An adequate account of dance experience requires more than a specification of cause; it requires a
description of the content (i.e., what is felt/thought) that is common to all experiences of dance and
that distinguishes one experience from another. As suggested by John Searle’s (2004) philosophical
framework called biological naturalism, it is clear that dance content cannot be entirely reduced to
its causes. The experience of dance is a culturally embedded event. It is also, like any conscious state,
a system-level property of the brain, the physical basis of which can be explained by neuronal
activity, much as digestion is a system-level property of the gastrointestinal system that can be
explained causally by the chemistry of the body. Dance may be explained partly by neurobiological
(material) features. It may be explained in part by societal, cultural, and historical influences. But it
cannot be ontologically reduced to any single material cause; to conflate these different levels of
analysis is to make a category error (Ryle 2000). Dance as conscious event, whether deploying
implicit (procedural) or explicit (declarative) knowledge, has both neurobiological and phenomenological
features. For example, the claim that knowing the causes of emotion in dance is sufficient
to answer the question of what emotional experience in dance is like no longer holds up to the lived
reality that people feel something (such as joy) when they experience dance. Such explanations leave
out of account what it is like to perform, watch, or make dance. Human consciousness exists only
from a first person, ontologically subjective, point of view. To know what dancing is or feels like,
one must ask dancers what they experience or experience dance oneself (cf., Jackson 1982, for the
“knowledge argument”). Questions about material underpinnings of experience will never reveal
the entire story.