Dance's Mind-Body Problem

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Dance's Mind-Body ProblemAuthor(s): Anna PakesSource: Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, Vol. 24, No. 2(Winter, 2006), pp. 87-104Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004106 .Accessed: 01/02/2011 15:52

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Dance's Mind-Body Problem

ANNA PAKES

In section 621 of the Philosophical nvestigations, udwig Wittgenstein considers the

following: 'when "I raise my arm",' he notes, 'my arm goes up. And the problem

arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the factthat I raise my arm?' (Wittgenstein 1958, 161). A dancer might have a numberof answers here, as might a viewer of dance performance. Generally, he dancer's

gesture of raising her arm is not just movement, but an intended action: it is notmere reflex or nervous tick but consciously willed and controlled; it is governedby a decision to move on the part of the dancer and in some cases also by adecision on the part of the choreographer that this action be performed. These

purposes shape the quality and significance of the movement as well as causingit to happen. So if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that Iraise my arm, I am left with these intentions.1 A dancer might want to add that

the remainder also includes her phenomenal experience of the movement: thesensation of the muscles tightening in the shoulder as the arm lifts, the feelingof tension between the arm reaching up and the legs rooted in the ground, thesense that the surrounding air offers resistance to the gesture. There is a whole

complex of kinaesthetic sensations associated with the action of raising her arm,and the dancer aware of her performance is very conscious of these sensations:

they contribute to the richness of her experience and, arguably, o the particularquality of the action as perceived by the audience. They too make the gesture of

raising one's arm more than just a movement of the arm upwards.Of course, Wittgenstein is not suggesting that it is actually possible to isolate

intention andphenomenal

awareness fromphysical

movement. Hisquestion

isan analytic one designed to elucidate the character of a human action as opposedto a mere physical occurrence. In the process, it highlights issues key to contem-

porary debates in analytic philosophy about the mind-body problem and thusoffers a route in to the core topics of this article. The dancer's hypotheticalanswer to Wittgenstein's question suggests that dance centrally involves (or seemsto involve) ideas and intentions causing or being embodied in physical move-

ment; it points also to how dance's value depends (or seems to depend) partly onthe phenomenal experiences of dancers, choreographers and viewers. Yet whatare ideas, intentions and phenomenal experience, what kind of reality do theyhave, and how do

theyrelate to the world of physical and physiological fact?

These aspects of the mind-body problem - the issues of mental causation and


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phenomenal consciousness - have received renewed attention in recent analyticphilosophy of mind, as materialist and physicalist views have grown in popu-

larity. If mental causation and phenomenal consciousness are indeed funda-mental to dance, debates about these issues in general have implications for, and

potential to illuminate, our art form, as this article will seek to show.2The relevance of the mind-body problem to dance is sometimes obscured

by mistaken assumptions about the nature of that problem and the way it is

currently being tackled by analytic philosophy. Within dance circles, there is a

tendency to think that even to refer to the mind-body relation as a 'problem' isto get off on the wrong foot by assuming that mind and body are separateentities. The term 'Cartesian dualism' is frequently invoked, often appliedpejoratively, and the philosophical position it denotes assumed to be antithetical

to dance's essence. What we should do, according to some, is to focus on theintegration of mind and body central to the dancer's lived experience or evidentin dance works.3 The 'problem', in this view, is one created by philosopherslabouring fruitlessly under Cartesian illusions; it dissolves when we adjust ourthinking to the terms and experiences of a long-neglected and undervalued artform.

There are two key difficulties with this received view of the mind-bodyproblem. Firstly, it misrepresents Descartes' work and the problematic withwhich he was engaged.4 There is not space to develop this argument here,but despite the unsatisfactoriness of the Cartesian solution it is important to

recogniseit as a

genuine attempt to tackle a perennial metaphysical issue: howto explain the existence of consciousness and its relationship to the materialworld of merely physical objects and of fundamental particles that science tellsus compose the world. In other words, how can an apparently immaterial thinglike a thought or decision cause me to raise my arm? How and why do I haveconscious awareness of the gesture 'from the inside', when this hardly seemsnecessary for the physical movement as such to be effected? These are questionsraised, not dissolved, by dance experience. The second difficulty with thereceived view is that it fails to recognise the focus and thrust of the last fifty yearsof debate on the mind-body issue. Since the 1950s, the majority view in analytic

philosophyof mind has been not dualist but materialist or

physicalist:where

Descartes posited the existence of two fundamentally different substances -consciousness and matter - most contemporary analytic philosophers claim thatthere is only one, developing various strategies to explain how consciousnessreduces to, or depends upon, its material base. The notion that the physical isall there is, and that consciousness must therefore be explicable - if it exists atall - in physical terms, is the current orthodoxy. In David Lewis's words, it is'non-negotiable' (Heil 2004, 5 1).5 If physicalism is the new orthodoxy in thephilosophy of the mind-body problem, then it seems appropriate that its tenetsbe examined in any contemporary engagement with that problem and itsimplications for dance.

