How to Do Things With Your Mind

Josh Landy
Can you perform actions in your ahead?

Blakey Vermeule
Is it even possible to control your thoughts?

Josh Landy
How much does meditation help?

Blakey Vermeule
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Blakey Vermeule
And I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from 220 Montgomery—KALW’s event space in downtown San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Blakey and I teach together in the philosophy and literature program. Thanks so much for sitting in today. Blakey.

Blakey Vermeule
Oh it’s my pleasure, Josh.

Josh Landy
Welcome everyone to Philosophy Talk

Today we’re thinking about how to do things with your mind.

Blakey Vermeule
So many great things to do with your mind. Look at me. I’ve just been planning my trip home, imagining what I’ll do if there’s traffic, and making a list of all of my enemies…

Josh Landy
List of enemies? I hope I’m not on that!

Blakey Vermeule
Well, it depends on how the conversation goes today.

Josh Landy
Okay, well, all right, I guess I’d better mind my P’s and Q’s, but I still have a potentially annoying question for you. Blakey, you were talking about a bunch of things you can ostensibly do with your mind a moment ago, but are they really things you do with your mind? Take your example of imagining traffic. Isn’t that just something that you know pops into your head? I don’t feel like you’re doing something when you think about it, yeah, but

Blakey Vermeule
I’m not just musing about traffic. I’m imagining what I’m gonna do about it. So I’m planning my route home. And you can’t do that by just letting your mind wander.

Josh Landy
I can see how you could think that. But I’m here to tell you, Blakey, that is an illusion.

Blakey Vermeule
Oh, what on earth do you mean?

Josh Landy
Here’s what I mean. Look, we human beings, we think pretty highly of ourselves. We like to think I’m the driver of the bus. I’m in control of everything that goes on inside my head. That’s not the reality. The reality is 99% of what’s happening in there is on autopilot. It’s totally inaccessible to the conscious mind. All we’re actually doing it’s just starting the ignition.

Blakey Vermeule
Well, that doesn’t make sense, Josh, if you just started the ignition and took your hands off the wheel, you’d veer around all over the place. Pretty soon you’d start thinking about the blister on your foot, what you’re going to have for dinner, and, of course, your mother in law, so we’re constantly monitoring the stream of consciousness and keeping ourselves on track. We really are driving the bus, or at the very least, we’ve got one hand on the wheel.

Josh Landy
Haven’t you ever been on an airplane? Those things spend most of their journey on autopilot, and they do a pretty good job. So why don’t think our brains are like that.

Blakey Vermeule
Well, I think you’re confusing brains and planes. Josh. I mean, airplanes aren’t designed to be constantly monitoring their surroundings for threats and opportunities, but brains are. We’re hardwired to notice the ice cream in the store and the dog mess on the sidewalk. That’s why, when it comes to the brain, you can’t just set it and forget it.

Josh Landy
Okay, but I feel like all you’ve shown so far is that we have to keep the brain on track. I mean, sure, but that doesn’t sound like much of an active role for us. So give me an example of a full fledged mental action, something you’re really doing with your mind, not just a process you set in motion and then check in on periodically, like a souffle.

Blakey Vermeule
Okay, how about learning a musical instrument? If you’re already an expert, you’re acting more or less on autopilot, but when you’re starting out, you’ve got a ton of really effortful work to do, and you have to focus on every little finger movement.

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, all right, but Then aren’t you restricting mental action to cases we don’t care very much about, like blundering about on the keyboard when we’re five years old? Doesn’t that rule out the cases that we love and care about the most, like Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations and knocking them out of the park.

Blakey Vermeule
Well, I’m not ruling those out at all. In fact, Glenn Gould is 100% in charge, so even if his playing is almost all automatic, it’s fully intentional. It’s fully under his control, and he is responsible for it if he misses a note, there’s no one else to blame. And the same is true for a host of mental actions, well, like what? Well, like lots of things, coming up with a good crossword clue, solving a mystery, cooking up arguments to refute an obstinate colleague…

Josh Landy
Touché. I have to admit, you’ve done a pretty good job of that. You’ve convinced me that there are way more bona fide mental actions than I’d realized.

Blakey Vermeule
And maybe our guest will move you even closer to the light, Josh. It’s our Stanford colleague, Antonia Peacocke. She is going to join us in a little bit.

Josh Landy
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to find out whether meditation helps in controlling our thoughts. She files this report.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Close your eyes for a minute. Take a deep breath, and hold it. Count to two. Breathe out. Count to two. Keep doing that for about a minute. You’ll know when to open your eyes again.

