The life of the mind

When we talk about the life of the mind, I think we are trying to describe and analyze, at the broadest level, all the ways in which our minds operate to produce our sense of self, the ways in which we reason, the feelings that we have.

In philosophy of mind, these two concepts of perception and belief are very foundational, and much of my work is interested in understanding the relationship between them. In some ways, we want them to be quite distinct from one another; we want perception to be this direct confrontation with the world that can justify our belief states. In other ways, we want them to relate closely enough that, for instance, perception can justify belief. There are ways that they can talk to each other. When we talk about perception, I think we are talking about the ways in which our senses present the world to us. We hope that this lets us be in touch with reality in some sense. We often intuitively think of perception as something that happens to us, something that we cannot directly control, though I think there is reason to doubt that.

One of the ways in which this concept of belief has come under a lot of pressure recently is the recognition that our belief states do not always form a unified whole. There is this phenomenon of belief fragmentation where, for instance, you have committed to having lunch with somebody you know perfectly well, but in another conversation you might make another commitment at the same time and then realize there was a mistake. It is interesting that you might have beliefs you cannot quite access because you are busy with another task.

Our minds are confronted with an excess of information at multiple stages. Take perception to start with. Right now you are looking at one aspect of your environment, and there has been some choice or decision process there. You could be looking at other parts of the room. There are then further filters as we go through that. Your gaze is directed in one direction, but within your field of view you will be prioritizing some of the things that are visible to you and attending to them more closely than others. As we go further back, you form masses of beliefs fleetingly and then never pay any attention to them again. Perhaps you forget them, or they sit around a bit longer. Anytime you are confronted with a reasoning problem, you have to decide what information is going to be relevant and what you attend to. It is a bit misleading of me to say that you have to make a decision there, because a lot of that is not happening at the person level. Going back to the perceptual case, what you attend to perceptually is often driven by bottom‑up factors that are very hard for you to control. If something is brightly colored, moving fast or contrasts with its environment, it is almost inevitable that you will pay attention to it. If you think of a firework going off, it is really hard not to attend to it.

However, some of what we attend to is also driven by what I call top-down factors and processes. What goals you have at a given time plays a really important role in determining what you attend to. Some of that might be deliberate. If you are in a hurry to leave the house and you are trying to find your keys, you are going to be looking around and consciously directing your attention to the surfaces where you might have left them, looking for things that look like your set of keys. Sometimes our goals operate without us doing that deliberately. If you think of a time when you have been really hungry, food is very likely to capture your attention. That is top-down to some extent, in the sense that finding food to eat is a goal you, as an organism, have, but it is not something that necessarily feels under your voluntary control. Even if you are in a meeting and you say to yourself, "Jessie, stop looking at the biscuits," it can be hard to stop doing that if you are really hungry.

When I say that something is salient, I mean that it is disposed to capture your attention. Epistemology has to be wary of making generalizations. This is perhaps a bit of a caricature, but by and large, it has invested a lot of resources in thinking about what makes the transition to forming a belief good. It is very well placed to say when a belief state is justified or unjustified, when it is rational or irrational. One of the key insights in my work is that this is not enough to capture a lot of what we care about when we think about how our mind works. The selection of information — what we end up paying attention to — is crucial to many of the processes that happen in our minds and that are intuitively relevant to the concerns of epistemology. That might include what beliefs you end up forming but also what beliefs you attend to, which will have a downstream impact on how you reason on their basis. We need a framework that lets us evaluate what we pay attention to from a distinctively epistemic perspective. What I mean by that is that there are all sorts of ethical dimensions to what you pay attention to. It is a sign that you care about somebody that you pay attention to them. If you are a caregiver, it would be morally wrong in some cases not to pay attention to something. If you have a particular social role, such as being a teacher, there are certain ethical demands that you should attend to your pupils in specific ways. I am interested in the ways in which what you attend to shapes how you reason, how you process and how you respond to information. I think epistemology will be inadequate if it has nothing to say about that.

When we think of our beliefs as forming a web, we can recognize that some beliefs have the role of a horrible connector in that network, where a lot of other information gets fed through them. Sometimes that can be driven by factors which do not feel epistemically relevant. It might be, for instance, that it gives you a kind of pleasure to think about certain things. I think this can sometimes be a guiding factor in certain forms of prejudice: people can find a certain satisfaction in returning to beliefs about a group of which they are a member being slightly superior to other groups, for example. Sometimes you can see this in ways where the reason why somebody is making a belief very central in how their reasoning operates is perhaps intuitively more epistemically relevant; they might think that it just makes sense of a lot of things, that it has rational implications for many other beliefs, but it can be easy to overshoot in that way. You need to strike a balance between relying on the information you already have and being in a more exploratory mode in which you are willing to pay attention to new beliefs or place sufficient emphasis on them.

When people talk about whether a belief is justified, they often have in mind whether it is apportioned to the evidence in the right way. I think that is a crucial determinant of justification; you want to recognize what evidence you have, and, as far as possible, try to fit your beliefs to that evidence.

Philosophers have been very cagey about saying that we have a duty to believe. One reason is that it can seem to generate an excessive number of duties. For instance, you might think that if you have good evidence for something, you should form a belief on that basis. One reason not to do that is perceptual: you have so much evidence, far more than you could possibly form beliefs on. We have to allow that some degree of selectivity is fine. That has to be baked in — it is okay that you are not forming every belief you could possibly form. Then, however, we face a tricky question: which beliefs should you form?

We want to have ways to describe what is happening when the mind is not functioning optimally. We might describe that as a failure, but I hesitate to use this word, because it implies a clearer black‑and‑white distinction between when the mind is operating right and when it is not than I think really exists. Because we are overwhelmed with information, I do not think our best approach is to say, "This is what you should attend to; this is what you should not attend to." Instead, I try to describe a broad evaluative framework that says, in an optimal situation, we would attend in a certain way.

Can we improve the way our minds work? Surely, yes. I love this question because it confronts us with the question of who is really the boss here. Who are we? Are we just identified with our minds, or can we stand apart from them and think about ways in which they could operate better? When we are thinking about attention in particular, it can sometimes seem tough once we start evaluating how we attend to things, because often that does not feel like something we intuitively control. If you have ever been distracted in a meeting by an itch or somebody's distracting habits, you can say to yourself, "Come on, Jessie, that is not the thing that you should be attending to right now," but it is really hard to control. We need to recognize the ways in which attention is not always under our voluntary control. On the other hand, there are clearly things we do that build attentional habits and dispositions, and those things are very much under our control; agents can be evaluated and critiqued for how they go about doing that. I also think it can be really helpful to develop a practice of attending to how your mind works: noticing it, not always necessarily being able to change it, but, over time, recognizing the kinds of dispositions you have and the weaknesses, pitfalls and vulnerabilities to bias that we all have. We cannot begin to engage with those until we have gone through that stage of simply recognizing and noticing the operation of our minds and what things we attend to.