# Tennis, Buddhism, and Acting: Toward a Pragmatic Non-Dualism
Published: 2026-02-17
Canonical: https://journal.xiaotianfanx.com/journal/tennis-buddhism-and-acting-toward-a-pragmatic-non-dualism

On Descartes from The Science of the Mind, by Owen Flanagan, and The Ontological Problem from Matter and Consciousness, by Paul Churchland. This journal could be substantially more spontaneous and whimsical than others.

 

	Disclaimers ahead: Although the most intriguing kind of dualism I've encountered in the text is probably property dualism—which, from another perspective, one could argue is not really dualism at all—for the purpose of this passage, I would like to focus on one of the arguments Descartes provided for substance dualism. This is the view that mind and body are essentially two distinct kinds of substance. As noted in Flanagan's chapter, this third argument—the divisibility argument from the Sixth Meditation—is, in many respects, the weakest. And in fact, that is exactly the reason I want to pick it up here. I will first restate the argument as it is presented:





Premise 1: An entity cannot have a property and its opposite.



Premise 2: My body is divisible and has parts; divisibility is part of what it means to be a body.



Premise 3: My mind is indivisible and has no parts. (omitting the long quote here.)



Conclusion: Therefore, my mind and my body are different kinds of things.

 

	There are obviously many counterarguments we can make by pointing out how the argument is logically invalid or how the premises are unsound. For example, the first premise is already largely contestable. While it seems neat and seductive to say an entity cannot have a property and its opposite, in many cases—within human understanding, science, and language—properties are not fixed objects but relational. For scalar/relational properties, for example, a thing can be both cold and hot at the same time with respect to different referential systems. A man can be both tall and short compared to different people. We can even argue that the Earth is more like a sausage or more like a ball, depending on the actual mathematical, geographical, or geometrical representation of it.

 

	Even considering the divisibility that Descartes particularly used in this argument, it is still not an intrinsic property but a functional one—even if we assume his first premise is true—and that doesn't really help his modal argument. We can examine, for example, to what extent our body is divisible or not. Descartes seems to assume the physical body is divisible because it is extended, and any extended object can be divided. That is one hidden premise to consider. Another potential rationale is that the body is divisible because it has different functions that can be divided into parts: what my hands could do, what my legs could do, what my mouth and stomach could do. This serves as an argument for the divisibility of the body.

 

	However, one could also argue that the body is indivisible because it is the sum of all its components—a functional whole. When you divide a component from the body, it is no longer a part of "one's body" in the same sense. Thus, to have a body of one's own, it must be viewed as an indivisible whole. While I acknowledge this argument is not necessarily logically superior to Descartes', it demonstrates the possibility of a different perspective.

 

	Regarding the mind's indivisibility, Descartes seems to create a slippery slope from a subjective perspective. The rationale behind his argument is that because he did not perceive a divisible part in his thoughts, the mind itself is, in reality, indivisible. Yet, it is quite obvious that the perceivability, the reality, and the ontological nature of an entity could be distinct. We can also introduce perspectives from our modern understanding of the mind to argue that it is actually very much divisible—divided just as we divide our body in terms of functionality. There are several theories that rest upon this idea, such as Minsky's "Society of Mind," which I mentioned in a previous journal. Furthermore, even if we conceive of the problem beyond functionality, consciousness itself does seem to be indivisible within one's subjective experience. However, for people with dissociative disorders or schizophrenia, it is largely arguable whether they experience a unified consciousness.

 

	After all, this argument itself, just like the other arguments Descartes proposed, is to many extents formally begging the question. It seems to assume substance dualism in advance—grounding the divisibility of the body and the indivisibility of the mind based on dualism—and then using that to argue for dualism itself. At the end of the day, if we follow the methodic doubt that Descartes himself promotes, it is evident that we can doubt the grounding basis of these premises. Thus, according to methodic doubt, because it is possible at all to doubt these premises, they can no longer serve as a grounding foundation.

