# Mental Action in Nguyen's Work: A Comprehensive Extraction **Date:** February 4, 2026 **Sources:** All C. Thi Nguyen texts in Learning folder (5 texts) --- ## Overview This report extracts every passage where Nguyen discusses mental action, cognitive action, or intellectual/non-bodily action as distinct from (or alongside) bodily action. Full paragraphs are provided for context. Nguyen's explicit mentions of mental action are relatively **brief** and often **parenthetical**—he focuses primarily on bodily action. The passages below represent all substantive mentions across his work. --- ## 1. The Key Definitional Passage **Source:** "Arts of Action" (Footnote 6) This is the most explicit statement that the aesthetics of action extends beyond bodily movement: > "Much of this work has been made possible by earlier work on bodily perception and the possibility of an aesthetics of bodily senses, including work on proprioceptive experiences of dance (Montero 2006). Also crucial has been work rejecting the requirement that all aesthetic experiences be sensory, much of it emanating from work on conceptual art. (Schellekens 2007) provides an excellent overview of that terrain, and a convincing argument for the possibility of the aesthetic experience of ideas. **Notice that the category of aesthetics of actions is a much larger one than, say, that of somaesthetics, which concentrates specifically on the internal aesthetics of bodily movement and excludes, say, the internal aesthetics of doing logic or playing chess** (Shusterman 2012)." --- ## 2. Chess as "Cogitation" **Source:** "Arts of Action" > "Similarly, some board games are designed to encourage particular turns of mind. For example, **the design of chess offers a concentrated access to a particularly elegant form of cogitation.** The chess player gets to experience the emergence of a lovely solution from a thousand tactical minutiae, and they get it with some frequency — far more than they are likely to get from grinding away at the actual problems of the world (Osborne 1964). Rock climbing and chess, I will argue, are examples of the arts of action." --- ## 3. Process Aesthetics Includes Mental Processes **Source:** "Arts of Action" The definition explicitly lists mental processes: > "Let's call the larger realm here 'process aesthetics' and stipulate that the term 'process' refers specifically to activity from the perspective of the actor. **Process aesthetics covers the aesthetics of mental and physical processes, including, but not limited to, one's own investigating, thinking, perceiving, deciding, choosing, moving, changing, and acting upon external objects.**" --- ## 4. Philosophical Puzzle-Solving **Source:** "Arts of Action" > "Process aesthetics permeates our lives, often emerging as a part of our natural, spontaneous, and unsculpted everyday activity. When I swerve around an unexpected obstacle in the road, I might delight in the elegance and beautiful, swift precision of my response. **When I finally figure out the solution to a philosophical puzzle that has been plaguing me, I can do so through clumsy, ugly, brute-force reasoning, or I might alight directly on the solution with a wonderfully precise turn of mind.** Some actions, of course, are aesthetically evaluable from the outside and the inside." --- ## 5. Mental and Physical Aesthetic Experiences **Source:** "Arts of Action" > "But, I will argue, we can also shape these experiences as part of an intentional artistic practice. The process arts, then, are the arts in which artifacts are made for the sake of bringing about **first-personal aesthetic experiences of mental and physical processes.**" --- ## 6. Fiction and "Mental Efforts" **Source:** "Arts of Action" > "For example: experiencing fiction involves a substantial deployment of the active imagination. Note, however, that no matter how active the role of the imagination, critical talk of fiction usually attributes aesthetic properties and judgments to the text itself and not to one's imagination of it. Furthermore, if one loses oneself in one's own imagination, **that attention is usually directed towards the fictional world as imagined, and not self-reflectively towards the mental efforts of imagining.**" And continuing: > "When we praise Jane Austen's novels, we praise them for their wonderfully exact descriptions of characters. This is an object-aesthetic attribution; **the quality of precision is attributed to the novel and not one's own mental efforts in response.** This is not true of all fiction, however. Consider, for example, more game-like fictions, such as mystery novels. There, it seems, the structure of the fiction encourages attention to **the reader's own struggles.