nucleation

ARG-051: Mind-wandering, read as Metzinger reads it, is an individual-scale case in which a capacity the agent keeps, veto over its own mental processes, loses and regains efficacy through a change in a condition of efficacy and not in the competing processes, so it is a further instance of the conditions of efficacy governing which regime acts, the first in the record for suspension in one mind

3 min read

Properties8
StatusProposed
Formanalogy
Tagsagency, cognition
Linewill-organization
GroundsTHEORY-1300 — In mind-wandering the capacity for veto over one's own mental processes is kept and its representation in the self-model is lost, and on Metzinger's principle a capacity can be deliberately exercised only while it is so represented; the loss of M-autonomy is then the loss of a condition of the capacity's efficacy, not of the capacity, THEORY-1297 — Mind-wandering is a recurring loss of M-autonomy, the veto-centred ability to suspend or end one's own ongoing mental processes; on the figures Metzinger uses, it takes about half of conscious time, not the two thirds he states, THEORY-1296 — Deliberate thought selects and sustains candidates from a stream of unintended thoughts that mind-wandering generates, and whether the conscious model of oneself as a knower that accompanies the selection causes it, enables it or only accompanies it is undecided by current evidence
ConcludesCLAIM-027 — Which of an agent's available regimes becomes effective depends on maintained relations — accessibility, precedence, persistence, jurisdiction, suspension and transformation — that are not reducible to the contents of the competing regimes, whatever mechanisms realize them
UsesTERM-023 — will-organization, TERM-017 — precedence, jurisdiction and suspension
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The inference

CLAIM-027: which of an agent’s available regimes becomes effective depends on maintained relations, not on the contents of the competing regimes.

Metzinger’s case (THEORY-1297, THEORY-1300). A person has the capacity to suspend or end an ongoing train of thought, M-autonomy’s veto. Many hundreds of times a day, without noticing, they lose its use: an episode of mind-wandering runs and “cannot be terminated at will” (LIT-1942, p. 6). The capacity is kept: “what we have lost is a specific form of knowledge, and not the ability itself” (LIT-1941, p. 282). What changes is whether the capacity is represented in the self-model, and “one can only deliberately and autonomously exert an ability if that ability is explicitly represented” (p. 280). Control returns when the representation returns, “caused by an unconscious event, perhaps by chance” (p. 283). The 2017 chapter adds that deliberate thought selects from the candidates mind-wandering supplies (THEORY-1296).

So a held regime, second-order mental control, gains and loses efficacy by a change in the condition under which it can act, and the competing regime, the stream of thought, is the same before and after. If that is right, the case is CLAIM-027’s at the scale of one mind’s thinking, and its relation is TERM-017’s suspension, “when an applicable one may be disabled”, together with accessibility.

Critical questions

  • In what respect are they alike, and is it the respect the conclusion needs? Alike in that a capacity is possessed and not effective (CLAIM-047), and its efficacy turns on something other than the contents in competition. That is the respect CLAIM-027 needs. The relation is suspension: veto is “the capacity to voluntarily suspend or inhibit an action” (LIT-1942, p. 4). ARG-005 says jurisdiction and suspension “have only institutional examples”; this would be the first individual-scale one.
  • What relevant difference is there? Three.
    1. The relation is a representation. CLAIM-027’s six relations hold among regimes; Metzinger’s condition is the agent’s model of having the capacity. Whether that is a relation of the will-organization or only tracks one is QUESTION-367, and Metzinger himself says in 2017 that the data cannot decide (LIT-1945, pp. 13–14).
    2. The onset may be content-driven. Metzinger traces the start of an episode to “introspectively inaccessible goal representations”, “postponed goal-states … environmentally cued by goal-related stimuli” (LIT-1942, p. 13; LIT-1941, p. 275). That is CLAIM-122’s defeater: a change in a goal state predicting which process acts. Only the return is put down to something other than content.
    3. Scale and object. M-autonomy is control of mental processes, not of action-generating regimes in TERM-019’s sense. A train of thought is a regime only if mental behaviour counts as action-generating.
  • What transfers, and what does not? The structure transfers: a kept capacity, cyclical loss and return of efficacy, and a named condition. The mechanism does not: the representation’s causal role is open, and no intervention holding the competing thoughts fixed is reported.
  • Does changing R change anything else? (ARG-009’s question, and CLAIM-027’s defeated_if.) Unanswered. The test is Metzinger’s H1 and H3 (LIT-1945, p. 14): block or restore the epistemic agent model and see whether control ends or returns, with the task, the competing thoughts and an externally cued measure of the ability held fixed. Axelrod et al. (2015), which the chapter cites for H1, is not in the record.

Verdict

Proposed. The case is the right shape for CLAIM-027 and would extend it to suspension in one mind. It does not yet support it, because the representation’s role is undecided by its own author and the onset of an episode has a content-driven explanation in the same papers.

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