 



 

	Anyhow, my reason for bringing up this "weak enough" argument by itself is not to actually criticize dualism—there are already a bunch of counterarguments against it (and for it, of course). My point is to use it as an example to describe a phenomenon I personally experience—ironically, in this current context—when I read these texts of early thinkers.

 

	I often find reading some of the "early texts" amusing and delightful. This is not necessarily because I am amazed by the content or the language (not to say those are bad), but rather, I find those texts—at least my reading of them—amusing in the sense that they are so "cute" (descriptively, not dismissively, for sure). They possess a decent and firm belief in what they are writing—or in other words, epistemic confidence—from Aquinas to Anselm, and from William James to Descartes—although these writers span nearly a millennium.

 

	Of course, if we were to really present ourselves in those times and walk in their shoes, I assume they would have had other concerns, uncertainties, and implications that they couldn't put into words—or that made their words appear to be existentially neat. However, speaking only from a first-person perspective in a time of a new cluster of global and existential crises, I find myself projecting a delusion of a certain assured mental, existential, and philosophical state onto those people and those writings. There's something refreshing about philosophy conducted before radical skepticism became the default position. As a result, I am always invited to smile when reading those texts.

 

	In comparison, later texts and theories inevitably become more comprehensive, as they are built upon those early thoughts and ideas. Thus, they bear the duty not to fall into the same logical or methodological hazards that may have seemed innocent back then. Take Churchland as an example. To arrive at eliminative materialism, it is necessary to bring up the entire ontology problem and then argue from as many perspectives as possible for that eventual radical claim.

 

	For context, eliminative materialism posits that the traditional or folk psychology understanding of the mind is not only incomplete but fundamentally false. It suggests it is a mistake to even begin considering this problem using concepts like belief, desire, or fear—terms that were used for thousands of years before a proper scientific methodology ever appeared. Clinging to theories based on those terms—which evolved across millennia—will inevitably fail to explain basic phenomena that could be better explained by an entirely new system. A typical example is the irreducibility of the concept of "witches" to mental illness; we eventually realized that witches do not exist at all. This paradigm shift—the entire replacement of the old vocabulary used to study the problem—is what Churchland seems to claim.

 

	To some extent, this point can again be used to criticize Descartes' arguments regarding the fallacy of introspection: just because it feels like there is "something" doesn't mean there truly is. Feeling as though one has an indivisible mind—a persistent, unified, and solely mental entity—does not mean one actually does. It is simply because we cannot directly access our actual internal physical and material behavior that we resort to a simpler version of explanation.

 

	However, Churchland faces a self-refutation challenge: if beliefs don't exist, how can we 'believe' in eliminative materialism? His response might be that we're using folk psychological terms instrumentally, as a ladder to be kicked away once neuroscience provides better vocabulary. But this raises a new question: can we even coherently formulate neuroscience without folk psychological concepts like 'understanding,' 'discovery,' or 'evidence'? This is why EM seems 'premature' to me, not because it's wrong in principle, but because we lack a replacement vocabulary. And to devise or even merely envision a completely new set of vocabulary/language seems already as challenging as the ontology problem itself. 

 



 

	Nevertheless, getting back on track, my point is to explicitly bring to the table this problem with divisibility—or, you could say, reducibility—and emergent phenomena.

 

	Although it may be a less ideal analogy, what I was saying regarding earlier and later texts is that while the earlier texts seem quite reducible—appearing neat and concise—the reducibility of the later texts is substantially less, or to say, more difficult. The effort required to reduce them to their primal forms and trace back their origins is significantly higher. While we can, of course, trace back the clues hidden in those thoughts and study how they evolved, I would argue that it is possible to eventually reach a point—and to some extent, we have already reached it—that it is simply too costly to reduce every origin and every thought back to its source whenever we perceive a new theory or theorem.

 

	Another virtual analogy I like to make is mathematics. As a well-accepted understanding, math is essentially deductive and built on primary axioms and theorems, gradually evolving into the complex cohort of theories that we call math today. The point is that although we can theoretically go back through every proof behind every theorem and reduce it to the original, irreducible axioms, there is a vague but standing threshold in practice. Beyond this threshold, reducing them in every case back to the primal axioms is pragmatically meaningless.