To place emphasis on the physical might initially seem more accom-modating of dance than the dualist framework, given that dance is an art of the


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DANCE'S MIND-BODY PROBLEM 89

body, founded on human physicality. So surely highlighting the physical basis ofall experience both reiterates an insight already available to those involved in

dance and opens a route to a kind of philosophy sympathetic to a long ignoredart? But the term 'physical' has a very different scope and resonance in analyticphilosophy to those it has in the dance sphere. Physicalism argues not that allmental phenomena are embodied or incarnate, but that they are - or shouldbe - explicable in the terms of physical science.6 As a metaphysical doctrine,Physicalism claims that the physical sciences should be ultimate arbiters of whatthere is. Its arguments are built around a crucial premise, that physics is itself

causally closed or complete, in other words that 'all physical effects are fullydetermined by law by prior physical occurrences' (Papineau 2001, 8).7 From adance perspective, in other words, the movement of the dancer's body - like my

raising my arm-

is a physiological event determined by other physiologicalor neurological occurrences - the firing of neurons in a certain pattern, say -

which themselves may be caused by other physical stimuli. Whilst we may talk interms of creative freedom, artistic intention, aesthetic response, meaning andembodied thinking, therefore, these are ultimately ways of speaking about brain

processes and messages passing across the nervous system. The mind - includingits capacities for rational thought, emotion and bodily sensation - is nothingmore than the brain (or brain and nervous system combined) or nothing morethan a functional system whose operations are ultimately determined by thebrain's physical structure.8

Recent work in thecognitive

and neuro-science of danceencourages

thiskind of physicalist perspective.9 Ivar Hagendoorn (2004), for example, claimsthat our responses to dance performance like 'all our actions, perceptions and

feelings are mediated and controlled by the brain' (79). His 2004 article exploreshow brain structures 'may combine to ultimately give rise to the sensations we

experience when watching a dance performance' (ibid.); elsewhere, he seeks toelucidate the 'processes through which a brain comes up with a [. . .] movement'

(2003, 222). Other projects such as the Choreography nd Cognition esearch led byScott deLahunta, Wayne McGregor and Rosaleen McCarthy; Daniel Glaser'sDancers' Brains research, and the Australian Unspoken Knowledges roject work

alongsimilar

lines, seekingto

explainin terms of brain structures and

processeshow dance movement is generated, perceived and interpreted.10 These are

largely experimental scientific rather than philosophical research projects, but

they are compatible with the spirit of philosophical physicalism in treating the

investigation of mind and mental phenomena as a properly empirical enterprise- a series of questions to be answered by empirical scientific enquiry rather than

metaphysical argument.On one level, such physicalist premises seem unproblematic: to a certain

extent they - along with a deep-rooted respect for the scientific project - have

permeated the contemporary mindset to the point where the words 'mind' and'brain' are often used interchangeably and where it is assumed that the mostfundamental explanation of phenomena will be one in physical scientific terms.It is also undoubtedly true that scientific investigation has yielded some interest-


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ing findings about the neural structures nvolved in dance perception and action,giving weight to arguments for the explanatory power of such enquiry. There is

a parallel tendency in some philosophy of mind which considers the causalclosure of physics to be a principle whose truth has been amply demonstrated

empirically Papineau (2001), for example, sees 'no virtue in philosophersrefusing to accept a premise that, by any normal inductive standards, has been

fully established over a century of empirical research' (33), while Crane (2001)notes how '[f]or some philosophers, to deny the completeness of physics is to besomewhat in the position of Cardinal Bellarmino refusing to look down Galileo's

telescope: it is a plain refusal to countenance the known scientific facts' (65).Nonetheless, as Crane points out, it is not clear that physicalism's basic premiseis a scientific fact so much as 'a philosophical principle invented to fit what

physical science has discovered into a particular metaphysical vision of things'(ibid.). It is, after all, difficult to see how one could provide empirical prooffor the claim that 'all physical effects are fully determined by law by priorphysical occurrences', since this is arguably an assumption on which empiricalinvestigation itself rests.

Rather than develop these ideas here, however, this article will focus onhow a physicalism has difficulty accounting for fundamental aspects of dance,specifically mental causation and phenomenal consciousness. How can weunderstand dance art unless we can explain how intentions, decisions and desiresto move in particular ways can result in visible movement? In other words, dance

depends- or seems to

depend-

on various kinds of mental event having physicaleffects, but it is not immediately clear how this is possible if physicalism's prin-ciple of causal closure holds. What is more, the significance and value of danceseem to rest at least partly on the phenomenal experiences of dancers andaudiences: on the way it feels to perform or witness a leap, lunge or fall to thefloor, on what it is like to confront the physical presence of dancers or audiencemembers, or follow a phrase or movement from its initiation to completion.Again, these phenomenal experiences are difficult to accommodate within aphysicalist picture centred on the neurological substrate of experience not itsqualitative features. Recognising this suggests that, although we (as dancers,dance audiences and human

beings) maywant to

acceptour basic

materiality,we also intuitively view mind and aspects of consciousness as fundamental to ourexperience; physicalism fits the first but not the second of these intuitions,arguably more easily accommodated by a Cartesian framework (see Haldane2000, 303). This in itself, of course, does not demonstrate that physicalism iswrong, or prove Descartes right; nor will this paper attempt to argue either case.The aim is rather to outline some of the arguments around the problems ofmental causation and phenomenal consciousness, in the process bringing homethe nature and philosophical pertinence to dance of these key aspects of themind-body problematic.


