No Dancing without a
Dancer
Rather, there can be no dancing without a choreographer. There is dancing, therefore there is a
choreographer.
The support for the premise is that we have often seen or at
least heard reports from people who have seen people dancing, whether they call
it ballet, square dancing, ballroom dancing, or disco. In all these cases, we
have people who observe that dancing is going on and with the certainty of
direct perception. We may ask what are
we seeing when we see what we call dancing.
One thing we might be saying is that there is some behavior of
description XYZ that when we see it we say, “Look! Dancing!” But it seems that something can exhibit
behavior of description XYZ but not be dancing.
This is because dancing is taken to be a form of
self-expression, a complicated gesture to express a person’s ideas and
feelings. Imagine a humanoid automaton
that a scientist builds to behave strictly according to a description of the
behavior of a dancer when she performs according to certain choreography and
imagine the automaton doing this alongside the choreographer performing her own
choreography which is the same as that used by the scientist. In the case of the choreographer, we would
say that her dance expresses her ideas and feelings, but the automaton is not
being expressed by its “dance”. This is because dance is not mere behavior but
also has intentionality. To dance is to
express one and so there is something to be expressed. Dancing is about something and indicates
something.
We can imagine a quadriplegic choreographer who is able to
program a computer by hitting keys on a keyboard with a dowel in her
mouth. She may have the keyboard to
program the scientist’s automaton and program it to perform original
choreography. Someone observing may
think they are watching a dancer that is not an automaton. In this case, what makes possible the perception
of a dance is the ability of the audience to recognize the behavior of the
automaton as dancing, as a gesture that indicates someone’s ideas and feelings. The choreographer is expressing herself
through the automaton. In this case, the
expression of the dance in the automaton is derived from and presupposes the
original expressive design of the choreographer which is intelligible to the
audience. If the automaton were to
behave that way without the choreographer and without the audience, there would
be nothing expressed and no dancing going on.
If the world were a space-time block all the way down, there
would be nothing being expressed. All
behavior would be just extrinsically correlated phenomena in space and time. On this view the choreographer would herself
be no different from the automaton – an automaton controlling another automaton
– so that its automatons all the way down.
But if that is true there would be no dancing. Similarly, if Hume is right and all behavior are
custom forward and backward which is characterized by conditioning all the way
down and through and through. And therefore
Hume is wrong in thinking that skepticism does not remove any of the wonder of
the world because it would wipe away dancing and similar things. But if there is dancing, then the world is
not just a block of space-time. Embodied
in that space-time are minds that dance and which are distinct from world of
mass.