 

	In that sense, beyond that threshold, can we argue that it is a kind of emergent behavior? Of course, here we are no longer talking about the strong ontological emergence but rather a weaker epistemological one. Yet the only purpose of this example is, again, to show that even with the theoretically must-reducible system, there could be a pragmatic irreducibility emerging beyond that vague but existing threshold. Probably, better examples may be chemistry and physics.  In principle, chemistry reduces to quantum mechanics—but in practice, we cannot predict chemical properties from first principles. Water's 'wetness' is not deducible from facts about H₂O molecules, even though wetness is nothing over and above molecular interactions. That could resonate with—or could be similar to—how we perceive the mind emerging from materialistic mechanisms. 

 

	Although the mind may be, in principle, reducible to neural processes, in practice, the complexity creates a threshold beyond which reduction becomes impractical—and perhaps unnecessary. This is the tentative framework I use to approach the problem: not through substance dualism, but through the lens of pragmatic emergence. As for whether it will eventually lead me to non-reductive physicalism or property dualism, we will have to wait and see.

 



 

	So much for the "conjecturing." I'd like to bring it back to my own subjective experience that might relate to this mind-body relationship problem—not necessarily to argue for or against dualism, but to explore what embodied practice reveals about the relationship between cerebral understanding and bodily knowledge.

 

Case Study 1: Tennis and the Epistemology of the Body

 

	The first point is quite epistemological, from a sports perspective. Just for context—although I've mentioned this elsewhere in my journals—I used to be a professional junior basketball player for the municipal team of Shanghai, receiving a paycheck when I was just a primary school kid. But that's something from another life; I haven't played basketball since, and even developed such PTSD after a cardiac event that it foreshadowed almost a decade where I wasn't playing any sport at all.

 

	Nonetheless, the point is that I only started to treat sports training as both a physical and cerebral activity when it comes to table tennis, and tennis later on—after I lost the intuitive biokinetic knowledge of using my body, I had to start learning and studying it as a discipline. Tennis and its physicality eventually became an epistemological reality check for me to realize the distinction, as well as the unification and communication, between the mind and body.

 

	The first point concerns the misalignment of one's proprioception with the physical form of the body—in other words, the gap between one's self-knowledge or self-introspection and the actual movement and behavior of the body in reality. To some extent, I believe this phenomenon—the gap—cuts both ways in the dualism debate. It can be argued that such a distinction exists because reasoning and the cerebral understanding of a movement often fail. This failure occurs not only when facing other minds, but also within one's own body—the failure to align one's proprioception with the actual behavior of the physical form. This alignment can never be achieved, and the gap can never be filled, without actual drills and practice. Essentially, this perspective considers the body as an epistemological entity that, by itself, understands and generates private knowledge. In that sense, one could even argue that the body has its own understanding and consciousness.

 

	On the other hand, there is another possibility we discussed: the emergent phenomenon is a result of overly complex, fine-grained data and information. Our body, receptors, and subconscious calculative mechanisms provide this data to our brain and mind, but the processing speed of our perception is simply not enough to directly access this sub-symbolic data. Consequently, it appears to us that we must distinguish between our bodily knowledge and the conscious, symbolic stream of consciousness.

 

	The problem with Descartes's argument, then, is this: if we indeed gain proficiency in forms and activities through drills and bodily practice, a shift occurs. Even if we follow the subjective experience of consciousness as an argument for mind-body dualism, isn't it also evident that the process of gaining knowledge—of becoming proficient and familiar with an action—eventually enters our mind as well? After we have gone through the drills, we develop the proprioception of our own body and movements, allowing us to better "command" our body to perform what we wish. The gap narrows. In the course, the body's knowledge becomes the mind's knowledge.

 

	Within the process of going through drills and practices, another interesting phenomenon appears to support the possibility of the body itself having a form of understanding—or, alternatively, to support the idea that our cerebral models are merely heuristics that approximate a more complex underlying reality.