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MENTAL CAUSATION

Imagine a dancer improvising on stage. She begins in silence and stillness, butgradually, in response to murmurings on the sound-score, starts to move in aslow, controlled way. She initiates movement in the extremities of the fingers andfeet, a series of impulses that pass through the limbs and joints to the body's core.As her centre engages, she moves more quickly and travels more expansively,her gestures becoming more complex and ambitious - until a moment when shefeels herself falling into a familiar pattern in which she merely reiterates a

sequence that seems to come automatically. The dancer makes the decision tofracture his sequence, break its apparently organic flow by unexpectedly leadingmovement from the elbow in a new direction. Realising also that her dynamic

has become monotonous in a series of flurries of movement of about thesame duration, she makes the effort to sustain certain phrases for longer and,ultimately, calm everything down to return to the virtual stillness from which she

began.This description - in a language that a dancer use might herself to charac-

terise her experience - evokes something of the complex thought processesinvolved in improvisation. The improvising dancer relies on technique and

familiarity with particular ways of moving born of extensive training, but also

engages in decision-making in the moment of performing: environmental

stimuli, consciousness of the evolving movement material and her own creative

ideas mayall affect what she elects to do next.11 The same seems true also of

dancers performing set material, who shape that dance through their decisionsto interpret it in a particular way. It also seems clear that choreographers'intentions help determine the nature, if not the meaning, of their artistic work.Indeed, audience members' appreciation of dance partly depends on the

assumption that they are watching mindful human beings engaged in intentionalaction, which in turn embodies (at least to some extent) the choreographic visionof the artist responsible for the work. Throughout dance, then, the assumptionoperates that mental phenomena - thoughts, ideas, decisions - are able toinfluence or cause the physical events visible on stage. Indeed, this is an

assumptionthat

pervades everydaylife and

seems,from a folk

psychologicalpoint of view, to be crucial to our sense of ourselves as human beings.12 And yetmental causation is difficult to account for at the metaphysical level, for bothdualists and physicalists. As already suggested, the problem arises for physicalismbecause mental causation appears to be ruled out by its core premise, 'all

physical effects are fully determined by law by prior physical occurrences'. Thisseems to exclude the possibility that anything beyond the physical can have acausal role. So how is it possible to square our intuition that - in dance, as inother spheres of life - ideas, thoughts and intentions do cause action with the

principle of causal closure or completeness?Reductive physicalism offers a straightforward answer, identifying mental

events with the brain processes.13 f the mind is nothing more than the brain,then mental events are neural events: their physical nature means they can cause


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physical occurrences without violating the principle of causal closure. If, for

example, the sensation of pain (a mental phenomenon in the sense that it is a

subjective experience of consciousness) is nothing over and above the firing ofCarbon-fibres in the brain of the subject, then because this is a physical eventthere is no logical difficulty n the way of explaining how that event causes pain-related behaviour like wincing, rubbing one's head or taking an aspirin (thoughit might be a complex and laborious process to trace this chain of causally related

physical events). The same principle also applies to the mental phenomenaassociated with dance, similarly reducible to happenings in the brain/nervoussystem, according to the terms of identity theory. If understanding another'smovement is nothing more than the firing of mirror neurons in the pre-motorcortex, then there is no logical stumbling block to explaining how that occur-

rence can cause someone to get up and dance themselves.14 here may be differ-ent ways of referring to these neural events: everyday language abounds in'sensations statements' with a very different flavour and meaning to the 'brain-process statements' of the neuroscientist; but, according to the identity theorist,the two kinds of statement still refer to the same thing - the physical event - andnot to some ghostly mental phenomenon distinct from it.15

Brain-mind identity theory thus solves the problem of mental causation, buthas come under sustained attack since its development in the 1950s, provingparticularly vulnerable to Hilary Putnam's (1980) charge that it denies multiplerealisability If conscious experiences such as sensations of pain, or kinaesthetic

awareness of one's movements, are strictly identical with specific (human) brainprocesses, then this seems to rule out the possibility that non-human creatureswith other brain structures can also feel pain or feel themselves move. This seemsto build too strong (and species chauvinist) an assumption into identity theory forit to be acceptable. Philosophers have wanted to leave open the possibility that itis not simply creatures with the same physico-chemical make-up as ourselveswho have conscious experiences and sensations. This means recognising thattypes of mental state like pain or kinaesthetic awareness can be realised by otherbrain processes in other physical structures, and a modification of the identitytheory is thus necessary to accommodate this insight.16

But anotherdifficulty

also arises whichperhaps

bears moredirectly

ondance concerns. This is to do with whether or not reductionist views which seekto explain mental in terms of physical phenomena actually fulfil their own brief.It is worth noting that the point of such theories is not to eliminate the mentalfrom the philosophical picture entirely, but to provide an explanation whichrenders it intelligible, in this case, in physicalist terms. In this sense, the terms'reduction' and 'reductionist' do not carry pejorative overtones, but identify anapproach which clarifies apparently complex phenomena by explaining themfully in the terms of another theory.17 The question then becomes whetheraspects of dance experience can be explained - indeed, rendered more intel-ligible - by accounts based on

physicalist premises.We

might replaceor seek to

reduce our ordinary, folk psychological explanations of dance behaviour toexplanations based on the findings and terms of physical or neuro-science. But


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do such accounts offer genuine explanations that enhance our dance knowledge?This is not a question that can be briefly answered in any comprehensive

way. Some might argue that we are already proposing a helpful clarification inmerely asserting that intentions, creative intuitions and viewers' responses todance performance are nothing more than brain processes of one sort oranother; this dissolves the 'mystery' of consciousness and brings it within the

grasp of science to investigate. But then how illuminating are neuroscientificaccounts of art phenomena? Again, this is too broad a question to be tackledhere, however a specific example may help illustrate a potential problem more

clearly. Hagendoorn (2005) draws on work in experimental psychology to

speculate about the effects on dance perception of an apparently innate human

preference for horizontal over oblique lines. He argues that this preference

affects how dance movement is appreciated and how artists select movement, inthat it is reflected in the shapes and figures they favour. Hagendoorn suggeststhat the enduring appeal of classical ballet follows from this technique's tendencyto align the body along the preferred horizontal and vertical planes. The

neurological explanation given for the preference is that the human brain more

easily detects such lines: 'the most likely hypothesis is that more orientationdetectors in the primary visual cortex are selective for horizontal and verticalthan for oblique lines' (2).