Sarah’s inside voice
I’ve got to work on my story. I’ve got to call that source. What should I do next? Oh, my God, I forgot to bring my lunch to work. That book I bought this weekend from the Monterey Bay inquiry of about coral reefs looks so amazing. I can’t wait to read it. I’ve got to check in with my daughter’s school administrator. Oh yeah, I also need to set her up for Bandcamp. Don’t forget to check in on her internship and see if it’s going well.

Sarah Lai Stirland
I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of chatter and imagery that rattles through my mind when I’m supposed to be meditating, I find it incredibly frustrating. Difficult as it is, it feels like meditation is becoming a routine practice in many aspects of daily American life. Taking a yoga class? It almost always begins with meditation. Had a stressful day at work? there are 20 minute guided meditations for that all over YouTube. Had open heart surgery? Some doctors say to meditate as part of your recovery. But when people advise you to meditate, what exactly are you supposed to be doing?

Michael McCord
As a broad sense, meditation would be putting your mind on something intentionally and trying to build not only the concentration capacity, but also the internal willingness to hold the mind In that looking stance.

Sarah Lai Stirland
That’s Michael McCord, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and president of the San Francisco Zen Center. He’s been meditating intensely for the past 16 years.

Michael McCord
The meditation is supported by concentration practices of learning to hold the focus and to notice the blips in concentration and to pull the mind back to something of a space and time, a point on the wall, a mantra your breath, a specific part of your body.

Prachi Gangwal
It’s not about getting to that zone of where you don’t have thoughts.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Prachi Gangwal is a Silicon Valley engineer, a mother and an elementary school teacher who meditates daily. For her, it’s a myth that meditating is clearing your mind.

Prachi Gangwal
It’s more about being able to observe and finding that observer within you.

Sarah Lai Stirland
A well known metaphor for this mental state is that you’re positioning yourself behind a roiling waterfall of emotions and observing that torrent, rather than letting yourself be swept away by it. Meditation can help us detach and control our emotions instead of being controlled by a primal fight or flight impulses, and it has practical, everyday applications that are often life saving.

Prachi Gangwal
There’s no road rage because it’s like, that’s okay. They’re in their element. Why do I need to get off my element? Now my mindfulness is I’m getting subtle indications in my body which I’m able to recognize that I will get angry, but that happens because you’re constantly meditatively reflecting, analyzing or letting it be or learning to center.

Sarah Lai Stirland
The benefits of meditation and mindfulness are multifaceted. It goes way beyond being able to control road rage. Historians, for example, have documented the practices as far back as 1500 BCE in ancient India. Yet, only in the past few decades have Western medical researchers been discovering meditations wide ranging health benefits. Studies suggest that mindful meditation can help us sleep better. It can also help us become less anxious stressed and depressed. As for me, I feel that I’m miles away from Prachi gangwell’s level, where meditation has effectively replaced coffee and alcohol as daily routines and ways to unwind. I’ve learned that frustration is part of the process, and that comparing my. My meditation session to anyone else’s—as I’ve just done—is beside the point.

Speaker 1
Because it’s intensely personal, and we all manifest in different ways in the universe. So this is simply a tool for an individual to learn how to be with their own mystery, rather than to get an A+ at something.

Sarah Lai Stirland
So let’s try it again. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in, hold your breath for a couple of moments. Breathe out. Do it a couple more times. I won’t ask you how it went. I’ll let you investigate and be with your own mystery. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that really fascinating and calming report, Sarah. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my Stanford colleague, Becky vermeule, sitting in for Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about how to do things with your mind.

Blakey Vermeule
Our guest today is a professor of philosophy at Stanford University and author of a forthcoming book called “Mental Means. Please welcome back to Philosophy Talk, Antonia Peacocke.

Antonia Peacocke
You thanks so much for having me

Josh Landy
So Antonia, I’ve read a lot of your fantastic writing, including stuff about esthetic experience, the expansion of the imagination, lots of wonderful stuff about literature. But how did you start getting interested in mental action?

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, well, I don’t know about you, Josh, but a lot of what goes on in my head is just total chaos, right? There’s ear worms, there’s songs stuck in my head, random anxieties, wacky daydreams, and I don’t love that. You know, a lot of us here are nerds, right? We have goals for what happens in our mental life. So I was interested in what I could and couldn’t control here. So two pronged approach for me, part of that is meditation, and part of it is getting academic research about mental action out there.

Blakey Vermeule
Antonia, earlier Josh and I were arguing about mental action. He said, There’s no such thing. I said, there are plenty of cases where we’re fully in control of our thoughts. Who is right?