 

	In tennis, there is a well-known paradigm of training—a top-down framework for "proper form" and movement—that applies to most coaches, players, and tutorials. Using the forehand as an example, this typical approach to coaching can be summarized by three main aspects:





Tennis is a rotational sport 
As it appears in almost every professional player, the forehand is a rotational movement. Right-handers rotate counterclockwise, and left-handers rotate clockwise in order to hit the ball.



The chain of kinetic 
The power of a forehand (or essentially any shot in tennis) comes from the entire concept of a kinetic chain. This initiates from the ground via the leg drive, moves through the hip and torso rotation, and then passes to the shoulder, arm, and eventually the hands and racket. One needs to develop and be aware of this coherent chain to conduct and release energy onto the ball.



The whipping effect 
Based on the first two points, it is typically suggested that because energy is derived from the leg drive, torso rotation, and the counter-normal force from the ground, it is ideal—and even necessary—to have the arm, hand, and wrist loose and flexible. This creates a "whipping effect" with a perceivable racket head lag during acceleration, followed by the pronation of the forearm and racket in the releasing stage.

 

	Of course, there is nothing fundamentally or in reality wrong with these three claims, explanations, or pieces of advice. But then the question becomes: why are there so many tennis players who know these three main explanations of the single form perfectly well yet ...? Among those many players—whether they learned this theory from a coach, their peers, or from tutorials online—a substantially huge proportion also practice very frequently. It is totally possible for them to have both the "right notion of the form" and the sufficient practice the body may need. But still, despite possessing both correct theory and extensive practice, most players never achieve proper form. Isn't this peculiar? 

 

	Admittedly, I was one of those people a couple of years ago. Then, I encountered my current coach, who is a former professional player and served for the Beijing municipal tennis team. The interesting part of his story is that he also used to believe in the storytelling rooted in these three descriptions and the entire training system around those perceptions at a young age. However, it eventually led to a serious injury that forced him to quit professional competitive tournaments. Because of his passion for tennis, he started to analyze and contemplate the nature of the sport—its ontology and, epistemologically, how we should approach it from both the player's and the coach's perspective to find a "better" way to learn.

 

	I have no idea what the exact thought and experimental process was before he developed his peculiar system of training, which seemingly goes against every traditional, public-facing coaching criterion involving the three claims we discussed. His system is rooted in the exact opposite emphasis and practice drills compared to those three common ones:





Linear Movement vs. Rotation
While the first common claim emphasizes tennis as a rotational sport, my coach emphasizes that we should never think of rotation at all—at least for our body as a whole—when it comes to any swing. Instead, we should think of it as a linear movement. It is not from right to left or left to right, counterclockwise or clockwise, but essentially from back to front in our mind.



Arm and Hand Control vs. Leg Drive
Counterintuitively, for the second common claim, my coach emphasizes that you should probably start by learning to play with only your arm, your hand, and the racket instead of prioritizing the leg drive from the ground or core and hip rotation. The succinct rationale is that the hand and arm are the most essential parts involved in the interplay; you must stabilize and control the most flexible set of joints in the entire swing process. This allows us to gain control of the overall movement before adding strength through leg drive and rotation.



Firm Tension vs. Loose Wrists
Regarding the third common notion, instead of letting the hands, wrists, and shoulders loose to create a "whip" effect, my coach emphasizes that everything from the shoulder blade to the wrists and hands should be flexed. They should be tightly and firmly exerted to maintain an extremely steady grip and contact point.

 

	If these three diametrically opposite claims were made by someone who knows nothing about tennis, I would probably dismiss them in the first second, having already been imbued with the common notion. Yet, I resorted to authority. Since my coach himself was a professional player who regained his competitive state after serious injuries by developing and using this system—this set of new, counterintuitive notions and the drills designed around them—I was indeed persuaded to experiment with this approach.

 

	As you may have guessed, it worked. It was much more reasonable and solid in the process than one would think. However, at the beginning, it was so confusing for my cerebral and reasonable mind to even understand what was behind these new notions. It was literally impossible for me to envision how this new set of rules could work jointly to achieve the same goal as the three common notions.