Leaving aside the general plausibility of the theory, does the latter

hypothesis actually help to explain the preference? Or does it just describe the

tendencyin other terms? On what

groundsshould we

preferthis

explanationover other (say, dance historical) types of explanation?18 We might if we learned

something about why more orientation detectors select in this way, but thisdiscussion at least does not explore in detail what neurological function is served

by this state of affairs or whether it has a role in evolutionary development. Evenif it did, the lack of reference in the account to art historical considerations seems

problematic. The neural structures specified might be responsible for mereaesthetic preference, but they seem unable to account for why and to what effectsuch lines predominate in particular works or types of art but not others. After

all, not all pictures look like Mondrians. Nor does this explanation seem very

helpfulin

understandinghow we

respond to, say,a Mondrian as an artwork,

rather than as a mere aesthetic object: there is no reference, for example, to the

meanings such lines might convey in specific art situations.19 he neuroscientist

might reasonably point out that empirical investigation of such issues is in its

infancy and that it will take time for scientific explanations to develop to reflectthe full complexity of such phenomena. The fact that existing explanationsmay be unsatisfactory does not in itself refute the premises of the scientific or

physicalist project. Yet examples like the one considered might also raise doubtsas to whether phenomena such as artistic understanding and meaning are of anorder that could ever be explained in the way reductive physicalism proposes.

One response that the defender of a physicalist approach might offer herewould be to step back from reductionism and adopt a more functionalist

perspective on mental phenomena: briefly, to argue that mental state types are


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not to be identified with neurophysiological types but with functional states (i.e.states defined by their position within a causal network of sensory inputs,

behavioural outputs and other mental states). Many varieties of functionalismthus characterise the mental as dependent upon but irreducible to its physicalsubstrate. For example, one could claim that our responses to another's move-ment do depend on the firings of mirror neurons, but our experience is notreducible to this neural event: rather, that experience is a functional state with a

particular character based on the inputs (e.g. the perception of another persondancing), dispositions to act (in this case, to dance oneself) and other mentalstates with which it is associated (such as desire or habitual enjoyment of

dancing).20 According to a functionalist perspective, there are different levels of

description of mental phenomena, whereby the higher level properties of artistic

activity revealed in, say, art historical analysis cannot be collapsed into the lowerlevel properties specified by neuroscientific accounts. Although this kind ofview allows greater scope for doing justice to intuitions about the richness and

complexity of conscious life, it again confronts the problem of mental causation.It has difficulty accounting for how mental properties irreducible to physicalproperties can be causally efficacious: if they are, then this still seems to violatethe principle of causal closure; if they have no causal role (but rather it is thephysical properties on which they depend which participate in the causal

network), then they appear merely superfluous.21 Many functionalist and non-reductive physicalist views avoid some of the difficulties of reductionism, butseem to lose its

advantagesin

resolving the problem of mental causation (Crane2001,59-62).This by no means presents a decisive refutation of physicalism and is not

intended to suggest a preference for dualist accounts of mental interaction:

although dualism does (like functionalism) allow more room for the mental in its

metaphysical picture, and does posit the causal efficacy of mental phenomena, it

struggles to explain how two fundamentally different substances or sorts of

properties (mental and physical) can interact with one another. But the consider-ations outlined are some of the issues that need to be tackled if physicalism is toaccommodate mental causation within its metaphysical picture; these argumentsand the

centralityof mental causation to dance should

give pausefor

thoughtto

those tempted to accept a physicalist view. This is an aspect of the mind-bodyproblem which does not dissolve despite the increasing proliferation and, insome cases, plausibility of neurological explanations of dance activity and experi-ence. Interestingly, even those projects focused on uncovering neuroscientificfacts about dance, and framed by a predominantly physicalist metaphysics, stillseem to assume mental causation. Both the Choreography nd Cognition rojectand Hagendoorn's work are interested in how neurological findings might becreatively exploited by dance artists. This implies that it is possible intentionallyto manipulate the brain structures and processes discovered.22 How could it beunless it is true that

thoughts,ideas and the mental more

generallycan effect

physical results?


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PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The discussion above raised the question of how effective reductive physicalistaccounts are as explanations of dance phenomena. There is also a question markover the completeness of those accounts: do they identify all or even the keyaspects of what goes on in dance? They do seem to leave one crucial dimensionout of the picture, namely the lived experience or what it is actually like to per-form, create and witness dance. Their focus is on the conditions of experience,not the experience itself. A description of the physiology and neuro-physiologyof a dancer raising her arm will not help us appreciate the complex ofkinaesthetic sensations she feels, or other aspects of her phenomenal experience.Similarly, characterising pain as the firing of G fibres may describe in objective

terms what happens in the brain when we have a headache, but it does not seemto touch the subjective experience of what it is actually like to be in pain. Thisis the problem of qualia or phenomenal consciousness which creates difficultiesfor any attempts to treat consciousness in purely physicalist terms. A neuro-

physiological account of what is going on in the brain will outline physicalstructures and processes that are objectively observable, but seems necessarilyto treat the qualitative dimension as superfluous and dispensable despite its

importance to our conscious lives: 'the subjective character of experience [...] isnot captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of themental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence' (Nagel 1974,