**" --- ## 7. Portal — "Mind-Bending" and "Mental Unlocking" **Source:** "Arts of Action" > "Consider, on the other hand, the beloved computer puzzle game Portal... The game then places an increasingly difficult set of obstacles in your virtual path, which you must solve with only your wormhole gun. **Solving these puzzles is a fascinating, mind-bending delight, in which gorgeous solutions finally emerge for the player out of frustrated despair.** Notice, though, that the aesthetic quality of the player's activity in Portal are partially attributable to design elements in the game and to the game designer's intentional efforts. **The astonishing feel of one's mind finally unlocking a puzzle arises in response to the counterintuitive physics and the details of each particular puzzle. And these parts of the game were surely designed, at least in part, to bring about the particular experiential qualities of that mental unlocking.**" --- ## 8. Aesthetic Insight and "Instrumental Calculations" **Source:** "Arts of Action" > "In the case of many computer games, on the other hand, the aesthetic insight is largely held by the designer. It is Portal's designers who realized that such-and-such lines of code, and such-and-such virtual physics, will create such-and-such physics puzzle, which will make it significantly likely that a game player will, in solving the puzzle, **have an aesthetic experience of their mind's own elegance.** The game player may have an insight about the solution to the puzzle, but that is not an aesthetic insight in Zangwill's sense. **During their absorption in the game, the players' attention is devoted to the instrumental calculations of play.** It is the game designer's insight that a certain variety of instrumental calculations, as guided by particular goals and rules of physics, will result in certain aesthetic qualities in the player's activity." --- ## 9. Chess and Logical Thinking **Source:** "Aesthetics of Agency" (Book Chapter 5) > "Though games can offer some of the more familiar sorts of aesthetic experiences by telling stories, presenting striking images, and even making arguments, they can also do something else for us: they can provide designed experiences of our own agency. And the agential medium is particularly good at shaping the character of our practical engagement. **Chess focuses us on thinking ahead down a chain of logical possibilities; Tetris focuses us on high-speed spatial reasoning.** And those designed experiences of agency can be aesthetic." --- ## 10. Logic Problem and "Calculation, Puzzle Solving, and Glorious Leaps of the Mind" **Source:** "Aesthetics of Agency" > "Such aesthetic experiences are not unique to games. They often arise in ordinary practical life. **I search for the right answer to a particularly thorny logic problem and the solution hits me like a bolt out of the blue—elegant, beautiful, perfect.** A car swerves into my lane and I react smoothly, dodging perfectly. Afterward, I am struck by the gracefulness of my own instinctive response. Games can refine those pleasures, concentrate them, and present us with novel aspects of them. For example: **doing math, philosophy, and the like, can give rise to aesthetic experiences of calculation, puzzle solving, and glorious leaps of the mind. Chess takes this sort of activity and crystallizes it. Chess offers us a shaped activity particularly fecund in aesthetically rich experiences of the intellect.**" --- ## 11. "Largely Mental Games" **Source:** "Aesthetics of Agency" > "The relationship between a player's actions and their maximum practical capacities is particularly difficult for spectators to access **with largely mental games, such as Chess.**" --- ## 12. "Feel of the Calculations" **Source:** "Aesthetics of Agency" On second-order aesthetic attention to first-order practical activity: > "In this second-order reflection, I distribute my attention to all the aspects of my first-order activity: **the feel of the calculations, the intensity of pressure, the explosiveness of the solution.**" --- ## 13. Logic Puzzles as Agential Works **Source:** Chapter 7 (Games and Autonomy) > "But many striving games are not interactive. Here are some examples: **logic puzzles; the Where's Waldo series of game books and other hidden picture puzzles; and, arguably, rock climbs and crossword puzzles.** These are static objects and do not generate new displays in response to input. Often, the solution, once found, is obvious to the player. Certainly, in logic puzzles and in the Where's Waldo books, there is nothing mechanically sophisticated enough to generate differing displays. But I can engage in aesthetic striving play with such a puzzle; that is, **I can aesthetically appreciate my experience of trying to solve it.