 

	During the first two months of exercising those drills, I spent a huge amount of time contemplating the "why" and "how" off the court. Although it is hard for me to admit that some of that intellectual activity was unhelpful, that was indeed the case here. When it comes to tennis, particularly in this instance, there is a moment where I have to give up reasoning and understanding based on my prior knowledge to actually accept the notion, practice, and let my body learn, react, and develop its own understanding. Eventually, the understanding emerged in my mind from my body regarding how those rules could work, both in theory and in reality. Interestingly, after years of practicing this second alternative path, one would end up with the same result as practicing the three common notions, but with much less hazard and uncertainty in the process.

 

	That said, here's the crucial point: Both coaching methods—rotation vs. linear, loose vs. firm, leg drive vs. arm control—are heuristics. They are mental models that approximate the same underlying physical reality. The actual physical motion of a competent forehand is singular and objective, but the mental framework you use to access that motion can vary dramatically. What appears to the cerebral mind as "diametrically opposite" turns out to be two different paths to the same embodied knowledge. 

 

	This may suggest something important about the mind-body relationship. The body does not merely "obey" the mind's conceptual models—rather, the body learns through repetition and feedback, and the mind constructs post-hoc explanations that may or may not accurately describe what the body is actually doing. The proprioceptive awareness that eventually develops is not the mind "commanding" the body, but the mind finally catching up to what the body has already learned.

 

	I'm not a hundred percent sure if this is common in other sports, as I do not have enough experience in them, but I would assume it is not that peculiar to have a case where what we emphasize in our proprioception—and what we believe when practicing or exerting an action—is different from what the motion or action is in reality. However, the problem then becomes: how will we know in general if we should accept such a seemingly diametrically opposite claim, and have faith in its potential to lead us to the "right result"? This brings me to my second case study.

 



 

Case Study 2: Buddhism and the Will to Believe

 

	In the particular case regarding tennis, I could resort to the authority and the competitive state of my coach. But if we zoom out and consider it as a general approach to understand a new set of existence beyond our preconceived notions—as an epistemological tool of understanding—isn't it essentially hazardous and passional (again, going back to William James)?

 

	In William James' sense, because I have good reasons to believe in my coach—his professional background, his recovery from injury through this method, the tangible results in his current students—I am not actually making a completely passional choice, but rather one with some sort of evidence. This holds true even if there is other evidence indicating this is the opposite of common notions.

 

	But what if, when it comes to choices and possibilities, we really don't have enough evidence? Consider, for example, the mind-body relation or dualism back when it was first conceived. At large, the reason substance dualism (as in Descartes' Sixth Meditation) was demystified and replaced by many other alternatives and counterarguments is not only because those arguments themselves, as I've shown a bit, are not sound or logically valid, but also because alternative arguments and explanations possess greater explanatory strength and evidence to support them, especially considering the developments in our modern neuroscience. (That said, it seems necessary for us to distinguish between the understanding and knowledge available to humanity as a whole and that which is available to an individual. This distinction may explain a lot in these cases.)

 

	Another personal example I would like to raise is Buddhism. For context, I came from a family where many members are Buddhist or inclined towards Buddhist beliefs, while I wasn't necessarily one myself. It is quite similar—if we conceive Buddhist practice to be similar to this subversive tennis training—in many senses. In many cases, what my coach emphasizes regarding the three opposite notions is only helpful in terms of mindset and understanding. Heuristically, it serves as a guide to the actual movement that resembles the three common notions. Arguably, in Buddhism or many other religious practices, many actions are in fact "false" or "wrong" when compared to the core notion or understanding itself. However, they are indeed, or at least could be, useful and helpful heuristically to develop and evolve towards the "right" result.

 

	Coming back to the problem of the will to believe, is there any good reason, or is it truly reasonable, to make such a belief or leap without sufficient evidence (or even nothing at all)? In fact, I am largely in favor of William James' claims regarding the will to believe. I perceive that it is probably the only choice to make a passional choice when there is insufficient evidence or when we can no longer resort to reason. However, whether that choice is still "rational" is the part I am still questioning.

