What does Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë mean when he says thatdance is a form of knowing? It depends on his theory of consciousness. According to the outmoded view that he rejects, consciousness is something that happens inside the head. Asexplained on中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播:

作为哲学家和认知科学家，我们的遗产是知性主义者。internalist。这是个人主义。也就是说，思想存在于我们的头脑中。而大脑的任务就是通过建立心理表征来了解我们周围的世界。就智力遗产而言，身体本身是外在的，身体的运动也是外在的，身体只不过是一个载体，一个容器，把这个思想带到我们体内。

Dance, Noë suggests, offers a phenomenon that challenges this intellectualist view. It’s not just a bodily activity; it is “thoughtful, attentive, a kind of thinking as much as it is fully embodied,” Noë says. In other words, it’s an exercise of mind. It takes an incredible amount of perception, understanding, and control to do it well. But dance, as a form of mind, is not just having representations somewhere in the brain—mental pictures of your partner, the dance floor, and the steps you and your partner expect to take. Dance is both spatio-temporalandsocial—it's a series of coordinated bodily motions through the space of a dance floorand与一个或多个伙伴的合作和即时互动。在舞蹈中，我们以一种有意识的、接受的和控制的方式与环境互动。舞者对外部世界和其他存在有一种特殊的认识，这种认识不是通过传统的看、听、摸和与他人交谈的方式来获得的。

To explore Noë’s ideas further, David Foster Wallace’s writings on tennis provide an excellent resource.

For Wallace, tennis too is a special form of knowing. Tennis greats likeRoger Federer按照华莱士的说法都是天才华莱士所说的“天才”并不是简单地说他们在他们所做的事情上表现出了非常高的卓越水平。He means it in the sense ofintelligence—in roughly the sense we call Albert Einstein a genius. Hegoes into great detailto hammer the point home:

(打网球)也需要聪明。在一场高水平的比赛中，在一个点上的一次交换中只有一个镜头是一场机械变量的噩梦。给定一个三英尺高的网(在中心)和两个球员在(不现实的)固定位置，一个球的效力是由它的角度，深度，速度和旋转决定的。每一个决定因素本身都是由其他变量决定的——例如，一个击球的深度是由球越过网的高度和结合一些速度和旋转的综合功能决定的，球越过网的高度本身是由球员的身体位置、握拍的姿势、后挥的高度和拍面角度决定的，以及3-D坐标，球拍面在球在线上的那段时间内移动的坐标。当对手的位置和偏好以及他送你去打的球的弹道特征都被考虑在内时，变量和决定因素的树就会不断延伸，一直延伸下去。目前还没有一个硅基内存可以计算出变量的扩展，即使是一次交换;主机会冒烟。The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity …

Such complexity warrants his, and our, curiosity.

Like Noë, Wallace sets out to pursue a theoretical question: What can we know about the consciousness of an elite tennis player? This is where Wallace’s writing on tennis gets interesting. For to answer this question, Wallace has pored over sports memoirs like Tracy Austin’s and spent hours following top-100 pro Michael Joyce. And he has found, much to his frustration, that they have a singular inability to articulate their understanding of tennis.

这是为什么呢?华莱士似乎相信，打好网球所需要的无数个小时的肌肉记忆重复训练和意识思维的平静，会让一个人特别无法将经验带到意识中并清晰地表达出来。In other words, to become an elite tennis player is, paradoxically, to become a genius and a moron at the same time:

Those who receive and act out of the gift of athletic genius, must perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

It’s an interesting theory, but I have never bought it. Granted, to play tennis at a high level requires a quieting of the conscious mind, a narrow Zen-like awareness of the ball, the court, and one’s opponent. And to achieve that skill requires sacrifices. But to think that tennis players are peculiarly unreflective and dumb simply betrays Wallace’s prejudice. If you don’t believe me, read Arthur Ashe’s reflections in John McPhee’sLevels of the Game.

No, instead I suspect that to ask the question “What is it like to be Roger Federer?” is to ask philosopher Thomas Nagel’s question “What is it like to be a bat?” Nagel raises the dilemma to argue that there is something about bat consciousness (and by extension, consciousness in general) that remains irrevocably unknowable to us. Bats sense the world through echolocation, and yet we can never truly know what that’s likefrom the inside. Similarly, tennis and dance may be ways of knowing that are, at some level, unknowable from the outside.

To be Federer is to understand the world in a very special and distinct manner, like the bat’s echolocation. If we ordinary mortals walk onto a tennis court, we perceive the far baseline, 78 feet away on the other side of the court, in our own pedestrian way (i.e. we see it with our eyes, we hear the person shuffling his feet on the other side, we can walk to the other side and look at it up close, etc.)

But Roger Federer can perceive the baseline with his arm, his tennis racquet, and the ball. He knows, for example,exactly它离我们有多远，而不仅仅是通过视觉、听觉或步行到另一边来判断的。He knowsexactlyhow far away it iswith his racquetstrings. He perceives the far baseline in the special sense that if he hits the ball just so, it will travel through the air, and land on or just before it. Moreover, his special understanding extends spatio-temporally into the future in ways we can’t grasp. AsWallace writes:

Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision … these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere — they’re often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer’s manipulation of opponents’ positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce.

Thus Federer, while moving and swinging his racquet with such micro-precision and grace, is at the same time seeing what is going to happen in the world several shots into the future. Great tennis players are like super heroes with special powers. We mere mortals can’t know what it’s like,from the inside, to enjoy such gifts.We can only watch in awe.