Antonia Peacocke
Well, no surprise here, but I think mental action is totally a real thing, and it’s philosophically important, right? So here’s how we know it’s real. We know that you can plan and strategize how to do things with your mind, like, how am I going to memorize this poem? You can practice like, if you have a certain mathematical skill you’re working on mental action is effortful trying. Have you heard of decision fatigue? You can also be commanded on the spot to perform a kind of mental action, and sometimes you’re held responsible for it.

Josh Landy
Okay, so let’s talk about this responsibility business. So I think that’s really interesting. So let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that mental action has forgotten. I was just pretending earlier, totally on your side. You can do things in your mind. I love the way you put it. It’s effortful. It can be tiring. That’s a good sign. But this responsibility is a little troubling, potentially, right? Because all kinds of stuff goes you were just talking about the kinds of stuff that goes through your head. We all have sort of weird and wacky thoughts. Am I responsible for all those Jimmy Carter once said that he had committed adultery in his heart. Is that a sin? Like how responsible are we for the random stuff that happens in our head?

Antonia Peacocke
That’s a great question. So I don’t think that everything that happens in your head is something that you do, but let’s say you had some weird mental image popped to mind, and then you sat down and spend the next 30 minutes trying to keep that weird mental image in your mind. That might be something I would hold you responsible for. Might even say you could have done something so much more productive in those 30 minutes. I tell myself that all the time.

Josh Landy
So they should have asked Jimmy Carter, how many times, many times did you do it on purpose?

Antonia Peacocke
That’s the question. Was it adultery in your mind? Because you sat down and thought, I’m going to imagine this for an hour. That’s a little weird. I don’t mean to be dissing. Jimmy Carter.

Blakey Vermeule
So can you give us some more examples of the kinds of things that would count as mental action in your in your view, Antonia?

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, sure thing. So some examples are like puzzles, right? And that might literally be a puzzle, something you’re working out you’re trying to fill something out in a crossword puzzle. Other examples are everyday things, right? Let’s say you need to remember what your doctor said that might be very important to you. That’s something you need to do in your mind, right? The memory is there somewhere other things are creative, right? You might want to compose a melody. You can also imagine things. You can also write things like poetry. So there’s a whole vast range of mental action. Some much more complex, some much simpler.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about how to do things with your mind. With Antonia peacock from Stanford University.

Blakey Vermeule
Are there ever times when you can’t stop thinking about something, or when a fact that you are desperately trying to remember just randomly pops into your head? How much control do you feel that you have over your own mind?

Josh Landy
Lights, camera, mental action—along with comments and questions from our live audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Billie Eilish
Where’s my mind, where’s my mind?

Josh Landy
if you don’t know where your mind is, how can you do anything with it. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Ray Briggs here at 220 Montgomery in downtown San Francisco. We’re talking with Antonio Reacocke from Stanford University about how to do things with your mind.

Josh Landy
Got a question or a comment that’s doing something in your mind? Join the discussion by raising your hand, and when we’re ready, Laura will bring the mic around to you.

Blakey Vermeule
Antonia, earlier you were saying that mental action is a real thing, which I think you’ve made a very convincing argument for. Can you explain a bit more what it means to control our thoughts? And part of what’s behind that question for me, is that control is a very, very, very loaded word in our in our culture, talk us through that a little bit.

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, sure thing. So I like to start with a notion of control with bodily action, right? What does it mean to be controlling part of your body? Well, usually you have an idea of something that you want, you set out to get it, and you strategize about how to do that. And then while you’re doing something, say, with your arm trying to pick up a cup. Say, you keep yourself on track. You correct any errors. You know, as a clumsy person, I’m constantly doing that. So control is mostly about guidance in that sense. But I know what you mean. It’s pretty loaded term.

Blakey Vermeule
Well, say a bit more about that. Blakey. What’s there’s a there’s an entire industry that has set up around us to help us learn to control our minds to be more productive. And it’s that sort of massive productivity industry that teaches us techniques of mind control in the service, basically, of productivity and in the service of our jobs, mainly. So I’m just wondering how you think about this.

Josh Landy
So come clean, Antonia—are you working for the corporations?

Antonia Peacocke
Are you worried about, yeah, mega Corp sponsors that? No, I’m just kidding. Yeah. So it’s not necessarily a matter of controlling all of the content of your thoughts, right? What you’re thinking about, and certainly, like any industry trying to sell you a theory, we want to subject that kind of a theory that you can control your mind to be megaproductive, subjected to scrutiny, right? There’s a lot that you can and can’t do with your mind, but to understand that better, we need better research, right? Can I focus on the same sentence for nine hours? No, that is beyond my power. Can I want different things? Usually not, right? That might be beyond my power, too. But can I learn how to make better decisions? Can I educate myself in a domain? Of course, I can do those things. So a little bit more nuance is an important thing.

