The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy

Abstract

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind.

Functional Decoupling of Language and Self-Reference Networks in Patients with Persistent Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

“…To sum up, the DMN has been shown to be involved in processing self-referential stimuli, including both internal [33] and external stimuli [34]. For instance, the DMN may be implicated in relating our inner thoughts to a coherent self-model [35]. For that to be possible, the DMN must be connected to the regions processing those internal and external stimuli.…”

Why Is Mind-Wandering Interesting for Philosophers?

“…Empirical research programs on spontaneous, apparently task-unrelated thought are interesting for philosophers, because they demonstrate a) that epistemic mental agency is a much more vulnerable and much rarer phenomenon than many philosophers of mind may have intuitively assumed, and b) that what we traditionally call "conscious thought" or "highlevel symbolic cognition" may, more often than not, be a subpersonal process (as I have argued elsewhere; see Metzinger 2013aMetzinger , 2015. Such programs raise the need for conceptual demarcation criteria allowing us to distinguish between intentional mental action and unintentional mental behaviour, as well as between personal-level thought, and forms of conscious cognitive processing that are better described as automatic, sub-personal chains of events.…”

“…For human beings, C is dynamic and highly variable, and it does not have to coincide with the physical body as represented (for an example, see de Ridder 2007). There exists a minimal UI, which likely is constituted by pure spatiotemporal self-location (Metzinger 2013a, b;Windt 2010;Blanke & Metzinger 2009); and there is also a maximal UI, likely constituted by the most general phenomenal property available to S at any point t, namely, the integrated nature of phenomenality per se (Metzinger 2013a(Metzinger , b, 2016. C is phenomenally transparent.…”

“…Elsewhere (Metzinger 2013a(Metzinger , 2015 I have argued that mind wandering is an unintentional form of mental behaviour. 3 Unintentional mental behaviours may surprise the organism in which they emerge and be basically inexplicable to it from its limited inward perspective, while still being a very efficient and adaptive form of intelligence.…”

Mind-Wandering and Self-Referential Thought

“…In addition, frequent mental trips to the past and future during the mind-wandering state might also provide a more direct, experiential sense of continuity of the self through time (Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013). Through these processes, the wandering mind might thus contribute to the creation and functional maintenance of self-models, which then lay the foundation for long-term motivation and future planning (Metzinger, 2013).…”