436).And

yet phenomenalconsciousness seems crucial to

whywe value

dance,whether we are performing ourselves or watching others perform.23When I watch a dancer on stage, for example, I am interested in her

contribution to the work as a whole and to the ideas and meanings the work

conveys. But my enjoyment of the dance, and my interest in it, also lies in the

phenomenal qualities of my experience in the theatre: the vivid brightness or

soothing colours of the lighting, the exhilaration felt at the speed and agility ofthe dancer, the satisfaction generated by the performer's precise timing and the

choreographer's careful structuring. t is possible that these aesthetic experiencesderive neurologically from brain structures and processes which favour peak-shift effects,

groupingof related features, isolation of

particularvisual clues

and the contrast of segregated features (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999,Hagendoorn 2003 and 2004), but arguably recognising and understanding all ofthis will not help us grasp what watching dance is actually like. The philosophicalproblem arises here not merely because our intuitions tell us that conscious

experience is too rich to be reflected in the existing language of the neuro-

physical; and not simply because we are amazed at the idea that the wet greymatter inside my skull can generate such sensations. The philosophical issue isover whether there are logical difficulties in the way of ever providing a

physicalist explanation for qualia and over whether or not there are good reasonsto think that phenomenal awareness is indeed essential to consciousness and, byextension, dance.

A number of philosophical arguments have been constructed around


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thought experiments which confront these issues. Frank Jackson has famouslydeveloped the 'knowledge argument' (1982 and 1986) which tests the limits of

what can be known about experience through the physical sciences. He imaginesa scientist called Mary who is confined from birth to a black-and-white roomand educated through black-and-white books, taped lectures and programmesshown on a black-and-white television. Being a student of some talent, Marymanages to learn all the physical facts there are about colour vision: what neuraland physiological structures enable it, how it works, what functions its serves.The question is whether, in the process, Mary learns all there is to know about

seeing colour or whether, on finally leaving the room and seeing red, blue and

green for the first time, she discovers anything new. Jackson argues that she doesacquire new knowledge because she suddenly understands what it is like to see

colour, something that the science of colour vision, however comprehensive,cannot teach her. And arguably, Mary does not just learn a new ability orconfirm empirically something she was previously only able to imagine: in

experiencing herself, she gains knowledge about the mental lives of others, a factquite distinct from all the physical facts that she had hitherto acquired (Jackson1986).

This thought experiment's implications can be developed in the dancecontext. I could - in principle at least - learn all the physical facts there are toknow about dancing: the complex functioning of the human anatomy in thewide range of movements available in dance; the physiological principles whichallow variations in

gesture, dynamic and texture; all the fine-grained neuralstructures which control and process movement. Yet arguably, would still learn

something new on participating in a dance class - or performing on stage - forthe first time, since I would understand something of what it is like to performdance movement in the space. With this understanding also comes some insightinto the experience of other dancers which - despite my extensive physicalscientific knowledge - was not available to me before.24 One might constructsimilar thought experiments around the experience of watching dance on stageor creating choreography. In each case, the qualitative feel of these activities forthose engaged in them does not seem to be captured by any amount of physicalscientific

understandingof the structures and

processesinvolved. I could know

that motion perception is predictive, comprehending the elaborate visual andneural processes that enable the brain to keep up with a perceived moving target;I might also know of the existence and function of mirror neurons and their

importance in my response to another's dance.25 But none of this knowledgeon its own will enable me to reconstruct - or even truly grasp - the actualexperience of watching a dancer in performance.

Philosophical opinion remains divided over how damaging Jackson'sknowledge argument is for physicalism and, in particular, or physicalist attemptsto account for consciousness. To some extent, its purchase depends on whetheror not it accurately identifies and

challengesthe core

premisesof the

physicalistposition. Crane (2001, 93-9) argues that it does not, since the argument assumesphysicalism to hold that all knowledge is physical. In Crane's view, one can be


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a physicalist without adopting this view: the principle of the causal closure or

completeness of physics is what is crucial, and this does not necessarily imply

physics' completeness in other respects or its explanatory adequacy. But even ifwe focus on causal closure, it seems, qualia are necessarily relegated to the statusof epiphenomena, that is mental occurrences which simply do not enter into thecausal network: f lived experience were to have physical effects then it would, bythe principle of causal closure, have to be itself in some way physical. Althoughsome physicalists may be happy to accept qualia as mere by-products of a

physical process, it does not really square with our intuitions: that it's the feelingof itchiness which leads me to scratch, for example, or the experience of pain thatmakes me reach for the aspirin bottle. We might similarly want to claim that theexhilaration experienced watching a dancer leap across the stage is what causes

me to cheer and applaud her virtuosity; or that my awareness of how my armfeels in that particular position affects how I make the transition to a subsequentgesture.

Intuitions alone, however, cannot show where physicalism goes wrongalthough they may help inspire or test relevant arguments. Although Jackson'sknowledge argument may not be decisive, other challenges to physicalism havebeen launched which also hinge on the issue of phenomenal consciousness. Oneof these involves a different thought experiment to Jackson's, but still designedto test the limits of conceptions of the mind-body relation. As with Jackson'sblack-and-white-room, the primary target is physicalist theory, in this case

specificallynonreductive varieties thereof.

