Zombie-Like or Superconscious? A Phenomenological and Conceptual Analysis of Consciousness in Elite Sport

Abstract

This file was dowloaded from the institutional repository Brage NIH -brage.bibsys.no/nih Breivik, G. (2013 PurposeAccording to a popular view, elite athletes are almost like zombies when they perform their fantastic feats. I think this view is highly misleading and I will argue for another, more complex view, which leaves plenty of room for consciousness. I will use both conceptual clarification and a close phenomenological description to set things straight. BackgroundThe philosophy of mind has become a central discipline in modern philosophy and in many ways has taken over the lead from the philosophy of language. Developments in cognitive science, neurophysiology and computer science have created fertile crossdisciplinary grounds in which many "old problems", such as the mind-body problem, can be raised in a totally new setting (1). One of the central topics is the role and place of consciousness (31; 34). Modern science seeks objective knowledge, and the subjective experience of consciousness has created something of a problem since the subjective view from within is hard to account for in objective terms. One solution was physicalism, which simply says that conscious experience is the same as the underlying brain states. The next solution, which is still going strong, was functionalism, which says that consciousness is just the software programme that can be run on various types of physical hardware. Information processing models have dominated in cognitive science and psychology, and also have a strong hold in motor learning and control (33). An increasing number of philosophers are dissatisfied with computer models and find that, with the new insights in neurophysiology, the studies of the mind must be linked to the brain as a biological entity instead of using computer models (25; 26). Furthermore, there is a rising agreement that the subjective experience of the conscious mind must be taken seriously as a fact, and that the hard problem today is to explain how it is possible that experiential qualia, the feeling of what it is like to have some experience, can arise out of "soggy grey matter" (18; 21). The soft problem is easier to address: how mind states are linked to and located in specific brain areas. In the following presentation I will neither try to solve the hard problem nor contribute with new details on the soft problem. My goal is rather to show how phenomenal consciousness, and hence one part of the hard problem, is expressed in sport.

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