What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology
Olson (Eric)
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Cover Blurb

  1. From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions.
  2. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It begins by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and suggests a way of choosing among them.

Oxford On-Line
  1. Discussions of personal identity commonly ignore the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. This book is a general study of this question. It begins by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines critically the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature.
  2. The book does not endorse any particular account but argues that the matter turns on issues in the ontology of material objects.
    1. If composition is universal – if any material things whatever make up something bigger – then we are temporal parts of organisms.
    2. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then either we are simples – perhaps the immaterial souls of Descartes – or we do not exist at all.
    3. If some things compose bigger things and others do not, we are organisms.

Introductory Notes – mostly to self

In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology")

Footnote 1: Footnote 2: Footnote 3:
Book Comment

Oxford University Press, 2007.


"Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology' by Eric T. Olson"

Source: Mind, 117:1120-1122, 2008

Paper Comment

Write-up2 (as at 04/10/2023 21:59:02): Baker - Review - Olson - What Are We?

Full Text
  1. In his invigorating new book – "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology" – Eric Olson investigates what we are3, metaphysically speaking. ‘By “we”,’ he says, ‘I mean you and me and the people we know — we human people4.’ (p. 85). Olson emphasizes that his inquiry is not anthropological or linguistic, but metaphysical. He asks what we most fundamentally are, not what we conceive ourselves to be6. Olson takes the metaphysical question ‘what sort of beings think our thoughts and perform our actions?’ to have priority over the linguistic question, ‘To what do our personal pronouns7 and proper names refer?’ (p. 118, p.1329).
  2. Olson canvasses a number of important accounts10 of our metaphysical nature:
    1. animalism,
    2. constitutionalism,
    3. the brain view,
    4. the view that we are temporal parts of animals,
    5. the bundle view,
    6. immaterialism,
    7. nihilism,
    along with some ‘minor views11’. After a mostly balanced presentation and critical examination of summary versions of these accounts, Olson concludes his book with a more freewheeling discussion12 of his own opinions on what we are and on theories of composition.
  3. The book is engagingly written13 in a conversational style. Olson has some vivid analogies, e.g., ‘Your hylomorphic soul is supposed to stand to you as a dent14 stands to a dented car or a knot stands to a knotted rope.’ (p. 17415) And he makes up inventive labels for the positions he discusses; to take just one among many, Olson calls Chisholm’s suggestion16 that we might be tiny physical particles ‘Lilliputian materialism’ (p. 17617)
  4. Olson’s favored view (or one of them) is animalism18, a view that he defended in "Olson (Eric) - The Human Animal - Personal Identity Without Psychology" (1997). Animalism is the thesis that ‘each of us is numerically identical with an animal. (pp. 24-519) ‘[O]ur having mental features of any sort [is] a temporary and contingent feature of us.’ Olson goes on to say that ‘any of us could exist at a time without having any mental properties at that time, or even the capacity to acquire them20.’ (p. 4421)
  5. The chapters on Souls and on Nihilism22 are particularly rich. Olson treats immaterialism with much greater respect23 than do most other materialist philosophers today. And he argues that nihilism (the view that we do not exist) is not easily disposed of: ‘Why should the truth be believable?’ (p. 21024) He compares nihilism with solipsism and raises the possibility that nihilism is a ‘pathological view’ — one that is psychologically impossible to accept consistently without going mad (p. 20925). The discussion is quite thought-provoking26.
  6. Olson rules out many candidate accounts of our natures by what he calls ‘the thinking-animal problem27’: ‘If there is a human animal located where you are, and it thinks just as you do, it is hard to see how you could be anything other than that animal, or how you could ever know that you are.’ (p. 21128) Olson says that the thinking-animal problem is not only ‘an argument for animalism but also a challenge for any other account of what we are.’ (p. 21129) (However, he shortly exempts nihilism and immaterialism30 from its reach. (p. 21631)) But the thinking-animal problem is a problem only if the antecedent is true32. Many non-animalist views — constitutionalism, ‘compound dualism’, the bundle view, the brain view, etc. — are not committed to the antecedent.