Josh Landy
Okay, so this is very interesting, because I’m super curious about where the limits are, right? I mean, presumably there are things we would all like to change about our lives. You know, I’d love to want to eat less sugar. And I, you know, over the years, I managed to totally cure myself sugar in my tea. So some want changes are possible, but some seem to be harder or maybe impossible. Then there’s this thing about deciding to believe. So William James the philosopher said you can actually decide to believe things. He gave the example of you’re climbing. He says, And and you get to a point where you can’t go up, you can’t go down. You’ve just got to jump over this abyss. And he says, the best thing you can do at that point is convince yourself you can make it. If you convince yourself you can make it, you will if you convince yourself you won’t make it, self fulfilling prophecy. There you go. And he said, he claimed that a lot of things in life are like that. So is that within the orbit of our self control, according to you, can we actually do that with our minds? Convince ourselves to believe something?

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, as so often happens in philosophy, that’s a great example with a questionable generalization, right? So, of course, there are going to be conditions where you want to cultivate a kind of. Optimism, and that can sometimes look like changing what you believe. Usually you have to take some kind of method there, right? Like remind yourself of your strength training in front of this abyss, right? Remind yourself of that time you long jumped in high school, that type of thing. But when it comes to convincing yourself that there’s not a table in front of you that seems completely impossible to me. So there are limits, even within convincing yourself that something is true or not, but it’s fascinating. I don’t know fully where those limits lie.

Blakey Vermeule
Do you consider that part of your research as a thinker, as an academic, is to try to understand the different cases of where we can and can’t control would you? Would you say that that’s a sort of fair description of what you’re trying to trying to think about?

Antonia Peacocke
Absolutely, definitely, and that’s not just a philosophical question, right? Right? One of the reasons I love the topic of mental action is that it touches closely on a lot of psychological questions, what philosophers like to call empirical questions too, right? Scientific questions sometimes we get along with So, yeah, when we learn about that wonderful research from our roving philosophical reporter about what mindfulness can do for you, that can be surprising. Sometimes, like who would have thought that focusing on your breath can change your emotional dispositions over time. That’s something we need to learn from observing the world in a really rigorous way.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and we are in downtown San Francisco with Antonia Peacocke from Stanford, thinking about how to do things with your mind. And we have a question from our live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. If you could just tell us your first name, where you’re from, and what your comment or question what your comment or question is.

Christian
Hello, my name is Christian. I’m from San Francisco. I’m very happy to be here. My question is going back to this question of control. Is this question of control Western imposed? I mean, is this an idea that has been imposed on us by our society, that we should be able to tell ourselves what we should feel and what we should think and what we should be able to have in terms of an internal experience? Or is it more about freeing the mind to be what it is more of about letting it be conduit for creativity, conduit for human existence, a conduit for being something other than what our society tells us what we should be. You know, so is the idea of control problematic, or is it more about freeing the mind to be what it is and allowing it to do what it does.

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, so I think this is a great question. It’s important to have that kind of skepticism, especially, you know, as Americans, we like to think, if you work hard enough, anything is possible. As philosophers, we got to know that it’s literally false. But I think that neither extreme is quite right, right? It’s not right that you can mold your mind into anything that you want, but it’s also not right that you have absolutely no control. One of the interesting things about meditation is that it shows that a lot of willpower and effort is required to let it be. So even when you talk about letting something be that itself can be an exercise of gentle, focused patient agency, rather than trying to stamp your foot and make something impossible happen.

Josh Landy
Let’s take another question. Let’s see. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Can you tell us your first name and where you’re from and your question or comment please.

Manooj
My first name is Manooj. I’m originally from Bombay, India, but I’ve lived in SF for 14 years, so I guess I’m from here. So my question is more on the word action, mental action versus the control. And what do we mean by action? Are we just talking about the planning brain? What about the moralizing brain? And then how do you live in the moment? Which is what we’re all trying to strive for. But I feel like I’m always striving for it, so I can’t do it, because I’m like, Am I in the moment now? What moment is this? It’s gone.

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah. Thanks so much. Manoj, so it’s obviously a deep topic for philosophical reflection. What an action is? Some people contrast action with something that happens to you, right? So an idea of activity versus passivity. Other people say something like, you have to have this idea an intention, right? And you have to have an idea about how to bring that about. And then various executive centers in your brain need to cooperate with you to make that thing happen. If you can get better over time, if you can get more skillful, if it depletes various effort centers that all seems like it’s on the side of action, how to live in the moment. I’ll have to get back to you.

