Living, Moving, Dancing
The holist theory of action
In this essay I develop my personal holist definition of a person as “a conceptually conscious physical entity, alive and moving in a directly perceived world with other entities and persons.” In particular I discuss my theory of action and how there is no problem of interaction between mind and body.
How physical events (usually conceived of as neural events) can cause conscious events is a puzzle that drives many philosophers crazy, but what drives them even crazier is how consciousness, which they take to be a flitting, filmy thing, can cause physical events, such as bodily motion. This is the problem of interaction that has bedeviled the philosophy of mind since the time of Descartes, who divided the self into two distinct substances in his theory of mind-body dualism.
Some moderns have offered an explanation in terms of “downward causation” of the mental realm to the physical, but this is little more than a phrase, unless it is crypto-dualism. Others, throwing in the towel, assert that consciousness does not cause anything: only neural events have bodily consequences, and consciousness is at most a dead-end side effect of the brain doing the real work, like the heat emitted by an engine. This doctrine, known as epiphenomenalism, claims that we only feel like we cause things. It’s merely incidental simultaneity that our perception of agency aligns with patterns of action. The theory requires unbelievable coincidences. What are the odds?
(Note: experiments by Benjamin Libet suggest that brain action precedes conscious recognition of intention. I believe these experiments have been improperly interpreted, and I address them in my monograph Free Will: A Response to Sam Harris.)
My reply to the claim that consciousness cannot cause actions is that the claim is in a sense correct. Consciousness as such does not cause our actions because conscious-ness, which is not a thing, doesn’t act at all—people do. Consciousness is an improper reification of the attribute of being conscious. It’s not a substance, not ontologically and not conceptually. When it comes to action, the adjectival attribute “conscious,” which is the primary quality as far as observation goes, can be regarded as an adverbial attribute. I, a conscious person in the world, see a glass of water, a thing in the world. I decide to drink the water and therefore go get it. I act consciously. There is no extra layer here that needs explaining by philosophy, no gap that needs bridging.
There is no mysterious, flitting, filmy, almost mystical, thing doing the work because it’s I, the organism entire, that moves in the world. Dualism is false. The idea of a separable mind is a misconceptualization. Once again, one can’t treat “pure” Cartesian consciousness as the “top layer” of the organism and peel it off to act on its own. My action is me-as-whole acting.
This may seem like common sense, but many philosophers and non-philosophers get it wrong—frequently by introducing the notion of representations of the world in the brain or mind. As Merleau-Ponty writes:
Thus, consciousness will remain a motor consciousness insofar as it provides itself with a “movement representation.” The body, then, executes the movement by reproducing it according to the representation that consciousness adopts and according to a movement formula that it receives from it…. We must still determine through which magical operation the representation of a movement gives rise in the body to precisely this very movement.
That’s the problem: How does an image cause anything? I would claim that we do not perceive representations of things but the things directly, and I discuss the implications of that claim here. Briefly, realism in perception and personal holism imply each other, and both put us into the real world where no interdimensional interaction is necessary.
I am writing a lot about activities. That’s because conscious-ness, ultimately, is not a noun nor even just an adjective or adverb. At a deeper level it is a verb. Not a literal part of speech, of course, but an activity. Not a discrete activity that can be pulled out from everything that the organism does and reified, but one set of activities integral to the whole.
We don’t have a perfect word for conscious-ness as an activity in English. To call it “thinking” as Descartes does, is too intellectual. I would call it “exploring.” That may still sound too intellectual or active. After all, we are just as conscious lying on the beach as when are when we are in the laboratory. True, but I would say that a deep level, the savoring of sensations is a sort of low-key exploration and is still an activity of the self, a process that one engages in. Also, in everyday seeing and touching the eyes and hands do not receive information passively but move around in the organism’s environment, searching out shapes, boundaries, perspectives, textures, etc. This is the lesson of J.J. Gibson’s theory of vision, which can be generalized to the other senses.
The reason that so many philosophers have trouble with interaction is that they continue to accept some form of Cartesian dualism, in a conceptual form, insofar as they reify consciousness and make it a separate thing that has to interact with the physical world, which they claim is closed and does not require mental causes to explain its goings on. The cure for this problem is to stop reifying consciousness and to stop regarding the physical world as dead, unconscious, and causally closed. Start with the primacy of the given. Atoms and neurons are not given. Their existence and nature are discovered and inferred. What is given are people; elephants; rocks; the hot, bright sun, etc. Atoms and neurons are not more real than they are.