  7. Consider constitutionalism. Constitutionalism33 holds that we are constituted by human animals, with which we are not identical. Olson says that constitutionalists often complain that their critics do not understand the view. Complaint or not, Olson does not seem to understand constitutionalism34. His situation is like that of a philosopher with a two-valued logic in a debate with an advocate of three-valued logic. Just as the trivalent logician can hold that there are two different ways35 for a proposition to be nontrue, the constitutionalist can hold that there are two ways for a pair of objects can be nonidentical. Thus, a pair of objects can exist separately or one can constitute the other. Olson simply does not acknowledge this ‘nonbivalent’ feature of constitutionalism.
  8. As a result of presupposing ‘metaphysical bivalence,’ Olson insists that constitutionalists, since they hold that we are not identical to animals, should be taken to hold that we are not animals at all36. (p. 2437). He simply ignores a constitutionalist who argues that there are two ways of having a property38 — nonderivatively and derivatively – both of which can be clearly defined. According to the derivative/nonderivative distinction, I am an animal derivatively in virtue of being constituted by something that is an animal nonderivatively. To be an animal derivatively is still to be an animal. Rather than arguing against the derivative-nonderivative distinction, Olson dismisses the constitutionalist’s claim that we are animals derivatively (or as he transforms it into a semantic point, ‘animals in some loose sense’) as a ‘mug’s game39’. (p. 2440)
  9. In his last chapter, Olson suggests that animalism, the temporal-parts view, and nihilism are the only viable accounts of our metaphysical natures. (p. 21441) He further argues that theories of composition42 and theories of what we are are intimately connected: If we had a good theory of either, he says, we would thereby have a good theory of the other. I want to use an example of Olson’s to cast doubt on his claim that ‘a theory of composition would tell us what we are.’ (p. 23243)
  10. Olson shows44 how mereological universalism (the theory of composition according to which any things however disparate have a sum) leads philosophers to fourdimensionalism45. He proposes a reductio of three-dimensionalist universalism46: Consider ‘the particles that currently compose you.’ Those particles — call them ‘the Ps’ — existed a month ago, and assuming universalism, there’s something that the Ps compose at every moment. Call it ‘M’ (for ‘mass of matter’). Given that the Ps cannot compose two things at once47, it follows that you are M. But you are not a persisting mass of matter48; you were not composed by the Ps a month ago. So, if you are composed of particles49 (in that you are identical to a sum of particles), then three-dimensionalist universalism is false50. So, instead of saying that you are composed of particles, some universalists are led to say that you are composed of particle-stages51. In that case, you have temporal parts. (pp. 230-23152) So, here we have a theory of composition (universalism) leading to a metaphysical view of what we are (a four-dimensional being with temporal parts).
  11. Olson notes that constitutionalism offers an alternative: A constitutionalist may be a universalist and say that M constitutes you now, but didn’t a month ago. However, Olson thinks that the alternative fails. To show this, he asks the constitutionalist what he takes to be a fatal question: “Under what circumstances do particles compose something other than a mass [like M]?” (p. 23153)
  12. It’s no wonder that he cannot find a good answer: He’s asking a question that conflates constitution and composition54. Constitutionalists who are mereological universalists hold that particles always compose a sum, and nothing but a sum. Sums are mere aggregates; they are not identical to any ordinary objects55 (like chairs, trees or people). Sums may constitute objects, but they are not identical to the objects that they constitute. You now are constituted by a human animal, which in turn56 now is constituted by a particular sum of particles. Last month, the same sum of particles existed but did not constitute you then.
  13. Universalism-cum-constitutionalism does not bloat ontology beyond constitutionalism alone; sums are ontological ‘freebies’57 that exist if their mereological parts exist. The important point is that constitution and composition are two different relations58. It is a significant (though popular) misstep for metaphysicians to try to make do with composition alone. A theory of composition would tell us what we are only if what we are is identical to a mereological sum. In light of the fact that exclusive reliance on theories of composition leads to a wildly implausible metaphysics, it is a profound mistake to suppose that ‘a theory of composition would tell us what we are.’ (p. 23259)
  14. Olson’s critical survey of ontological theories of our nature will be successful, I suspect, in a classroom60. Focussing mainly on generic versions of views rather than on specific texts, Olson assembles familiar arguments and presents new ones61. The discussions are clear and, with a few noted exceptions, even-handed. "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology" is a readable overview of accounts of what we are and is filled with many stimulating arguments.



