumed my all spare time today.
with love,
sanjay
When we close our eyes, we (1.) keep the eyes’ pupils moist (during the sleep the reflex for closing the lids does not work), (2.) protect the eyes from debris (foreign bodies; during the sleep the reflex for closing the lids does not work), (3.) turn off external stimuli, (4.) ensure the forming of the sleeping hormon Melatonin, (5.) treat the brain with care because it has less to do during the sleep with closed eyes.
A sleeping person does not blink (see also => 1. and 2.). And breathing is not like blinking, Zinnat.
You see nothing, not even darkness; so we can conclude that nothingness, if it exists, is not dark, not bright, not light, not coloured, has nothing ( 
) to do with colours, not even black or white.
Caught! The nothingness exists: as “the radio transmissions from an antenna”! 
According to the common physicists “the radio transmissions from an antenna” are “the remains of the cosmological radiation (cosmic microwave radiation)”; but according to “RM:AO” the cosmological radiation (cosmic microwave radiation) does not exist because the universe is indefinite, relating to both space and time, it has no beginning and no end, so it is eternal, indefinite.
How?
In this thread, i am not going into the issue of Mind/brain duality. Both means the same in this thread.
Brain is simply that thinks and take decisions.
This is where perception goes wrong. There is no independent decision making authority that ignores or overrule brain’s decisions.
Reflex actions of the body were taken mostly by the nerves located in the spinal cord, which is once again connected to the mind. It is not an autonomous authority and works according to the guidelines of the brain. There is no thinking/cognitive part in the spinal cord.
Secondly, as far as the analogy of soldiers is concerned, they are not supposed to interpret, but just to act according to the directions coming from above. Those soldiers do not any personal issue with the enemy soldiers, and do not have other reason whatsoever to kill any person other than those standing orders that they have.
with love,
sanjay
Thanks, i am relieved to hear that.
Maia, you need to go one step futher than that.
You said that those snippets can come and go within a fraction of an second. Okay. But, the thing that i want to understand how precisely those snippet appear in your mind within that short duration?
Let me tell you something that perhaps will help you to understand what exactly i am asking.
When i or other people think about any conceptual thing, say philosophy, the word philosophy flashes in the mind, not what any philosopher or what we discuss in it. Mind sees and read the word philosophy and the sound of that reading also makes an eco in the mind. Both things happen simultaneously. But, as your mind is unable to see that word written, thus i am assuming that the only thing that it can do to remember the sound of the word philosophy.
What is your take on it?
with love,
sanjay
Reflex is autonomous, actually.
sorry
Good question.
The reason is because breathing and blinking do not play any role in the sleep and not related to mind either.
Having said that, these two are not related to process of cognition but sleep is. But, please do understand that i am not saying that sleeping or closing the eyes are cognitive decisions. All i am saying that it is dependent or related to the mind and its cognitive functioning/abilities. While, breathing and blinking has nothing to do with cognition.
No, please do not get me wrong. I am not saying that it is not necessary. All i am saying that its reasons are not similar to breathing and blinking but other (non-biological).
Well, that is the reasoning of closing eyes that i am challenging. These are not the reasons but something different.
with love,
sanjay
It is accurate. I am not saying that sleeping occurs just after closing the eyes. I am saying that sleeping entails closing eyes, though it is possible that a person may remain awake for some time even after closing the eyes.
phoneutria,
I have to appreciate your effort. You really tried to look into the matter seriously.
Actually, i agree with that. But, that still does not answer my question precisely but you are close.
The question is not what happens but why it happens so.
Again, i do not disagree with that too. The case of animals is slightly different from humans, but not entirely. The basic concept is still the same.
No, rest is not the issue. If the purpose of the sleep is rest, why mind engages itself in dreaming and REM of eyes happen during the sleep? Why cognitive functioning of the mind just not stop completely?
with love,
sanjay
The snippets pop into my mind in a fraction of a second but usually stay there until I think about something else.
When I think of philosophy I don’t hear the word in my mind, nor do I imagine reading the word with my fingers, although now you have just mentioned it that’s exactly what I’ve done.
I may be wrong but that did not seem humor to me. I looks to me that he missed my point in inviting Maia to this thread.
with love,
sanjay
phoneutria,
I will reply this tonight. Right now, i have to leave.
with love,
sanjay
Not all of them. Those reflexes which Sanjay described are conditioned, like Pavlovs dog i.e. we learn them during our lives. But the eyelid-reflex belongs to the autonomous reflexes, is not controlled by the brain.
So, Sanjay, why can’t we see a closed eyelid as a normal state of a relaxed muscle? Opening the eyes is an effort for this muscle and as we are trying to relax muscles when we sleep, the eyelid closes automatically.
The reflexes described by sanjay are not conditioned. They’re part of the somatic reflex arc.
When the sensorial information is traveling to the brain, when it reaches the medula, it sends back an instruction to pull away. There is information arriving back to the limb before it even reaches the brain, let alone for the brain to transmit back to the limb. You move your foot away before your brain is even aware that it hurts.
That is not a contradiction, all reflexes pass the reflex arc, else they wouldn’t be reflexes. The reflexes which Sanjay describes here are conditioned because we don’t have them from birth on. A newborn baby doesn’t know that a thorn hurts, it has to learn it. Pulling the foot back when you step in a nail required learning, that two things which usually don’t belong together are combined through frequent assoziation, then became a reflex, controlled by the central nerve system (via reflec arc) and without connection to the brain.
Other reflexes like the abdominal or the plantar reflex are inheritet (kongenital)., but both categories, inherited and conditioned reflexes, go through the reflex arc.
I was trying to say that Sanjay’s examples are reflexes, what he doubted, because they are all, as he wrote, “well thought out decisions”.
You’re confusing the reflex of withdrawing from pain, which is present in newborns, and the process of learning which objects cause pain.
No, it isn’t.
Yeah.