 

	In the case of Buddhism, there are no obvious reasons to be against it from my perspective—within the scope of my understanding and knowing what it claims. This involves the Four Noble Truths and many associated practices. But the essential question regarding my perception of Buddhism—even within my family—is that although I didn't find anything wrong or necessarily unacceptable, there is also no good (sufficient) reason to firmly choose it.

 

	On the other hand, following one of the counter-arguments used against mind-body dualism (Occam's Razor), I can also claim that it is unnecessary to believe in Buddhist beliefs and practices. To my evidence and reason, there is certainly no clear connection between many of the practices and the claims or understandings they entail. Then, in that case, how can one be sure or be converted into it from the bottom of their heart, except for revelation? Or, in other words, the will to believe?

 

	Of course, a Buddhist perspective on mind-body dualism is indeed very interesting. One explanation could be that it is certainly not the substance dualism Descartes defines, but it is also not evident that they are treated as the same thing, as the entire framework of discussion in Buddhism is different—not to mention the different interpretations and understandings of various schools that are often incompatible at all. Consider only, for example, the idea of "no-self" (anatta) in an oversimplified form:





It is rooted in the fact that having a self leads to craving.



Craving leads to suffering.



Suffering is undesirable.



Therefore, to erase suffering, we must achieve the state of no-self.

 

	In a sense, it can be said that the anatta is ostensibly compatible with Churchland's eliminative materialism—both reject a substantial, unified self; both emphasize process over substance, etc. On the other hand, the no-self claim—even if it seems to undermine the very idea of having a mind or a distinct, soul-like existence—coexists with many Buddhist traditions that emphasize the primacy of mind in shaping experience. Essentially, the seemingly contradictory co-compatibility comes from Buddhist distinct understandings of "mind" in the first place.

 

	Eventually, a (middle way) Buddhist may say something like this that offers that neither Descartes nor Churchland fully captures: The self—and by extension, the mind—is not a substance (Descartes) but also not a mere illusion to be eliminated (Churchland), but rather a process of a dependently co-arisen phenomenon. In other words, the mind and the body are neither separate substances nor reducible to one another but are mutually dependent, arising together in each moment.

 

	Perhaps this reframing is what the tennis example and even the mathematics analogy are all pointing toward. We do not need to choose between "mind is separate from body" and "mind does not exist." We can instead recognize that mind and body are phenomenologically distinct yet ontologically integrated—different aspects of the same process, neither reducible to the other in practice, even if they are inseparable in reality.

 

	The will to believe, in this context, is not about choosing substance dualism or eliminative materialism (or other alternatives, of course) at all. Is Buddhist practice a Jamesian 'live option'? Given my cultural background, yes. Is it forced? Not obviously—I can remain agnostic. Is it momentous? Only if Buddhist soteriology is true (liberation from suffering). Therefore, James would likely say the will to believe is premature here unless suffering is genuinely unbearable and other solutions have failed. 

 



 

Case Study 3: Acting and the Integration of Intention and Action

 

	The last case I'd like to bring to the table is acting, specifically in terms of theatrical acting. When I was taking my first acting class back then in the first semester, there was an interesting moment during our first attempt at simply presenting ourselves. We had to introduce ourselves and say a simple sentence like, "My name is [Name]. Today, I'm at NYUAD, taking this acting class."

 

	Almost all of our class received the same feedback from the professor: "Go forget the bullshit you learned for public speaking. I hate it. I hate the training you had for it."

 

	Interestingly, although I self-conceived as being somewhat eloquent and good at reciting in public speaking, I hadn't actually received any formal training. However, I did have a "performative" inclination back then (and perhaps still now) when I was speaking publicly. And that sort of performance is the undesirable type of performance, which is in conflict with our acting method—the Stanislavski Method.

 

	Ultimately, the first goal of our practice was to accept being gazed at and witnessed on stage; in other words, to be present. In that sense, what we were asked to do was to achieve a very peculiar state regarding the division between mind and body. It requires the mind and body to work almost perfectly in sync, while simultaneously maintaining the perspective to command our behavior with a well-defined intention for each step and movement. For example:





To walk, we are not only letting our body walk; we must have the intention of walking. 



