A post by Felipe Morales Carbonell.

I must flee from thought, and find refuge from sorrow in a strong imagination—the only solace for a feeling heart. Phantoms of bliss! ideal forms of excellence! again enclose me in your magic circle, and wipe clear from my remembrance the disappointments that render the sympathy painful, which experience rather increases than damps, by giving the indulgence of feeling the sanction of reason.          

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Daydreaming gives, I’ll argue, a model for some large-scale features of philosophy, and it presents a challenge to the recent project of developing what is called the logic of the imagination. Both claims may seem, admittedly, fairly ambitious; I will be happy if I manage to offer the barest sketch of an argument for these points.[1] First, I should say something about daydreaming.

A very plausible way to characterize daydreaming or mind-wandering is to do so in terms of the type of constraints that act on the subject’s mental state. For these purposes of characterization, it is useful to keep in mind a distinction between deliberate and automatic constraints, that is, between constraints which are guided by cognitive control and constraints which are outside cognitive control. Christoff et al. (2016) stress that in mind-wandering the absence of constraints or their weakness (if present) can affect both the content of the states and the transitions that those states undergo over time, and define mind-wandering as a special case of spontaneous thought which is more deliberately constrained than dreaming, but less deliberately constrained than creative thinking and goal-directed thought (also, less automatically constrained than so-called rumination). In any case, such definition can only serve as a rough guideline: to distinguish between mind-wandering and dreaming properly speaking, it is probably better to say that the former can occur in waking states, while the second can not, and the question of where the lines lie between mind-wandering and creative thought and, between those and goal-directed thought is difficult. It might be better to say that the phenomena that are clustered under the umbrella of daydreaming and mind-wandering shade off into the other categories, blending with them. Additionally, it might be worth stressing the element of spontaneity of mind-wandering phenomena and the kind of dynamics that they present.

These elements, along with the lack of constraints, seem to work in tandem: the lack of constraints arises from spontaneity through the dynamics. Let me use a simile to explain what I mean here. Imagine a highway that stretches as far as you can see, where each driver has managed to coordinate with each other so that the flow of traffic is regular even though drivers often switch lanes and exit the highway at different points. Now, imagine that at random intervals, different numbers of cars enter the highway. As a result of this, the cars already in the highway have to adjust their patterns of behavior. The more incoming cars there are, and the more random their behavior, the more chaotic the overall behavior. Similarly, in daydreaming, spontaneous imaginings affect the possibility/viability of sustaining cognitive constraints. In mind-wandering, imagination’s spontaneity adds noise to the information flow that goes on, and it feeds back, forcing the flow of consciousness to adjust. These dynamics can be manipulated, at least to the degree that mind-wandering can be isolated and our attention can be refocused to other tasks. Strictly speaking, mind-wandering should not be described as a task insofar as it is not a goal-oriented activity, but we can also think of mind-wandering cases where we take as a goal to continue exploring the affordances of the content of our imaginings.

This last point is crucial here. Daydreams can be guided even though they are not goal-oriented in the sense that through them we aim to reach some specific condition. In this, daydreams are much like what Suits (1978) called open games, “games which have no inherent goal whose achievement ends the game” (ibid, p. 133). The relation between daydreams and games is significant. Whoever has daydreamed should understand, I hope, how daydreams can be games. Anecdotally, when I got bored at school, I used to imagine that I flew over the neighborhood, or that I was very small and climbed among the branches of trees. These imaginative activities can be seen as solitary games of make-believe.[2] The view would be endorsed by Walton (1990, p. 43), who argues that daydreams are a form of make-believe. We don’t need to go that far: it is enough that there is a class of daydreams that are games.[3]

If some daydreams are, in this sense, open games, they could serve as models for the large scale features of philosophy as an activity. By these I mean the dynamics of the formation, justification, criticism and defense of philosophical views, either collectively or in solitary.[4] I believe that philosophy at this scale is, in the general case, an open activity: we do not in general aim at its completion (pace the early Wittgenstein, for whom what philosophy is was equivalent to what philosophy should be, mistakenly I think). Perhaps it is more accurate to say that in any case we do not succeed in completing it; and I take that fact as a reason to think that there is no overwhelming justification for the claim that it can be completed.[5] But maybe that’s just my natural pessimism, combined with the optimistic view that engaging in open games is not a waste of time.[6]

This model of philosophy as a form of open game can deal with philosophy having criteria of correctness without having to have completion conditions. In open games we can say that moves are right without making them and their consequences unrevisable. Where this feature pays off is, I think, in cases where the target questions we are dealing with are about conceptual revision or more generally, where these questions arise from the open-endedness of concepts. In those cases, I think that we should think of philosophizing as a form of make-believe, where we build images of what would happen if those concepts were to be pushed in certain directions that we cannot be entirely sure about (much like Peter Suber’s (1990) Nomic game, where the game can consist in trying out different rules).[7]

Let’s move on to my second thesis, on the so-called logic of the imagination.

If daydreams can be a model for philosophy, then it is important for us to understand daydreams, and more generally, the imagination.[8] Above, I gave the barest sketch of a model of how daydreaming might work at a certain level of detail (the level at which we can start thinking about the dynamics of daydreaming). Coincidently, that is the level of detail that is required by what people have called the logic of the imagination (Wansing (2015) and Berto (2017) are two recent examples; Chris Badura has given a nice overview of this research project here). Daydreaming raises a challenge for this project. It is this: current models are not dynamic enough. They can represent only “clean” imaginings without the presence of spontaneous contents, where there is no noise, and consequently cannot properly describe loose states such as daydreaming.[9] Of course, there is no reason to think that there can be a strongly normative logic of daydreams (or dreams, if pushed further); descriptively, however, we do want to have tools to describe as many processes as possible.

[1] In philosophy one sometimes begins with an overall view, and then the work consists in filling in the details (which is, by the way, another way in which philosophy can be similar to some exercises of the imagination).

[2] Suits characterizes games of make-believe as a type of open game.

[3] Monika Chylińska explores the connections between imagination and pretense here.

[4] I take the solitary case as the limit of the collective case where the community of philosophers consist of just one subject who philosophizes on his own, somewhat sollipsistically. Such philosophers have to criticize themselves.

[5] The fact that philosophers take aims in their philosophizing is not a counterexample to the thesis in the sense that I intend it here, for the reasons that individual philosophers are not entitled to declare philosophizing in general as completed.

[6] At this point I recommend taking a look at Suits thoughts on utopia.

[7] I don’t mean to say that philosophy is always concerned with such conceptual questions. Behind this point, there is a general worry with fictionalist approaches such as mine: philosophizing needs friction (cf. Sher (2016)); but where is that supposed to come from? And, how to integrate philosophy in the larger context of our practical concerns? Some form of realism seems much better suited for the task. The point is made forcefully in Black Dresses’ song “Music” (2019) (replace ‘song’ and ‘music’ by ‘philosophy’): “there’s only so much that a song can do/ it can’t heal or change the world or make it end/ music is so easy but it only makes it easy to pretend”. Metaphilosophical anti-realism needs to find a way to address this objection of moral reproach. I will leave all these questions open here.

[8] And conversely, by understanding philosophy we might be able to understand the imagination.

[9] See also Stuart (2019), who offers a model of the imagination that incorporates an unconscious, uncontrolled subsystem. Solaki et al. (2019) offers a dual process model of thinking, that might give the hints for the direction in which to go.

References

Berto, F. (2017) “Impossible worlds and the logic of the imagination”, Erkentniss, 82, 1277–1297.

Black Dresses (2019) “Music”, https://blackdresses.bandcamp.com/track/music.

Christoff, K., Irving, Z. C., Fox, K.C.R., Spreng, R.N. & Andrews-Hanna, J.R. (2016) “Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: a dynamic framework”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 718–731.

Sher, Gila (2016) Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Solaki, A., Berto, F. & Smets, S. (2019) “The logic of fast and slow thinking”, Erkentnis, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00128-z

Suber, P. (1990) The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law, Logic, Omnipotence and Change, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Stuart, M. (2019) “Towards a dual process epistemology of imagination”, Synthese, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02116-w

Suits, B. (1978) The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Walton, K. (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wansing, H. (2015) “Remarks on the logic of imagination. A step towards understanding doxastic control through imagination”, Synthese, 194, 8, 2843–2861.