Shaun Gallagher, PhD, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis.
We know about different practices of mindfulness involved in meditation and other contemplative practices. I’ll focus on mindfulness in different types of performance. Specifically, I’ll look at phenomenological studies of what it means, in regard to self-consciousness, to be in the flow (sometimes characterized as being mindless) during athletic, dance, and music performance. I’ll frame the discussion around two different debates in recent philosophy of mind. First, to stake out the general parameters of the discussion, a recent debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the nature of mind and action. Second, to focus on the specifics of the nature of self-consciousness, a recent debate about deflationary accounts of minimal self-consciousness and whether such minimal self-consciousness survives in flow experiences, or in meditation. One of the issues at stake in these debates concerns how we would be able to answer questions about experiences that are sometimes characterized as selfless. Do phenomenological (or microphenomenological) interviews give us a way to access such selfless experiences, and do reports on selfless experience require (in some paradoxical way) that there be some form of pre-reflective self-awareness during selfless experience? I regard this as still an open question, but I tend to think that first-person reports on experience require a pre-reflective self-awareness during that experience. On this view, first-person reports on selfless experiences would mean that the experiences were not really selfless. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
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