Josh Landy
That’s the one thing we need! Um, let’s take another question from our live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Jackson
Hi, Jackson from San Francisco. So I am definitely convinced that you oftentimes control what’s going on your mind or martial martial resources. I’m interested in this relationship between the part of your mind that is doing the marshaling and the part of the mind that is being marshaled like, oftentimes thoughts are unbidden. They’re like, I’m asking the creative parts of my brain to come up with something. But what is the relationship between that part that’s doing the marshaling and the part that’s being marshaled?

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, excellent. This philosopher, Galen Strawson, is one of the disputants in a philosophical debate about how much you can do in mental action, and he thinks all you can ever really do is set your mind to some topic and then hope that something happens in accordance with that. He thinks that there might be vast personality differences between people in whether we can do more than that or not, or whether even think that we can do more than that, but it is a weird thing to think about. It’s not as though you’re acting on something that’s distinct from you. It’s like you’re acting on something that is you, that’s very deeply and intimately you, that is your mind. But I think sometimes it helps to think of the mind, as often meditators do, where it’s something like clouds passing you by or a river. Sometimes trains, something is going on, but you can intervene in a way that’s more than just setting your mind right and get on the train and drive it somewhere. I guess that’s not really how trains work. I should have used a different example. Trains are on rails, okay? Cars, or you can not right? So you can let your mind do its thing, right, sometimes called the monkey mind or monkey brain, or you can take the reins.

Josh Landy
But that brings us back to Christians questions, when do we want to take the reins, and when do we not want to take the reins? Right? I can think of a couple of good cases, I think, where we do for example, you know, if you’ve got a bunch of intrusive thoughts. If you’re able to meditate and achieve peace of mind, that seems like a step in the right direction, authentic action, doing the thing that you really want to do with your deepest values, rather than just being carried by the whim of the moment. That seems like a good thing. So on the other hand, I liked Christian’s point about inspiration. Sometimes maybe we want to give ourselves over to inspiration and let something view something beautiful and artistic come out. And maybe, if we’re too much in the kind of control mind, that’s a step in the wrong direction. Proust, my favorite author, talks about involuntary memory and how great it is when something comes back to you without you trying. So which is better, right? Which is which? Which state of mind expresses me more, the state in which I’m sort of going with the flow and not trying to take control, or the state of mind in which I’m fully in charge of my actions?

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, great question. Josh. So partly, it’s a matter of your own priorities and how you identify, right? If you identify as your mind. If it’s very important to you, like for academics, it is. You might think I really want to impose some form on the mess that’s going on in here. That’s my experience. Yeah, definitely. But of course, anybody in any creative field, including in academic philosophy, including composers, artists, sculptors, crossword constructors, scientists, scientists, absolutely anybody in those fields will tell you that there’s a certain point at which you have to stop banging your head against the wall and let something go on in the background, that passivity is really important to any creative process.

Blakey Vermeule
Yeah. I mean, I think about there’s some very, very famous examples in the history of science, like Einstein, just basically the mode of scientific creativity is more like what we would call classical inspiration. The Muse comes down and visits you in your sleep at night and but and yet, that that Muse produces something for which Einstein was responsible you know, it was intentional. He was responsible for it, and he controlled it. So it’s a, I mean, to me, it’s a completely fascinating topic, and it goes all the way back through the history of human thought. I’m just wondering how you think about those cases.

Antonia Peacocke
Absolutely, yeah, it’s something I’ve tried to think about too is creativity and how much agency that requires. It turns out that although the muses are doing something for us, they don’t just give you gifts unbidden, right? They’re not like Santa Claus in that way. Turns out that if you have an image of lights or clocks on a train and you’re Albert Einstein, that’s going to mean something to you in the context of special relativity, because you’ve been spending so much careful time working on that and thinking about that, you’re only going to have those creative thoughts in the shower if you set the right conditions up during the day so that you have the right thoughts in the shower, not something really dumb, like I sometimes say.

Josh Landy
Never you, but definitely me. We’ve got another question from our live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Tell us your name, where you’re from, and your question, please.

Anita
Anita from Oakland. Are our thoughts influenced by our surroundings? Because sometimes my wife and I will have the same thoughts at the exact same time, and I’ll go, wow!

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah. It’s definitely a dynamic that I’ve noticed. I’m lucky to have that with my partner too, that we are almost in sync. Sometimes we know what each other is thinking. I think if that sometimes is a kind of habit, right? You mold one another’s personality in a gentle, nice way, right? Over time, those things that control again? Great. Yeah, absolutely. So of course, your thoughts are influenced by your surroundings, and they’re even influenced by the way the people around you think. You think about your teachers when you talk about, say, an advisor’s voice in your head, sometimes, if you have a great teacher, they will live as a voice in your head for a long time. That’s partly because you’ve started to share habits of thought. That’s the way I like to think about it.

Josh Landy
That’s wonderful. Let’s take another question from a live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nick
Hi. My name is Nick from San Francisco. I guess I have a two fold question, but I’ll keep it brief. There’s this idea that when you’re trying to take control of your mind, that it’s almost as if there’s this other quality to it. I guess. What I’m trying to ask is, are we our minds in this instance, or is this just a thing that’s controlling a meat sack, and in addition to that, the way that meditation and the control of the mind is being, you know, taken the reins of isn’t that just a question of focus? And if my focus is that my mind is here, or that I am in my head, can’t we shift that focus to say, Oh, I’m in my big toe right now? And then you’re, you know, you’re paying attention to the sensations of the big toe. Isn’t that really just a question of focusing your intent?

Antonia Peacocke
Totally. so it’s a huge issue, what you are, right? Are you your body? Are you your mind? We could do an entire history of philosophy on that question. One way I like to think about mental action and the kind of control you have over the thoughts that you have is like you’ve inherited a house, right? What’s in the house you didn’t necessarily put there, but you can rearrange it, right? You can rearrange it in such a way that you need to go over here to find this group of things, and you’re never going to look at these other things that you put in the attic, right? It’s not perfect control, and you inherit a whole lot of tendencies and habits and wants and likes and dislikes. You literally inherit those things, sometimes from your parents or people who raised you or taught you right. But of course, the question of where you are, oh, it’s a tough one. I don’t really know. I think I’m not in my big toe, even if I like to imagine sometimes, for the purposes of meditation.

Josh Landy
You or your big toe is listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re in downtown San Francisco thinking about how to do things with your mind. Our guest is Antonia Peacocke from Stanford University, author of “Mental Means.”

Blakey Vermeule
How do we get more disciplined in the way we form our beliefs? What techniques or practices will make us better citizens can more controlled thinking or awareness of the process of how we get controlled thinking bring about a just, verdant and equitable society?

Josh Landy
We’re coming to you from 220 Montgomery—KALW’s event space in downtown San Francisco. We’ll take more questions from our live audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Bandits
Picture me looking into you. Photograph, just for a laugh.

Josh Landy
I can picture all kinds of things—does that count as doing something with my mind? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey vermeule. Our guest is Antonia Peacocke from Stanford University, and we’re thinking about how to do things with your mind.

Josh Landy
We’ve got another question from our live audience here at 220 Montgomery. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Linda
Hi. I’m Linda from San Francisco, and my question is about the changes that actually happen in the brain. It’s a physical thing. With meditation, they’ve studied Buddhists or other long term meditators, and have found changes and they report that it’s the act of noticing that their mind is wandering and taking themselves back and paying attention again to their breath or what. Ever that helps them to meditate over and over, that seems to make this change in the brain that does those positive things that you were talking about, of not getting angry, of just being a better person. So any comments about that?

Antonia Peacocke
I think when we go back to the idea of what control is, right? You want to be in charge of what’s going on. You want to be keeping yourself on track with some goal that you have. And in the context of your mind, you can’t keep yourself on track if you haven’t even noticed that you’ve gone off track, right? So the primary way that you exert control in mental action is first by noticing that something else is happening than what you had intended to have happen, and then gently bringing yourself back without then going down a third rabbit hole of blaming yourself for getting off track in the first place.

Josh Landy
Okay, so Antonio, we’ve been talking a lot about the value for us as individuals in taking more control over our mental life, and I guess the value for corporations, but what about the value for society?

Antonia Peacocke
That’s a good question too. So of course, meditation is going to help us handle our emotions, but I also think more generally, training yourself in various specific skills can help you become a better partner, a better parent, a better friend, a better teacher or colleague, right? It all depends on where you put your energy right. Just as you might choose to put your energy into pickleball versus strength training with your body, you might choose your path in your mental action life to be a path of practicing empathetic engagement with other people or practicing how to manipulate them, right? Those are two very different things, as with any power that I think mental action practice can get you, it can be used for good or bad, right?

Blakey Vermeule
I’m curious about the role of the self in relation to the group in connection to this question. I mean, one of the defining features of our moment is a whole lot of political polarization and tribalism, and along with that goes the thought that my political opponents are, you know, sheep. They’re not in control of their beliefs, they’re mentally defective in some way. And you know, this is true across the political spectrum. I’m curious how you think about tribalism in relation to the problem of mental action. I mean, it seems to me a very pressing kind of moral and philosophical issue.

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s usually wrong when you have a debate with somebody, a dispute with them, whether that’s emotional or political or purely intellectual, just to think that they’re not thinking at all right, or that they’re really stupid. That’s almost always a mistake, even if your goal is to change their mind. Your goal isn’t just to understand them. Sometimes we have different goals, right? But it always helps, I think, to understand what their habits of mind are. What do they take as evidence? Who do they listen to? What kind of information? Diet are they on? These are really important factors in anybody’s mental life and the health of their belief set Absolutely, that’s right.