We know people are conscious. We know that we are alive. We know that we move consciously. We just have to be careful not to misconceptualize these facts, because dualism is tempting. As far as we have any reason to believe, we are not machines operated by spirits. We are conscious flesh. We don’t know how that’s possible down to the last detail, but that’s what appears to be the case.
Some philosophers would try to dismiss all this by labelling it “folk psychology,” but is that fair? The world of people, tables, dogs, etc. is self-evident. That I cause my actions consciously is self-evident. To try to deny these truths based on theoretical knowledge, especially when we know so little about the universe, is scientism. You see, two can play the labelling game, but I’ve got a lot more solid evidence on my side, because my experience is self-evident, not inferential. We can’t dismiss the phenomenon of conscious, efficacious matter out of hand when we deal with it every day.
I suppose some philosophers would want to call my position “non-reductive physicalism,” which is a form of “emergentism” of mind from matter where the mental happenings cannot be reduced to the physical ones (usually conceived of as being in the brain). This still seems like crypto-dualism to me, with the emergent “mind” being a reification of “conscious-ness.” I don’t want to say that a mind or even a brain is conscious; I want to say that a whole bodily person is conscious. And yes, that means if I lose a limb, I am less conscious, because I can’t feel or move it anymore, even though I would maintain my personal identity, which I am happy to concede has its seat in my brain.
And I don’t want to speak of emergence, because that gives priority to the constituent elements of the body, as if reduction were the default position, which is why “non-reductive physicalism” has to be described negatively (as a non-something) and defensively. All we know is that the organism as a whole is alive and conscious on its own terms. Wholes really exist, and the reductionistic project is flawed, or at least limited, from the start. Presumably, something about matter makes life and consciousness possible, but that’s really all we can say scientifically for now, and that’s all philosophy is responsible for saying ever.
This view takes some getting used to if you have done a lot of philosophical thinking, but really, it’s a natural way to think about oneself.
“I dance and move as a living, bodily being, mediated by my brain—but I do not set my limbs in motion from the brain like a homunculus.” (Fuchs, p. 111)
This is not merely an academic point of interest. Many people who have retreated into their “minds” have an awkward relationship with their “bodies.” I remember when I was in rehearsals for a musical in high school, the other actors said I danced like Frankenstein’s monster! Actually, I was dancing like a dualist.
At best, dualist theories assert that the brain “plans a voluntary action and then commands the muscles to move” (a view criticized by J. J. Gibson quoted in Noe, p. 149). As a counter to this command theory, I propose that our conscious intention to move is in our movement, in the same way our conscious-ness pervades our bodily self. Prior, purely mental, intentions as such do not cause actions. Rather, the conscious living being moves consciously.
A prior intention to move is not an intention in the effective sense but merely a necessary context or plan for the intended action. No amount of prior intention will make you do something until you “just do it.” In this respect, the Nike ads are correct: just thinking about doing something will never make you do it. All voluntary action is ultimately spontaneous, by which I don’t mean impulsive or thoughtless. Spontaneity may be deliberate, as when a brain surgeon works meticulously to make her incisions, but when all is said and done, she makes them.
People who learn to act most of the time without excessive pre-planning, just by understanding and doing, are very fortunate indeed. I do not mean this in an anti-intellectual sense. It might take years of thinking and practicing before one can improvise in the moment without much thinking. Playing a musical solo comes to mind. But we could also be talking about natural and graceful action on the fly, which may result from especially well-integrated elements of the human layer cake (i.e., conscious, preconscious, unconscious action) that allow one to act intuitively without much on-the-spot planning. Once again, I’m advocating getting out of your head, even if doing so takes a lot of “in-head” preparation somewhere in the past. One way or another, the real, effective intention is contemporaneous with the action, or more exactly, it is the leading edge of the action of the whole.
Note, however, that intentions-in-action need not be bare physical motions. When I intend to pass a car while driving, I am not merely intending motions of my hands and feet; I am intending to pass the other car. I am probably not even especially aware of my hands and feet. We are conceptual beings, and we intend conceptualized actions. That is the link between prior intentions and intentions in action. It is an interesting question for psychology just how long an intended action can continue without the actor stopping and planning anew.
