Abstract
In this paper, I describe and discuss two mental phenomena which are somewhat neglected in the philosophy of mind: focused daydreaming and mind-wandering. My aim is to show that their natures are rather distinct, despite the fact that we tend to classify both as instances of daydreaming. The first difference between the two, I argue, is that, while focused daydreaming is an instance of imaginative mental agency (i.e. mental agency with the purpose to voluntarily produce certain mental representations), mind-wandering is not—though this does not mean that mind-wandering cannot involve mental agency at all. This personal-level difference in agency and purposiveness has, furthermore, the consequence that instances of mind-wandering do not constitute unified and self-contained segments of the stream of consciousness—in stark contrast to focused daydreams. Besides, the two kinds of mental phenomena differ in whether they possess a narrative structure, and in how we may make sense of the succession of mental episodes involved.
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Notes
Discussions of mind-wandering—sometimes under the label of ‘daydreaming’—can be found in, for example, Singer and McCraven (1961), Smallwood and Schooler (2006), Zangwill (2006), Sutton (2010), and Metzinger (2013). Although Singer allows for ‘positive constructive daydreaming’ which furthermore helps us to achieve some of our personal goals, he does not seem to count focused daydreams among the (central) examples of ‘positive constructive daydreaming’, but rather conceives of the latter in a way which is compatible with my characterisation of mind-wandering. See McMillan et al. (2013) and Regis (2013) for further discussion, especially concerning Singer’s seeming identification of ‘daydreaming’ with mind-wandering.
Interestingly, a similar subdivision seems to be present in dreaming. While some sequences of dream episodes are structured and unified by means of their shared link to purposive mental agency (i.e. examples of lucid dreaming), other sequences lack this purposiveness, structure and unity (i.e. ‘standard’ examples of dreaming). Note, however, that terms like ‘dreaming’ or ‘dream(s)’ do not denote a certain class of mental phenomena, but rather a specific state of consciousness (e.g., to be contrasted with being awake, or with being comatose). Furthermore, there are good reasons to assume that there is a fundamental difference between waking consciousness and dream consciousness, which has the consequence that, say, focused daydreaming and lucid dreaming could not belong to the same mental kind. In particular, we should not take (lucid) dreaming to be an instance of imagining. I discuss and defend these claims in more detail in Dorsch (2015).
There is of course the complication that we may be wrong about what contributes to the pursuit of a certain end. We may, for instance, erroneously think that listening to our friend, or relaxing ourselves by thinking of something pleasant, helps us to come to a better decision about what to do tonight. So should our consideration of our friend’s opinion, or our mental effort to relax ourselves, count as part of our deliberative project? If they do, we might have to acknowledge that what matters for the inclusion in a given mental project is not real, but only seeming contribution to the achievement of the project’s purpose. However, there is no need to settle this issue here; and in what follows, I assume, just for the sake of simplicity, that actual contribution is required. Even if this should turn out to be false, it would still remain true that what unifies mental projects is their purpose.
That we do not yet have a full grasp of all the different ways in which mental episodes may contribute to the fulfillment of the purpose of a mental project and thus be part of that project does not imply that there is no definite answer to the question of when—and why—a given mental episode belongs to a particular project. The same applies to the issue of whether mental projects are limited exclusively to the mind (see the following footnote). But even if mental projects would have vague boundaries, this would not deprive them of unity, or of forming a real class of mental phenomena that can be further investigated, empirically or otherwise. Indeed, such investigation is presumably needed to be able to identify more clearly the borders of given mental projects.
The requirement that the whole project has to take place within the mind might sometimes be too strong. While most mental projects consist solely of mental episodes (and perhaps also dispositions) and the mental actions and processes which link these together, it may be argued that some mental projects involve also certain forms of relatively non-interfering bodily actions. For instance, it does not seem to matter much for the project of finding the best next move in a given game of chess whether one scans the position on a chess board with one’s eyes or instead visualizes it in one’s mind. But do the movements of one’s eyes render the project in question non-mental? One way of capturing such cases would be to modify the second requirement on mental projects—for instance, by requiring that mental projects are such that they merely could (but need not) be pursued without any involvement of bodily action or other external events. Following the suggestion of one of the referees, another option is to treat cases like this as examples of embodied cognition (see Anderson, 2003, sect. 3.3, for a discussion of similar cases). Treating a project as dependent on some bodily movement in this way might still be compatible with the idea that the project itself is limited to the mind (e.g. when the dependence is understood as being weaker than proper constitution). In any case, the mental projects that interest us the most—focused daydreams—clearly occur exclusively in the mind.
See Smallwood (2013) for discussion, who also distinguishes between the initial causes of instances of mind-wandering (which may be voluntary or involuntary) and the mechanisms that are responsible for the development and continuity of the sequence of mental episodes in question.
Purely associative sequences would be more like sitting on a bus and letting it take us wherever it goes. We remain completely passive and just watch the changing scenery.
See Giambra (1995), Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Smallwood (2013). Wegner (1997) claims that mental agency may also give rise to mind-wandering in another way. His view is that, often when we introspectively check whether our deliberate attempt at focusing our mind on something particular has been successful, we cause our mind to wander off precisely because of our active intervention to the contrary. Independently of its merits, this proposal is compatible with the view defended here that, although mind-wandering is not an instance of imaginative agency, we may actively engage in it by choosing to let our mind wander off. The kind of impact of agency that Wegner identifies is much more indirect and, since it treats mind-wandering merely as an unintended causal effect of mental agency, also neither intentional, nor open to introspection.
Another explanation of why we might be tempted to treat the two phenomena as very similar, or even as differing at best in degree, is that they both involve a shift in attention away from the external world and our interaction with it. In particular, both focused daydreaming and mind-wandering are typically unconcerned with our actual situation or tasks. This similarity might also be further elucidated by the—not uncontroversial—idea that both phenomena centrally involve the brain’s ‘default network’ (see Buckner et al. 2008, especially section III, and McVay and Kane, 2010, for discussion).
I would like to thank Davor Bodrozic, Malcolm Budd, Magnus Frei, David Harris, Sebastian Gardner, Peter Goldie, Rob Hopkins, Mike Martin, Lucy O'Brien, Thomas Pink, Tobias Schlicht, the editors and the anonymous referees for their stimulating discussions and/or very helpful comments on previous drafts. My work on this article was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, as part of the research project The Normative Mind (PP00P1_139004).
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Research on this work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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Dorsch, F. Focused Daydreaming and Mind-Wandering. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 791–813 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0221-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0221-4