** Note that the physical object doesn't change or provide variable displays in response to input, and **the inner experience of solving the puzzle is highly variable between players—it is generated by each player's own deductive efforts.**" --- ## 14. "The Hacker Wins by Reasoning, by Deducing" **Source:** Chapter 7 On the asymmetry between the Corporation and Hacker in *Android: Netrunner*: > "The corporation player is given an agency focused on bluffing, deceit, and misdirection. The hacker player is given an agency focused on carefully managing their resources to gather information. And the successes are both glorious and agentially specific. The corporation wins by being deceptive, by bluffing, by forcing the hacker to waste their resources attacking unimportant nothings. **The hacker wins by reasoning, by deducing, and sometimes by gambling at just the right moment.**" --- ## 15. Logic Puzzle as Aesthetic Experience **Source:** Chapter 7 > "On the other hand, take **a logic puzzle. A logic puzzle is a game, and can be played for the sake of the aesthetic experience of epiphany.** Suppose that, for a particular logic puzzle, there is pretty much only one way to figure out the solution. We might plausibly think that **the exact contours of that aesthetic experience were largely set by the puzzle's creator, since the nature of the puzzle and its solution are so constrained.**" --- ## 16. Puzzle-Solving Experience in Portal **Source:** Chapter 7 > "The game designers seem to have created the game, in part, for the players' aesthetic experience of their own **process of struggling and solving those puzzles.** And there is plenty of wiggle room for the player to devise their own solutions." And: > "For the game player is **intentionally solving the puzzle,** but probably is not intentionally imbuing it with aesthetic quality in any way. When I play Portal, I'm not aiming at elegance at all. I am utterly absorbed in the practical challenges at hand. The fact that my solution turns out to be elegant is, from an intentional standpoint, merely a byproduct of my absorption in the instrumental struggle." --- ## 17. "The Path of the Puzzle" **Source:** Chapter 7 > "So, here we have one kind of response to the recalcitrance of agential distance: **making the solution very specific and singular, which will enforce at least some degree of uniformity of experience. Let's call this the path of the puzzle.** Here, the game designer aims at allowing only a very narrow set of solutions. Note that the attentive object still won't be precisely the same across all players, even in a puzzle with an utterly singular solution. **After all, the process of solving the puzzle will vary between players, and that process is the primary attentive object of an aesthetic striving game.**" --- ## 18. Climbing as Mental State **Source:** Chapter 7 > "One climb might involve tiny handholds and footholds, usable only when one's center of gravity is jammed right against the wall. This then enforces, for most climbers, a strict style of movement: slow, delicate, precise. **And to achieve that movement, most climbers must maintain a certain mental state—careful and deliberate, but calm and free of gripping anxiety or excess tension.**" --- ## 19. Games and Thinking **Source:** "Games and the Art of Agency" (article) Games capture "forms of agency" which includes thinking: > "They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game." --- ## 20. "Intellectual Beauty" — Reference Nguyen repeatedly cites Harold Osborne's paper "Notes on the aesthetics of chess and the concept of **intellectual beauty**" (1964) as support for the aesthetics of chess. --- ## Summary of Findings The passages cluster around several themes: 1. **The somaesthetics footnote** (Arts of Action) — explicitly says his category includes "doing logic or playing chess" 2. **Chess as "cogitation"** and "experiences of the intellect" 3. **Portal** — "mind-bending," "mind finally unlocking," "aesthetic experience of their mind's own elegance" 4. **Logic puzzles** — treated as aesthetic striving games 5. **"Mental and physical processes"** — in the core definition of process aesthetics 6. **Philosophical puzzle-solving** — "wonderfully precise turn of mind" 7. **Reasoning and deducing** — as agentially-specific modes of winning The most sustained treatments are in the Portal passages (Arts of Action, Ch. 5, Ch. 7) and the chess passages. Otherwise, mental action appears as brief asides or items in lists alongside bodily action.