In-Page Footnotes ("Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology' by Eric T. Olson")

Footnote 2:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (04/10/2023 21:59:02).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 3: Footnote 4:
  • Baker doesn’t point out the tendentiousness and ambiguity of Olson’s terminology, ‘human people’ confounds human beings with human persons.
Footnote 6: Footnote 7:
  • Olson is insistent (reasonable so) that I is a referring expression. See his discussion in §1.4.
Footnote 10: Footnote 11:
  • What are these ‘minor views’? Compounds of the other views (like ‘temporal parts of brains’)?
Footnote 12:
  • See Chapter 9: What Now?.
  • What does Baker imply by ‘freewheeling’? That the arguments are less rigorous?
Footnote 13:
  • The positive comments on style throughout this review somewhat hide – or maybe balance – Baker’s antipathy to Olson’s primary theses and arguments.
Footnote 14:
  • Olson deals with ‘dents’ briefly in the first two sections of his Introduction – in §1.1 & §1.2.
  • I discuss similar matters in my Note on Holes and Smiles.
  • I discuss Hylomorphism in my Note of that name.
  • Baker only highlights this usage for its style rather than content.
Footnote 16: Footnote 18:
  • See my Note on Animalism.
  • Olson’s contention that we survive the loss of all psychology is just common sense if we are animals, rather than – as Baker proposes – essentially persons.
  • Baker keeps her powder dry at this point, preferring to use the available space to correct Olson’s misunderstanding of her own position.
Footnote 20:
  • Presumably if the human animal is born without the possibility of developing the relevant mental capacities or – towards the end of life – has irretrievably lost them.
  • For Baker, the Person (one of us) would – according to the case – either not come into being or ceased to be.
  • I intend to revisit some of these comments once I’ve read Olson’s book!
Footnote 22:
  • See my Notes on Souls and on Nihilism.
  • Both strike me as absurd non-starters, but the Chapters will be worth reading for the light they shed on Olson’s views.
  • It’ll be interesting to determine wherein the ‘richness’ lies.
Footnote 23:
  • I can only comment on this when I’ve read the Chapter on Souls, though see my comments on Chapter 1.2.
  • For me, the key point requiring serious thought is the whole ‘Uploading’ issue so beloved of Transhumanists. For this to make sense, or for us to be ‘patterns in Information Space (as Andy Clark thinks) we’d probably need to be immaterial, though maybe we’d need to be embodied (in a computer or elsewhere) to experience anything.
Footnote 26:
  • It’d have been nice to have an indication of which thoughts might have been provoked.
  • Comments will have to await my reading of the Chapter on Nihilsm, though see my comments on Chapter 1.2.
  • I’m not sure if the view is Pathological. If it’s similar psychologically to Solipsism, it’s an irritating view that probably cannot be disproved, but can safely be ignored.
  • Does anyone actually hold this view these days – rather than people ‘in the literature’ trying to advance their careers by showing how clever they are?
Footnote 27:
  • This is where the review gets interesting, and where Baker departs from Olson.
  • See my Note on the Thinking Animal Argument.
  • Also my comments when Olson introduces the topic in Chapter 1.9.
Footnote 30:
  • Firstly, I’m not sure the page reference Baker gives is correct.
  • Also, while Nihilism will be exempted from the TA Argument (if there are no thinkers, this can’t be too many), I thought that something like the TA Argument was a standard objection to the Soul View (if souls think and animal’s brains think, there are two many thinkers).
Footnote 32:
  • I agree with Baker that there are problems with the TA argument, but I wish she’d been clearer what the ‘antecedent’ was.
  • It would appear to be compound “If there is a human animal located where you are, and it thinks just as you do … ”.
  • If so, one or both of these premises is in dispute:-
    1. ‘There is a human animal located where you are’, and
    2. ‘Human animals think’ (just like you do).
  • So, to which of these two premises – and why – do the following views object?
    1. Constitutionalism,
    2. ‘Compound dualism’ (… which is …),
    3. The bundle view,
    4. The brain view
  • I’ll add further comments here shortly … Constitutionalism (Baker’s preferred account) is dealt with immediately below.
Footnote 33:
  • See my Notes on Constitution and the Constitution View.
  • My question is just what is constituted by the animal with which it is not identical? Saying it’s the Person, individuated by a FPP just isn’t good enough.
  • We’ll come back to this in due course.
Footnote 34:
  • I agree. Baker and Olson seem to have talked past one another.
Footnote 35:
  • Non-true can be False or Unknown. See Wikipedia: Three-valued logic.
  • Incidentally, this is an analogy, so needs to be checked for relevance.
  • The idea is that – as Baker says – there are two ways of being non-identical: separate existence and one being constitute by the other.
  • This is fairly clear with Statue and Clay, but less so with Person and Animal.
  • But the idea of denying bivalence seems fair and useful enough.
Footnote 36:
  • This is the key point. Olson insists that you are either identical to an animal or you are not an animal at all. Yet everyone – including most philosophers – say that we ‘are’ animals in one sense or another.
  • The problem for the CV – as against other non-animalist systems – is that the others can point to what other thing they propose ‘we’ are. This isn’t really possible for those holding the CV. Of course, Baker doesn’t think this is a problem, for reasons upcoming.
Footnote 38:
  • See my Note on Properties.
  • I think Baker’s ideas of having properties nonderivatively and derivatively is worth considering, and that Olson should take the view seriously.
Footnote 39:
  • I agree with Baker that this pejorative terminology is reprehensible.
Footnote 42:
  • Baker will go on to accuse Olson of confusing Composition and Constitution.
  • I think she is right – composition – Mereology – is entirely different from constitution in Baker’s sense of the term.
  • I don’t have a Note on Composition per se (only on Mereology). Maybe I should – or create one on the difference between Composition and Constitution?
  • Olson is worried by Composition because of his TA Argument. This is why he denies the DAUP (Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts) – see "Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts".
Footnote 44:
  • Does Baker think that Olson’s argument is sound?
  • And – while we are about it – does Baker accept mereological universalism? What does ‘accepting’ this doctrine involve?
Footnote 45:
  • See my Notes on Perdurantism and Exdurantism.
  • I think the connection between 4D and mereological universalism supposed by Olson is confused, as Baker usefully explains.
Footnote 46:
  • This is a bad argument, as Baker goes on to explain.
Footnote 47:
  • Is this a tenet of mereological universalism? That a ‘thing’ just is the contents of a region of space(-time)? This is composition (set-theoretical), not constitution.
  • Also – in saying ‘you are M’ – according to whom?
Footnote 48:
  • Indeed, for the reasons Baker goes on to give. That is, if a mass of matter is defined by the particles it contains. But then, doesn’t this mean that no ‘mass of matter’ persists from one moment to the next. Is this true metaphysically, or useful linguistically?
  • Do mountains persist? Does the ‘lump’ persist in the famous ‘statue and the clay’ TE?
Footnote 49:
  • According to whose theory? No view of PID says this, does it? Animalism says that you are an Organism, which exchanges particles with its environment.
Footnote 50:
  • That’s if we want to say things persist – in a ‘strict and philosophical’ sense.
Footnote 51:
  • This needs a bit of spelling out, but these would be the stages that compose you at any one time. The space-time worms of the particles while they composed (part of) you.
Footnote 54:
  • I get the impression that Olson doesn’t really ‘get’ what Constitution is.
Footnote 55:
  • This is an important point. In the absence of 4D, none of these objects would persist.
Footnote 56:
  • So, there is ‘constitution all the way down’.
  • For Baker, the unifying principle to individuate a Person is that person’s FPP. What’s the unifying principle for an animal? What makes one bunch of particles M2 at T2 constitute the same animal as another bunch, M1, at the prior time T1? Maybe this is a problem for any theory of the persistence of organisms?
Footnote 57:
  • This is a good point. These sums don’t compose anything other than the sums themselves. They may temporarily coincide with something we care about (or ‘nature’ cares about).
Footnote 58:
  • This is important. However, composition is clearly defined, but not everyone understands – or thinks coherent – constitution.
Footnote 60:
  • This is rather a put-down!
  • A problem with the book is that it deals at – maybe – a superficial level with topics that Olson had often dealt with elsewhere in more detail. Maybe he deals with some of them in greater detail later.
  • I get the impression, though, that it’s supposed to be – up to a level – comprehensive and to address options that Olson had previously ignored.
Footnote 61:
  • Which arguments are new? New to Olson, Baker or philosophers generally? At least some of them are ‘stimulating’!