We expand that attention and the focus of the notion "to walk" into the entire body. 



We then exert movement and action with that intention fueled in the body. 

 

	Similarly, if I am to speak a word (at least in the context of our acting class and method), it is not to let it simply slip out of the mouth. It is about making a firm decision in the mind that I am to speak such a word, sentence, or passage. We must fully decide and have that intention completely to say the lines we need to say. Therefore, the practice we were having both reinforced the distinction between our mind (the one that makes the decision and the intention) and the body (that performs it), while also emphasizing the integration between the two as a necessity to conduct the final artistic expression.

 

	On the contrary, I assume what's wrong with public speech is that there is no presence of mind right in that moment, in the space on the stage, together with the body. Thus, there is no full presence of the body on the stage as well. In a "typical" public speech, what happens is a performative performance in which the body "mindlessly "conducts a series of rehearsed and practiced behaviors that fit a certain persona and the expectations of that particular speech. In most general, average public speaking, it is not the conscious mind and the conscious speaker that are present together with the body to expand consciousness and intention into the speech, into the performance, and thus even beyond the body and into the space and audience.

 

	Again, following this thread, it seems that mind and body are indeed phenomenologically distinct—intention is one thing, action is another—but they must be practically unified for authentic expression. We cannot act authentically if the mind is elsewhere and the body is on autopilot (as in "public speaking"). We also cannot act authentically if the mind tries to "command" the body without expanding intention into the body itself (mechanical acting). The mind does not "control" the body from outside, and the mind is also not an epiphenomenon (causally inert byproduct) or illusion, as eliminative materialism might imply. Instead, jointly, the mind is the body's capacity for intention—and the body is the mind's capacity for expression. They are not two substances, but two aspects of the same integrated process.

 





	To be very honest, I'm not even sure what the final takeaway should be after all these analyses of logic and case studies. But I do think it is quite evident—for me, at least—that substance dualism has no place here. It is simply no longer tenable given our modern understanding at this time. Yet, to what extent a complete physicalist or materialist perspective could work still remains a mystery. On one hand, it is almost impossible for me to completely reject the possibility of a materialistic explanation—after all, the brain is a physical organ, neurons are physical entities, and every thought corresponds (presumably) to some neural state. But at the same time, the status quo is not very satisfying.

 

	Eliminative materialism, as Churchland proposes, is radical and perhaps premature. We do not yet have a better way to talk about beliefs, desires, intentions, and experiences than the folk psychological terms we currently use. To eliminate them entirely, at this stage, would be to throw away the only map we have before we've drawn a new one. (In AI's case, then, it is to completely ditch the human-oriented benchmarks and designs to straightaway pursue the "novel kind of entity"—even if I myself am a strong advocate for the latter.)

 

	By the three case studies—tennis, Buddhism, and acting—unexpectedly, though, it seems to reveal something in between, a pragmatic non-dualism I have to call it now (even somewhat unwillingly due to my inertia of resisting complete pragmaticism). Perhaps the gap between mind and body is real in experience, but it is not ontological—a gap created by the complexity of the system—the threshold beyond which reduction becomes pragmatically impossible, and emergence becomes the only useful explanatory framework. Just as mathematical theorems are, in principle, reducible to axioms but, in practice, must be treated as emergent, so too the mind is, in principle, reducible to neurons but, in practice, must be treated as an emergent phenomenon. 

 

	This is not a final answer, for sure. And just as the body learns before the mind understands—and the mind eventually catches up, integrating that bodily knowledge into conscious awareness—so too might our philosophical frameworks evolve. We are still in the phase where the body (neuroscience, lived experience, embodied practice) is learning faster than the mind (philosophy, theory, conceptual models) can fully understand. But if we are indeed willing to believe that the understanding will come, when it really does, I suspect it will be neither substance dualism nor eliminative materialism, but something that honors both the distinction we experience and the integration that underlies it.

 

	For now, I am content to practice—on the tennis court, on stage, in the writing of these journals—and let the body teach the mind what it has not yet learned to say.