Imagine someone who is alike me in every physical respect, whose bodylooks and functions in an identical way, who responds to various stimuli with thesame behaviour and whose brain and nervous system are identically structuredand engage in exactly the same processes as mine. The only difference is that thiscreature - call it a zombie-me - doesn't have subjective conscious experience.Zombie-me is not to be confused with your average, common-or-garden zombieof the Dawn of theDeadVariety, which looks and behaves differently o an ordinaryhuman being. Zombie-me looks, acts and reacts in exactly the same way as I do.But she (if we can even call her a 'she') does not have the visual experience of

seeingcolours,

althoughher brain functions in the same

wayas mine when I look

at a bowl of brightly coloured fruit. She is not kinaesthetically aware of her ownmovement, although she can dance the same phrases as me and improviseeffectively, or at least without an audience being able to tell purely by looking thatwe are different. She can attend a dance performance, seem engrossed in theaction on stage, her body going through the same patterns of behaviour as minewhen I sit in an auditorium. And yet, we cannot call her movement a responseto how it feels to watch the show, because she doesn't feel anything. When she

gasps, this is not an expression of her wonder at the performer's virtuositybecause she doesn't have the subjective experience of amazement, even thougha brain scan would reveal that the same neurons fire in the same pattern as in mybrain in a similar situation.

Philosophers such as Kirk (1974; 2003, 85-97) and Chalmers (1996) have


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asked whether it is really possible to imagine such zombies existing, whether theyare conceivable or whether the mere idea of a zombie is self-contradictory. f

zombies are conceivable, then this suggests that they are logically possible: thatis, there is no logical or conceptual difficulty that prevents us from imaginingthem, even though there may be insuperable practical stumbling blocks to themever coming into existence.26 Chalmers suggests that, if zombies are conceivable,then this shows that the mental is not entailed by the physical in the way that

physicalists suggest, because an entity could have all the physical structures n

place that, in my case, produce consciousness, but fail to do so in the case ofzombie-me. So if zombies are conceivable, then physicalism must be wrong.27According to Crane (2001), this argument has an advantage over the knowledgeargument because it treats physicalism as a purely metaphysical rather than an

epistemological theory (i.e. it takes physicalism to be a claim about what there is,not about what can be known about the world and how). There has, however,been extensive debate, particularly over the premise that what is conceivable ispossible, which plays a key role in the argument (Crane 2001, 100-1; Kirk 2003,89-90), as well as over the question of whether zombies are indeed conceivable(Kirk 2003, 90-4).

But the zombie thought experiment can also be elaborated to test ourintuitions about what is crucial to dance. Imagine a group of dancer-zombieswho all perform and behave exactly like human dancers, showing the samevirtuosity, expressiveness, kinaesthetic sensitivity and performance presence, atleast as far as the viewer who does

not know that they are zombies is concerned.Now consider whether it matters to the audience when they discover that theseperformers have no inner awareness of their actions, no felt sensations orphenomenal consciousness of their dance at all. Does this make a difference toour appreciation of what they are doing? What the audience sees is perceptiblyidentical with what a group of human dancers might perform. Yet knowing thatthese 'performers' feel nothing does seem to matter in quite a profound way. Ina recent discussion of what spectators see when they watch a dancer's movingbody, Francis Sparshott (2004) suggests that this includes the 'flesh', or 'actualmaterial stuff in motion', the body as 'articulated mechanical system' and the

'organic body, movingas a

living thingcontrolled

byits nervous

system' (280).But crucially, the audience also sees 'the gesturing human, its movement notmerely vital but essentially meaningful as expressions of a conscious, perceptive,motivated being' (ibid.).28 parshott notes how the performer also bears identitymarkers (age, gender, ethnicity) and refers to a particular social reality andcultural context, which may in turn endow it with a special symbolic significance.These further layers are, however, dependent on the fundamental humanity ofthe performer, or on our awareness, first and foremost, of the dancer as aconscious being consciously in control of her action.


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CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this article, the hypothetical dancer's answer to Witt-genstein's question about raising his arm suggested mental causation andphenomenal consciousness as important features of dance, which make it morethan just movement. If they are indeed fundamental, then they must be centralalso to any attempt to come to terms with dance philosophically. A positionwhich eliminates either from the picture is unlikely to be able to offer a satis-factory account. Of course, most physicalists would not go so far,29 ut this articlehas aimed to show how even less extreme physicalist positions encounterdifficulties in tackling these aspects of the mind-body problem, and hence in

accounting for crucial dimensions of dance activity. This is not to say that a

physicalist perspective can never overcome these difficulties, but it does indicateproblems that need to be addressed and the appropriateness of a cautiousapproach to physicalist 'solutions' to the mind-body issue within dance.

Although some, such as Kim (2001), are sceptical that the mind-bodyproblem can ever be resolved, possible solutions are still proposed and debatedwithin philosophy of mind, each having the potential to illuminate aspects ofsuch 'hard' questions if not to provide definitive answers.30 And each may thusalso have interesting implications for how we think about dance as an art formthat crucially involves both matter and consciousness. The detailed discussion ofthese issues in the specialist language of analytic philosophy of mind may seemto take us a long way from dance; but this article has tried to indicate some of the

ways in which it bears directly on crucial aspects of the art form. Exploring therelevance of mind-body philosophy helps grasp what is going on in dancesituations, whilst examining concrete dance experience helps ground abstractphilosophical reasoning and conclusions. Hopefully, this brief foray into the

territory has helped to demonstrate this and to show that the mind-bodyproblem really is a problem for dance and not just for the philosophers.31

NOTES1. These issues,

includingthe distinction between action and mere movement have been

extensively discussed n the existing philosophical iterature on dance: see in particularMcFee (1992, 49-66), Carr (1987) and Beardsley 1982).

