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Focused Daydreaming and Mind-Wandering

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  • Dorsch, Fabian Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Avenue de l'Europe 20, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland
    2015
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  • Review of Philosophy and Psychology. - Springer Netherlands. - 2015, vol. 6, no. 4, p. 791-813
English 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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  • English
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Medicine
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Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2014
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https://sonar.ch/global/documents/309272
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