Why Is Mind-Wandering Interesting for Philosophers?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Metzinger
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Specific Target ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Theories Of Mind ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Spontaneous Thought

This chapter explores points of contact between philosophy of mind and scientific approaches to spontaneous thought. While offering a series of conceptual instruments that might prove helpful for researchers on the empirical research frontier, it begins by asking what the explanandum for theories of mind-wandering is, how one can conceptually individuate single occurrences of this specific target phenomenon, and how one might arrive at a more fine-grained taxonomy. The second half of this contribution sketches some positive proposals as to how one might understand mind-wandering on a conceptual level, namely, as a loss of mental autonomy resulting in involuntary mental behavior, as a highly specific epistemic deficit relating to self-knowledge, and as a discontinuous phenomenological process in which one’s conscious “unit of identification” is switched.

scholarly journals The Philosophy of Mind-Wandering

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary C. Irving ◽  
Evan Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Current Psychological ◽  
Independent Thought

This chapter provides an introduction to the philosophy of mind-wandering. It begins with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated thought or stimulus-independent thought. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto center stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations. They do not account for the dynamics of mind-wandering, task-unrelated thought that does not qualify as mind-wandering, or the ways in which mind-wandering can be task-related. The chapter reviews philosophical accounts that improve upon the current psychological definitions, in particular an account of mind-wandering as “unguided thinking.” It critically assesses the view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency, as well as the view that mind-wandering is disunified thinking. The definition of mind-wandering as unguided thinking not only is conceptually and phenomenologically precise, but also can be operationalized in a principled way for empirical research.

scholarly journals The Philosophy of Mind-Wandering

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary Irving ◽  
Evan Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Current Psychological ◽  
Independent Thought

This chapter provides an introduction to the philosophy of mind-wandering. It begins with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated thought or stimulus-independent thought. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto center stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations. They do not account for the dynamics of mind-wandering, task-unrelated thought that does not qualify as mind-wandering, or the ways in which mind-wandering can be task-related. The chapter reviews philosophical accounts that improve upon the current psychological definitions, in particular an account of mind-wandering as “unguided thinking.” It critically assesses the view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency, as well as the view that mind-wandering is disunified thinking. The definition of mind-wandering as unguided thinking not only is conceptually and phenomenologically precise, but also can be operationalized in a principled way for empirical research.

scholarly journals Catching the wandering mind: Meditation as a window into spontaneous thought

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Hasenkamp
Keyword(s):  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Physiological Measures ◽  
Great Utility ◽  
Spontaneous Thought ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Subjective Reports ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Research Recommendations

This chapter considers a form of attention-based meditation as a novel means to gain insight into the mechanisms and phenomenology of spontaneous thought. Focused attention (FA) meditation involves keeping one’s attention on a chosen object, and repeatedly catching the mind when it strays from the object into spontaneous thought. This practice can thus be viewed as a kind of self-caught mind wandering paradigm, which suggests it may have great utility for research on spontaneous thought. Current findings about the effects of meditation on mind wandering and meta-awareness are reviewed, and implications for new research paradigms that leverage first-person reporting during FA meditation are discussed. Specifically, research recommendations are made that may enable customized analysis of individual episodes of mind wandering and their neural correlates. It is hoped that by combining detailed subjective reports from experienced meditators with rigorous objective physiological measures, we can advance our understanding of human consciousness.

How Does the Waking and Sleeping Brain Produce Spontaneous Thought and Imagery, and Why?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Antrobus
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
Future Value ◽  
Spontaneous Imagery ◽  
Spontaneous Thought

Although mind-wandering and dreaming often appear as trivial or distracting cognitive processes, this chapter suggests that they may also contribute to the evaluation, sorting, and saving of representations of recent events of future value to an individual. But 50 years after spontaneous imagery—night dreaming—was first compared to concurrent cortical EEG, there is limited hard evidence on the neural processes that produce either visual dreaming imagery or the speech imagery of waking spontaneous thought. The authors propose here an outline of a neurocognitive model of such processes with suggestions for future research that may contribute to a better understanding of their utility.

scholarly journals Becoming Animal: Karma and the Animal Realm Envisioned through an Early Yogācāra Lens

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 363
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stuart
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
Theories Of Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Buddha

In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of Buddhist discourse during a millennium of historical development. I focus in particular on a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which serves as a bridge between early Buddhist theories of mind and karma, and later more developed theories. This third-century South Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text on meditation practice, karma theory, and cosmology psychologizes animal behavior and places it on a spectrum with the behavior of humans and divine beings. It allows for an exploration of the conceptual interstices of Buddhist philosophy of mind and contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Exploring animal embodiments—and their karmic limitations—becomes a means to exploring all beings, an exploration that can’t be separated from the human mind among beings.

