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More and more, the 'demarcation problem' comes to mind...what are the bounds of science, nonscience, and pseudoscience?...what is it and is it not that science can inform us about the natural world? Discussions of 'mindless' or 'soulful' seem to be attaching values to actions. These values fall outside the realm of science (and formal systems)...there is no experiment that could be performed by which one could determine a 'soulful' or 'mindless' action. If there could be such an experiment, then maybe science could make a statement of the success of one or the other strategy (e.g., through differential survivorship or reproductive success) in a particular context, but it would attach not any aesthetic value. My intuition tells me that such analogies of 'mindlessness' and 'soulfulness' are falling into the realm of pseudoscience, if we are trying to use formal systems to justify them. That said, I do like the concept and practice of mindfulness, but I prefer the sort of mindfulness embodied in some schools of Buddhist thought where skepticism is at the core of it's teaching...i.e., living through (and by) experience, not by (or through) faith. This seems to be the core of science, with the caveat that science seeks consistency in that experience.