2. Wittgenstein himself is not often invoked in the contemporary iterature on the mind-body issue and his own philosophical concerns had a somewhat different ocus, itself thetopic for another article since there s insufficient space to explore his perspective properlyhere. Indeed, Haldane (2003) notes: the decline of interest n Wittgenstein's work, and inthat of others influenced by him, is itself a mark of the naturalistic-cum-scientific urn'(303), the contemporary trend which is the focus of this paper. Existing analyticphilosophical work on dance which adopts a Wittgensteinian pproach also tends not toengage with the metaphysical ssues identified as a contemporary physicalist might seethem. Although Best (1974), Carr (1987) and McFee (1992) all question '[w]hat is theconnection between an intangible hing like an emotional state, and a physical hing like

a human movement' (Best 1974, 2), they treat that connection as fundamentally ogicalrather than causal and do not discuss n detail the relationship between brain states andmental states. To a certain extent, then, existing philosophy of dance refuses o accept the


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premises of contemporary debates and therefore does not enter into them, perhaps partlybecause of its Wittgensteinian eanings.

3. See, for example, Fraleigh 2004, 8-9) who suggests hat certain forms of dance practiceheal the manifold divisions (between culture nature, masculine feminine, as well asmind/body) spawned by Cartesian dualism. Similarly, Briginshaw 2001) suggests thatby reinstating and revaluing he body, dance challenges Descartes' dualism which 'seesthe mind and body as separate entities where the body materially occupies space and isa container for the conscious mind' (140). Like Fraleigh, Briginshaw associates themind/body divide she claims is instituted by Descartes with other, problematic binarydivisions between, for example, self and world, masculine and feminine. Neither theoristexamines the nature of Descartes' problematic, he detail of his argument or the contextin which it is formulated.

4. For a recent discussion of Descartes which challenges received views within philosophy ofhis work's hrust and significance, ee Baker and Morris (1996).

5. Although the terms 'materialism' nd 'physicalism' re often used interchangeably, hey

designatedistinct

positions.Materialism

s the metaphysical doctrine that everythingin the world is composed of matter (particles such as atoms or electrons, say), wherephysicalism argues that the question of what there is should be delegated to the physicalsciences; since science has revealed the existence of non-material entities such as forcesand waves, this is not equivalent o claiming that everything s material. In theory, hen,physicalism s metaphysically pen-ended since it treats he question of what exists as anempirical one to be resolved by physical science (see Crane 2001, 46-7). The rest of thisarticle will focus on physicalism rather than materialism, ince it is currently he morewidely held, and plausible, view.

6. 'Physical science' would typically include the different branches of physics, but alsochemistry, molecular biology and other sciences reducible to physics in practice orprinciple which s usually seen to exclude human sciences ike psychology and sociology).Proponents of physicalism are not always clear about the scope of 'physical science' or

how it should be denned: see Crane in Guttenplan 1994, 479-80) and Crane and Mellor(1990).

7. In Papmeau s view (2001), physicalism only came to prominence as a philosophicalposition not just when physical cience established ts dominance n the knowledge phere,but when this crucial premise became available to philosophers n the 1950s. On thephilosophical ignificance of physicalism s core premise, see also Crane 2001, 43-8.

8. This is a very broad characterisation f the implications of physicalism, which does notproperly reflect the distinctions between different varieties thereof. There is an attemptin what follows to develop some relevant distinctions - between identity theory andfunctionalism, or example - but the discussion ends to remain general on the groundsthat physicalism's asic thrust and problems need to be understood before such subtletiescan be grasped.

9. This is despite the fact that cognitive science as a discipline is usually regarded asconceptually underpinned not by physicalism per se but by functionalism which strictlyspeaking is compatible with dualism as well as physicalism). Often, however, the waycognitive and neuro scientific work s popularised reinforces a reductive physicalist iew.What is more, many of the philosophical ssues dentified n what follows can be raised nrespect of functionalism as well as (reductive) hysicalism.

10. See the following websites for further information and links to associated publica-tions: Choreography and Cognition, http://www.choreocog.net; Daniel Glaser's pages,http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/dglaser/science.shtml; nd the Unspoken Knowledges pages,http://www.ausdance.org.au/unspoken.

11. See the essays by Susan Foster and Kent de Spain in Cooper- Albright (2003) for moredeveloped accounts of the experience of improvisation. De Spain in particular, p. 33-6,explores he different ways in which intention becomes embodied in physical movement

and identifies various kinds of intention, from direct to indirect to 'intending theunintended' or 'allowing' (34). From the perspective of this article, each implies thepossibility of mental causation and emphasises the thinking that dancers do. This


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discussion of mental causation begins with improvisation ecause it vividly llustrates hethoughtfulness f dance (see also Sheets-Johnstone 1981), not because it has priority nthis regard over other dance practices: thoughtfulness s also characteristic of theperformance and creation of choreographed work, as Garr 1987 and McFee 1992 arguein depth.

12. 'Folk psychology' is a term widely employed in philosophy of mind to refer to theconceptual framework, or set of practices, conventionally used by ordinary people tounderstand, explain and predict their own and other people's behaviour and mentalstates' Eckhardt n Guttenplan 1994, 300). See Ghurchland 1981) and Jackson and Pettit(1990) for opposing views on whether folk psychology s, or articulates, n explanation ofbehaviour at a fundamental evel.