Perceptual Representations and the Vividness of Stimulus-Triggered and Stimulus-Independent Experiences

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 1200-1213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fazekas ◽  
Georgina Nemeth ◽  
Morten Overgaard
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Mental Imagery ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Common Framework ◽  
Cortical Regions

In recent years, researchers from independent subfields have begun to engage with the idea that the same cortical regions that contribute to on-line perception are recruited during and underlie off-line activities such as information maintenance in working memory, mental imagery, hallucinations, dreaming, and mind wandering. Accumulating evidence suggests that in all of these cases the activity of posterior brain regions provides the contents of experiences. This article is intended to move one step further by exploring specific links between the vividness of experiences, which is a characteristic feature of consciousness regardless of its actual content, and certain properties of the content-specific neural-activity patterns. Investigating the mechanisms that underlie mental imagery and its relation to working memory and the processes responsible for mind wandering and its similarities to dreaming form two clusters of research that are in the forefront of the recent scientific study of mental phenomena, yet communication between these two clusters has been surprisingly sparse. Here our aim is to foster such information exchange by articulating a hypothesis about the fine-grained phenomenological structure determining subjective vividness and its possible neural basis that allows us to shed new light on these mental phenomena by bringing them under a common framework.

scholarly journals Mind-wandering as a natural kind: A family-resemblances view

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Seli ◽  
Michael Kane ◽  
Jonny Smallwood ◽  
Daniel L. Schacter ◽  
David Maillet ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
Precise Understanding ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind

As empirical research on mind-wandering accelerates, we draw attention to an emerging trend in how mind-wandering is conceptualized. Previously articulated definitions of mind-wandering differ from each other in important ways, yet they also maintain overlapping characteristics. This conceptual structure suggests that mind-wandering is best considered from a family-resemblances perspective, which entails treating it as a graded, heterogeneous construct and clearly measuring and describing the specific aspect(s) of mind-wandering that researchers are investigating. We believe that adopting this family-resemblances approach will increase conceptual and methodological connections among related phenomena in the mind-wandering family and encourage a more nuanced and precise understanding of the many varieties of mind-wandering.

scholarly journals The Interpretive-Sensory Access Theory of Self-Knowledge: Simplicity and Coherence with Surrounding Theories

Problemos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 148-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulius Rimkevičius
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Processing Theory ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Claims

The interpretive-sensory access (ISA) theory of self-knowledge claims that one knows one’s own mind by turning one’s capacity to know other minds onto oneself. Previously, researchers mostly debated whether the theory receives the most support from the results of empirical research. They have given much less attention to the question whether the theory is the simplest of the available alternatives. I argue that the question of simplicity should be considered in light of the well-established theories surrounding the ISA theory. I claim that the ISA theory then proves to be the simplest. I reply to objections to this claim related to recent developments in this area of research: the emergence of a unified transparency theory of self-knowledge and the relative establishment of the predictive processing theory.

scholarly journals VOLUNTARY IMAGINATION: A FINE-GRAINED ANALYSIS

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
ILARIA CANAVOTTO ◽  
FRANCESCO BERTO ◽  
ALESSANDRO GIORDANI
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Logic Of Imagination ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Propositional Language ◽  
Core Features

Abstract We study imagination as reality-oriented mental simulation (ROMS): the activity of simulating nonactual scenarios in one’s mind, to investigate what would happen if they were realized. Three connected questions concerning ROMS are: What is the logic, if there is one, of such an activity? How can we gain new knowledge via it? What is voluntary in it and what is not? We address them by building a list of core features of imagination as ROMS, drawing on research in cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind. We then provide a logic of imagination as ROMS which models such features, combining techniques from epistemic logic, action logic, and subject matter semantics. Our logic comprises a modal propositional language with non-monotonic imagination operators, a formal semantics, and an axiomatization.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document