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Contents + References"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology - Contents + References (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Introductory Notes
  • This page lists the Contents and References from "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology". These were online at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but now seem to have been taken down, though I have taken copies. The electronic version of the References was paged backwards!
  • The purpose of this page is firstly to make it easier for me to check out the references in "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology", but was also an opportunity for me to check that I had access to the books and papers.
  • Those listed with a link from the Author’s name only are not in my possession, and likely never will be.
  • The draft references are not quite identical to the list in the book. I’ve noted the couple of occasions where they are omitted from the book, but have not noted the few occasions where there are additional references.
  • I’ve not bothered to note where I have a different edition to that cited.
  • Occasionally the sequencing of the references (yyyya/b/c) differs between the draft and the published book. I’ve followed the book, but will need to be careful when I link them up in the text.
  • The Contents has links to the full text of the draft Chapters – again taken from the above site when they were there – and to the various Notes I’m writing on the chapters themselves.

Contents
  1. The Question. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? The Question".
    1. What are we?1
    2. Some Answers2
    3. 'We'3
    4. Rephrasing the question4
    5. Must there be an answer?5
    6. How the question differs from others6
    7. Why it matters7
  2. Animals. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Animals".
    1. Animalism8
    2. What is an animal?9
    3. The thinking-animal argument10
    4. Are there animals?11
    5. Can animals think?12
    6. Too many thinkers13
    7. Revisionary linguistics14
    8. Animalism and our identity over time15
    9. Further objections16
  3. Constitution. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Constitution".
    1. Material things constituted by animals17
    2. The clay-modelling puzzle18
    3. The replacement puzzle and the amputation puzzle19
    4. Thinking animals again20
    5. When does constitution occur?21
    6. What determines our boundaries?22
  4. Brains. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Brains".
    1. The brain view23
    2. The thinking-brain problem24
    3. The brain view and our identity over time25
    4. Thinking-subject minimalism26
    5. Direct involvement27
    6. Homunculism28
  5. Temporal Parts. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Temporal Parts".
    1. Four-dimensional hunks of matter29
    2. Temporary intrinsics30
    3. Lumps and statues31
    4. The problem of modal incompatibility32
    5. Puzzles of personal identity33
    6. Thinking animals and other worries34
    7. Thinking stages35
    8. The stage view36
  6. Bundles. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Bundles".
    1. Bundle theories37
    2. Traditional arguments for the bundle view38
    3. Personal identity and the bundle view39
    4. Can thoughts think?40
    5. Thinking animals once more41
    6. Bundles of universals42
    7. The program view43
  7. Souls. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Souls".
    1. Immaterialism44
    2. Traditional arguments for immaterialism45
    3. The paradox of increase46
    4. The cost of materialism47
    5. Objections to immaterialism48
    6. Compound dualism49
    7. Hylomorphism50
    8. Simple materialism51
  8. Nihilism. