你的精神生活有多少是有意识的行为?And how much of it consists of inaction, notdoinganything at all?To answer that, we need to get clear on what we mean by “intentional action” and “inaction.”

当你有意地做某事时，你心里已经想好你要做什么了。你可以告诉别人你在做什么。And in the realm of intentional action, you can do somethingin order去做别的事情。你可以打算用一种手段达到目的。你可以故意做各种各样的事情——打响指、揉面团、跑马拉松、刷墙。当你做这些事情的时候，你脑子里就会想着你要做什么;你可以告诉别人你在做什么;你甚至可能在脑海中有一个更长远的目标。

Inaction, by definition, does not involve acting on some goal or trying to do anything at all. Sometimes we call physical inaction “lying around,” which implies that your body is not moving much, but that can be misleading. A physically inactive person’s heart is beating, and her lungs are expanding and contracting. In this context, inaction does not mean total lack of movement. When you're inactive, you simply go with the flow.

The same applies formentalinaction: it doesn’t imply that your thoughts are stationary (whatever that might mean). Rather, mental inaction involves going with the flow again—that means the stream of consciousness, wherever it might take you. This kind of thought is what philosopher and cognitive scientistZac Irving has studied under the label “mind-wandering:”it’s the kind of thought that doesn’t involve guiding your attention to any particular thing at all. This lack of guidance means you justlet your mind run只要有跑步的感觉。

Such mental inaction contrasts with directed thought of various kinds. You can do all sorts of things intentionally in thought. You can intentionally recall what you ate for breakfast. You can intentionally solve a math problem in your head. Doing any of these things involves guiding your thoughts in a particular way.

Now that we’ve gotten a better understanding of what we’re talking about, we can ask our question again. How much of your mental life is taken up by action, and how much inaction?

The best way to study this is to sample people’s lived experience as they are going about their daily lives. For instance, you can ping people’s phones at random moments over the course of a few days and ask them questions about their present thoughts in order to probe whether those thoughts are intentional or not—for our purposes, active or inactive.Manystudiesinthelast decade or so have done studies of exactly this kind. The explosion of research suggests that mind wandering can take up tohalf the timeof your mental life. Based partly on this research, the philosopherThomas Metzingerhassuggestedthat you lack mental autonomy in two thirds of your mental life.

但这些实证研究存在一个严重的问题——至少在它们适用于我们的问题时是这样。他们并没有真正探究思考者是否在有意识地进行心理活动。这是因为他们要求人们回答的问题并不能解决这个问题。

这些研究通常会在哔哔声之后问第一个问题，即你在哔哔声时的想法是否与你的活动有关。Mills et al.asked “Were you thinking about something other than what you were doing?”Jazaieri et al.asked “Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” Similarly,Kane et al.andSong and Wangasked participants to rate whether “my mind had wandered to something other than what I was doing.”

These questions make it sound as though there is justonething that a person is doing at a time. Moreover, the setup of these studies encourages participants to think about that one thing as the unique external task they are supposed to be working on. That could be solving a math problem, or cooking dinner, or something else. When asked, then, whether they were thinking aboutthething they were doing, participants just assess whether their thoughts at the time are related tothat one target.

But your thoughts at any time could be related to a great many targets. Indeed, many kinds of distractions come about when you realize you could be doing something else in thought—planning your dinner, for example. If you stop thinking about your external task and start doing one of these things, you haven’t relinquished your mental autonomy. In fact, it might look as though you have asserted your mental autonomy in another kind of intentional action, which you simply felt like doing at the time. You canintentionally计划你的晚餐，即使那不是你此刻应该做的事情。

Even if your distracted, off-task thoughts do wander from place to place that itself can be intentional. This is a pointFabian DorschandZac Irvinghave made. Sometimes your thoughts simply wander. But sometimes you intentionallyletyour thoughts wander. To say that you do this intentionally is to say that you have in mind what you’re trying to do; you could tell someone what you’re up to (letting your mind wander…); and you could do that as a means to an end (resting your mind).

The better studies recognize this possibility, and they ask subjects explicitly whether they were letting their minds wander “on purpose” or “deliberately”. If we look at how participants responded to this question, we get a quite different picture of the scope of mental agency than the one we considered above. The incidence of mind-wandering in these random samples of everyday life varies from around 30% to about 60%. But in each study that tested for purposeful mind-wandering, abouthalf这些走神的例子被参与者归类为有目的的。正如凯恩和他的同事们所说的那样，“当研究对象报告说自己在工作之外思考时，他们通常对自己走神并不感到惊讶，这表明他们是故意在精神上脱离工作的。”我觉得这很像故意的行为。

If we count intentional mind-wandering as intentional mental action then we can estimate that intentional mental action makes up about 65 – 80% of our mental lives. That’s a far cry from the erosion of agency and mental autonomy that some claim the research into mind-wandering suggests.

What should we learn from this? At least, we should see that mind-wandering and intentional mental action are compatible. The research into mind-wandering doesn’t tell us all we want to know about intentional mental action, nor about mental agency or autonomy more generally. But it also suggests that we should come up with better questions to ask people in order to probe how often they engage in intentional mental actions. To their credit, Mills et al. were doing just that. I’m excited to see the next stage in research into mind wandering.

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