13. See, for example, Place (1956), Feigl (1958) and Smart (1959). Armstrong (1968) andLewis (1983) both present views which tackle difficulties resent n identity theory's earlyformulation.

14. The BBG 2 series The Dancer's Body, presented by Deborah Bull and broadcast in

September 2002, presentedresearch

attributinghe desire to dance to these kinds of

neural processes. See http://www.deborahbull.com or further information and pressreviews of the series.

15. For discussion of how the language of introspective eports has a different ogic from thatof material processes, ee Smart's 1959) seminal statement of brain-mind dentity heory.

16. Where type identity theories hold that types of mental state are identical with types ofphysical state (for example, that pain for all individuals/creatures n all cases is identicalwith G-fibre iring for all individuals/creatures n all cases), token identity theories avoidthe difficulty highlighted by Putnam. Token identity theory argues not that mental statetypes are identical with physical state types, but only that every individual mental event(token) s identical with an individual physical event (which could be a token of a varietyof different ypes). As Kirk notes, Donald Davidson's anomalous monism (Davidson 1970)presents a good example of a token identity theory, although whether or not this (orindeed other token dentity heories) can satisfactorily ccount for mental causation s stilla topic for debate (2003, 56-69). Similarly, here is ongoing debate about whetherfunctionalism another alternative to type identity theory - resolves the problem ofmental causation; ee pp. 9-10 below for a brief discussion of functionalism.

17. Thus Crane (200 1) argues or an understanding f reductionism as explanatory as well asontological and comments: [t]here s a general eeling n current philosophy of mind thatreductionism s a Bad Thing, and it is more reasonable o be an anti-reductionist, venonce the distinction between reduction and elimination s made. Insofar as reduction sunderstood as explanatory eduction where this is conceived of as a kind of explanation- then this must be a mistake. Genuine explanations are advances n our knowledge, andfaced with the possibility of advancing our knowledge t would be irrational o reject itmerely on the grounds hat it is 'reductive'. Or rather, t makes ittle sense to do so, since'reduction' s just a name for this sort of advancement of our knowledge 55).)

18. Contrast, for example, analysis which relates the aesthetic principles of ballet to theartistic radition of classicism, e.g. Macaulay (1987) and (1997), or Volinsky n Copelandand Cohen, eds. (1983) who explains ballets aspiration o verticality n both socio-culturaland evolutionary erms.

19. The distinction between aesthetic and artistic modes of appreciation s clearly drawn byBest (2004) and McFee (2005). Both emphasise how the particular artistic context,surrounding onventions and traditions determine the meaning of given dance works.

20. See Lycan and Block in Guttenplan 1994, 317-32) and Kirk (2003, 121-35) for furtherintroductory discussion of functionalist positions.

21. Papineau (2001, 10) thus claims that functionalism is 'a closet version of epi-phenomenalism', that is, the doctrine that mental phenomena exist but are causallyimpotent, mere by-products f physical processes over which they have no influence. The

extent to which different varieties of functionalism and non-reductive physicalismaccommodate mental causation s still a still contested opic: see, for example, Kim (1993),Jackson (1996), Thomasson (1998) and Clarke 1999).


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22. The Unspoken nowledgesroject goes even further: urthering he 'basic understanding fthe complex thought-processes nd strategies deployed by choreographers' s expected to'enrich and enhance choreographic nvention', revivifying a stagnant dance economy(http://www.ausdance.org.au/unspoken/background.html).

23. The popularity of phenomenological descriptive echniques in the dance studies heldsupports his observation, nsofar as they are intended not to analyse dance objectively butto offer 'a first person account of the world [and dance] as it is lived' (Sheets-Johnstone1981, 402). See also Sheets-Johnstone 1979) and (1984), Fraleigh (1987) and Thomas(1995, 170-5).

24. There are, of course, limits on how much it is possible to understand what particularmovements or movement sequences feel like to perform, for someone who has notperformed or does not have the capacity o perform a given dance (see Best 1978, 141-52;Smyth 1984; and McFee 1992, 264-72; a contrasting perspective on kinaestheticempathy, drawing on cognitive science, s presented by Montero 2006). Nonetheless, anyembodied experience of dance arguably gives nsight nto movement of an order different

to knowledge of its physiological and neurological character.25. Both the predictive nature of motor perception and the role of mirror neurons arediscussed n detail in Hagendoorn (2004).

26. Contrast he idea of a zombie, for example, with the evidently contradictory notion of around square which is both logically and empirically mpossible.

27. The zombie argument eems to have most purchase on nonreductive orms of physicalismwhich claim that the mental depends or supervenes on (rather han being identical with)the physical in some way. Such nonreductive approaches have developed partly inresponse to the charge of writers such as Nagel (1974) that physicalism simply leavesconsciousness out of the picture: he nonreductivist ecognises he existence of conscious-ness but argues hat it is a necessary consequence of the physical structure. But, accordingto the zombie argument, consciousness annot be necessarily ntailed by the physical nthis way if zombies are a logical possibility.

28. McFee (1992) and Carr (1987; 1997) argue along similar ines.

30. David Chalmers has famously labelled the task of explaining consciousness the hardproblem', which sits alongside other, ess intractable ssues that make up the mind-bodyproblematic: ee Shear, ed. (1997).

31. Thanks to Bonnie Rowell and the anonymous reviewers for Dance Research or theirinsightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. A shortened version of this materialwas presented at the Dance Research Conference organised by the Society for DanceResearch at Middlesex University on 25 March 2006. I am grateful to the conferenceorganisers and audience for the opportunity o discuss hese ideas.

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