Josh Landy
Which gets us back to the question of responsibility, right? We’re not always responsible, even if we’re making certain kinds of mistake, right? First of all, people aren’t always necessarily making a mistake. They might just come from different value background, but even if you are making a mistake, sometimes it’s the fault of the social media, the algorithm, or something like that. But I want to pick up a little bit on this notion that you’ve been putting forward about mental habits and sort of skills of mind, which I love, right? I think I really like this idea you can even become a better partner by cultivating certain kinds not just of physical habit, like doing the dishes, but of mental habits, kind of thinking, charitably, being warm and empathetic and so on. That realm seems like a really interesting middle ground between, on the one hand, the kind of seizing control mental action that we think of when we’re planning and doing a long division or, you know, solving a crossword clue, and, on the other hand, just kind of going with the flow. There’s something really interesting about this, this notion of a mental habit. The French philosopher Felix claveston talks about this, you know, it’s basically deliberate but unconscious. A really skilled piano player isn’t just acting, you know, randomly or being blown by the wind onto the keys. They are very deliberately playing the piano and playing it brilliantly, but totally unconsciously. So what’s going on there is that mental action? Is it mere mental activity? Is it active? Is it passive? What’s What’s the situation there?

Antonia Peacocke
Yeah, so we want to think about the control or the action that we perform in the short term versus the control that we have in the long term. Right? Most of us get frustrated if something isn’t going our way in the short term without knowing how much more control you can have in the long term. Now, when you already have a habit. It can feel really automatic. The philosopher Barbara Montero, who also used to dance ballet, talks about this phenomenon in really skilled performers, where it’s almost as though they go through the performance and then the second they get off stage, they’re like, where am I? What was that? Right? It’s as though something goes offline. Now that doesn’t mean that’s not them, or that it’s not skilled, or that it’s not hard earned and effortful, it’s super focused. It’s control that’s exerted in the long term that allows for those skilled aspects to take over in the short term.

Josh Landy
I want to see if I could try to bring together two of your interests, right? So we’ve been talking a lot about mental action, but you’re also a brilliant scholar of the arts. Is there a role for the arts in cultivating the kinds of mental habit that you’ve been talking about, maybe making us you know better at either being social or manipulating other people, being a better partner, all of the things that you’ve been talking about, what’s the role? What if anything, is the role of art here?

Antonia Peacocke
I actually think that literature, and particularly written literature, that is mostly just words, some pictures allowed, is some of the best training that we can get in how to think differently, right? It’s like putting on the clothes of somebody else’s mind for a little while, seeing how they fit. Right? You might notice, especially if you spend your career with an author like Proust, you might notice that you start to think differently, maybe not in 20 page sentences, but certainly some of the way that you start to think is going to come from who you let into your mind, and what you’re doing when you’re engaging seriously with a piece of written literature is, I think, you’re modeling what it would be like to go through these thoughts in this Order, in this way. And that can really shift how you think over term.

Blakey Vermeule
I guess I would ask you to maybe talk a little bit about the role of emotion in this process. I mean, I’m a George Eliot fanatic, and I feel like a lot of what I’ve learned from her is how to be more sensitive and attentive to other people’s suffering. But that’s not something that I learned through my call it system, one thinking or sort of cognitive control thinking. I just learn it from the heart. So how do you think about those two things in relationship to each other?

Antonia Peacocke
Great, yeah, when Elliot puts on the page this fully formed character, right? Who’s flawed and struggling and has interests of their own. She’s also directing your attention to various aspects of their character. How do they think? What do they want? How does that change? What do these other people owe to them? And insofar as you are being led by the hand through that pattern of attention that becomes something that’s available to you. That doesn’t mean you’ll always think to attend in that way to the people in your life, but suddenly it’s like, oh, wait, I could have been attending to this aspect of my friends or family all this time. So yeah, it’s not just a matter of exerting your willpower at 3pm one Friday. It’s trying to figure out, how else could I relate to those even when I’m just thinking about them?

Josh Landy
Okay, so Dr Peacock—the doctor is in. We come to you wondering not only how to make ourselves into happier people, but also into better partners, better citizens, better discussion partners, more tolerant, kinder like Georgie Elliott wants us to be how do we do it?

Antonia Peacocke
I think you need to really be serious about your own goals for how you live your mental life. We’re often encouraged to think about this in our physical lives. Where is my body spending its time with my kids at work, hiking in an office, et cetera. We’re not always as attentive to if I looked at myself in five years, what would my mental life be like? Do I want to be thinking in metaphor? Do I want to be empathizing with other people? Do I want to be obsessing about certain puzzles? Do I want to be this anxious? Right? If we set those kinds of goals, we can start to practice the skills that matter to us, and you really have to put your effort some places and not everywhere, as with any set of goals.

Josh Landy
Well, Antonia, that was a whole lot of mental action for us of the best possible kind. Thank. So much for joining us today.

Antonia Peacocke
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Antonia Peacocke, professor of philosophy at Stanford University and author of the forthcoming book “Mental Means.”

Blakey Vermeule
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, which is philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and do things with your mind in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you, send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on our blog.

Blakey Vermeule
And now, a man who moves at the speed of light, but only in his mind: it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Philosophy posits there’s no such thing as free will, even though denial would seem to prove there is.  Maybe not so much between good and evil, but whether to go outside now?  Or wait until it cools down a little.  Life is complicated!  Philosophy is supposedly about finding the truth, but truth is dependent, not on free will, but about defining the terms around which truth is discussed, which is hard because language is fuzzy, unlike numbers which can yield algorithms and gambling odds.  And artificial intelligence, which will soon do all our talking for us.  Frankly, I’m amazed we can still get to the end of a sentence without help.  We can’t even agree on what a dog is.  Dog ears can belong to a floppy old bloodhound, a contract you signed thirty years ago, or an old book.  Dog is what you do when you follow somebody.  It’s what you call somebody when he’s unfaithful.  Dog could be a collie or a pug.  It could be the dog you had when you were a kid out there on the farm.  Or maybe you never had a dog.  Or the dog had rabies!  So where DO we stand politically?  We are split down the middle between those who are okay with trans people drinking light beer, and those who just want to machine gun lager by the case.  How does this affect keg parties in Wisconsin?  So many things to think about and yet we each only have one brain.  What is smart?  Something that makes a lot of money for Elon Musk?  Well, it’s not Twitter then.  Something that makes a lot of people happy?  Changing Twitter to X maybe?  Something that makes some people unhappy, and some people very happy.  Like home ownership or a Batman movie.  Is happiness even a thing to want?  It’s often accidental– a puppy licks your face.  The Supreme Court makes a ruling.  That used to make Americans feel good.  At last.  Education for everybody!  At last, a Constitution!  At last, the President can have people killed at his discretion.  What?  That seems problematic.  How do you arrive at a ruling that makes it okay for a President to defenestrate visitors to the Oval Office?  Well, it’s what the framers would have wanted.  So the justices claim, allegedly.  They ask themselves, would a president have thrown somebody out a window, even though there was no Oval Office at the time?  Sounds like something Andrew Jackson could have done, to be honest, but he wasn’t really a framer.  John Adams would have done it, if he’d had the upper body strength.  And if it was somebody French.  Maybe we’re turning into the vicious morons our forefathers apparently dreamed the nation might become.  There’s a brand of coffee now called DEATH WISH (an excellent strong coffee by the way). I saw a hot sauce display at the store and the bottles were shaped like hand grenades.  And I recently bought a laser pointer shaped like a sniper rifle bullet.  A conservative publication is selling its own brand of razors because it deems Harry’s Razors to be too woke.  How is razor wokeness even determined?  Will woke razors make us bleed milk?  We’re tougher, but also hypochrondriacs, judging by the never ending onslaught of new drugs I see advertised, which all seem to be cures for types of insomnia that didn’t exist until 2020.  Many of us deny that Covid is real, but willfully court salmonella, because we think pasteurization is a scam by the French—see, John Adams again!  To keep us from making lattes with raw milk.  In reading for this particular commentary, I came across the concept of doxastic voluntarism, a new one to me, which is the philosophical doctrine according to which people have voluntary control over their beliefs.  I guess you have to have doxastic voluntarism before you can have free will.  But it only goes so far.  Once you choose to believe in God, for example, you can’t go back on it.  You can, but there are consequences.  Eternal damnation.  Nowhere to go on Sundays.  It’s hard living in your own head, America.  Everybody’s always yelling at you!  Telling you you’re wrong!  Trying to sell you something!  And nobody even knows what!  Pet shops all across the land, and we don’t even know what a dog is.  Oh who cares.  See you at the barbecue Friday night.  You bring the beer and machine gun.  I’ll bring the tequila.  Woo hoo!I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Blakey Vermeule
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Special thanks to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and everyone here at KALW’s 220 Montgomery event space.

Blakey Vermeule
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Josh Landy
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Blakey Vermeule
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Blakey Vermeule
And I’m Blakey Vermeule. Thank you for listening

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.