Intention, properly understood, and movement are only asunder when something is wrong with the system, such as physical or psychological paralysis.
We do not inhabit a world of input to and output from the mind or brain. We move as conscious physical beings in a world of directly known things and other people. I am not just watching these things on mental television; I am walking among them, touching them, etc. (More of my definition of “person” here.) Motion is integral to the self, and we move with our whole beings. This is true even when we speak of specific body parts. I don’t “use” my hands to grasp or my feet to walk. Rather “My grasping hands are ‘I who grasp,’ my feet are ‘I who walk,’” and so forth (Luijpen, p. 35).
The fundamental function of being conscious is to facilitate an organism’s intelligent action at whatever level of intelligence it has. The reason for this function is that we must navigate and manipulate the world to stay alive. Mortality—or to put it more affirmatively, life—is what gets the whole process going. Consciousness does not exist as an end in itself, as some philosophers seem to believe when they treat it as outside any practical, social, or emotional context. (Descartes and his followers, for example, do not seem to have the slightest idea what consciousness is for.)
While we’re on the subject of motion, we should discuss how dualism negatively impacts our physicality. The problem is its excessive intellectualization of life. Please don’t get me wrong; I am not preaching an anti-intellectualist sermon. I am rather intellectual myself. I am saying only that living too much in one’s head has a bad effect on one’s physical life.
Ideally, walking, running, swimming, playing games, making love, and so forth should be pleasant, graceful, and engrossing, because they involve the whole person. One should arrange one’s life to do enough of such activities to be physically and emotionally healthy, never sacrificing them to the mental demands of work or to sedentary activities such as reading or watching TV. Unfortunately, one cannot live as a whole all the time. Sometimes, you must rehearse irregular verbs “in your head” or let the dentist work on your mouth while you dissociate a bit, but these are deviations, however necessary, from what should be the norm.
For me personally, the ends of the wholeness spectrum are dancing and writing. Dancing, even if the steps must be learned and initially feel unnatural, is an act of joyful motion, experienced as a spontaneous flow state, a realization of my conscious and bodily wholeness. And even writing, as I can attest, is not all in the head if you reach out to reality with your words and are mindful of your workstation and posture. Writing can be a way to physically project yourself into the world, especially when your ideas are grounded in reality. My eyes and head, my hands and arms, my reason and feelings—all are “I who write.”
I feel as if my theory is a bit radical, so let me try to describe it in other words.
The problem of interaction is in essence a problem of a mind getting representations to relate to things that are in effect in another dimension. By what magic can an image cause a body to move? My response to the problem of interaction and my theory of action rest on the idea of the self as a conscious, bodily whole in a directly perceived world that it shares.
A person—who is not a mind, soul, or even a brain—acts directly just as he perceives directly. My relationship to my body is not one of remote control guided by closed-circuit television. Merleau-Ponty’s slogan was “I am my body.” I don’t use that wording because it sounds to me like eliminative materialism, although he didn’t mean it that way. I will, however, say “My body is me.” My hand is me, so naturally I am aware of it and can move it. I am moving (me).
Although we can imagine things “in our head” that are representations, our basic contact with the world is through the senses, not through what is in our head, so there is no gap between substances to bridge. I, a conscious, bodily being, am in the world where I can move. There is no such thing as conscious-ness that has to interact with matter; there’s just conscious matter, and that matter is conscious not of images that would have to have magical powers but of self and world as physical things. Persons, bodies, things, and world all inhabit the same space. They are not in different dimensions that have to be bridged.
What makes this a little confusing is that we are conceptual beings. The imagination “in our head” seems like “mind,” especially that part of the imagination that narrates the self-concept. (I’ll be writing more about this in another essay.) Our conceptual plans imbue the intentions that are in our actions, and if one intellectualizes too much, there can feel like a gap between “mind” and “body.” But one can remedy this by “moving into the world” by “moving into one’s body.” I call this technique “extending one’s self aura over one’s body” or presence.
I believe my theory of personal holism, which somewhat resembles Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Thomas Fuchs’s ideas, can resolve a number of philosophical conundrums, but perhaps more importantly, it can help people live better lives, including helping them dance.