Why does the mind wander by default?

[Basman]

-as opposed to being still by default? It also seems like the mind wanders more, daydreams more, when physically fatigued, which is strange because even though you have less energy, the mind becomes busier, but in a more thoughtless and automatic manner. When you are tired, you don't want to be present. You want to watch slop on TV and do nothing instead of literally doing nothing and taking in the space. I guess a better question would be, why is the mind so attached to "noise"?

I wonder how human minds compare to animal minds in this regard. Animal minds seem to be less busy, less conceptual and more present compared to us, but it is hard to tell, right? Animals having less complex minds counter-intuitively simplifies happiness for them, assuming their needs are met. 

Edited October 9 by Basman

[Hojo]

I think its just past experiences coming up that you reacted too asking to react to them again. Since we have language we have many ideas to react too.

Imagine everytime you react to a thought you make the thought a real thing. Now it wants daddies attention like a baby. You can keep reacting to it and make it an adult thought with its own ideas. That would be like the idea of a thing reacting to other ideas ( you). You need to find a space in your mind away from the idea and be able to hold there.

Edited October 11 by Hojo

[Carl-Richard]

Because it throws variation into your thoughts, and then you can select which ones to pursue if they're really good. It's like selection and variation in biological evolution, only abstracted into the realm of thoughts.

In biological evolution, variation comes through for example mutation or genetic recombination through viral infections or sexual reproduction. Selection comes through passing your genes on simply because you were stronger than somebody else or simply because you didn't die.

In the realm of thoughts, variation is simply your mind reviewing, processing and "recombining" thoughts and past experiences in a more free way than usual, and those thoughts are often related to the self, and often about the past and projections into the future. And they are that of course because that has been good for your biological evolutionary fitness. Biology and mind are of course intricately tied to each other.

And when you do this more free kind of thinking, you might start seeing connections that you didn't see before, and you can have new insights (new "phenotypes"). And then selection happens when you decide to act on or explore those thoughts in a more focused way, "passing on their genes" so to speak, or simply committing them to memory ("genetic information" is after all a form of memory; here, it's mental memory).

Edited October 11 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

On 9.10.2025 at 11:35 PM, Basman said:

I wonder how human minds compare to animal minds in this regard. Animal minds seem to be less busy, less conceptual and more present compared to us, but it is hard to tell, right? Animals having less complex minds counter-intuitively simplifies happiness for them, assuming their needs are met. 

I've one time seen what looked like a cat making a deliberate conscious decision between two options on how to hide as I was walking towards it on a road, and it chose the option which I did not predict but which in hindsight could've been way smarter:

Instead of jumping into the grass on the side of the road it was on and increasing its distance from me, it chose to run across the road in my direction, decreasing its distance from me almost so I could attack it, and then under a car to hide.

Before that, it was checking the grass (which seemed a bit short, and it only stretched a few meters before it hit an unassailable wall, so it maybe didn't seem safe enough), then it saw the car, and I believe it might have looked at the grass again and then the car again and then chose the car. And I was already pretty close to it when it ran towards the car (probably 4-5 meters) and it must have more than halved its distance from me before it got under the car.

What struck me was how "planned" it seemed, because again, I did not predict it running towards me and then under the car, rather than just running into the grass and increasing its distance from me. It must have somehow calculated that the grass option was less safe than the car option and that it could make the run under the car before I could attack it even though they were decreasing their distance from me. That's a pretty impressive level of cognition, even though it's probably more embodied than "abstract".

Edited October 11 by Carl-Richard

[Natasha Tori Maru]

I think it is a function of our perception of time - memory.

If we had no memory - would the mind wonder?

Or would we be amoeba just looking for next meal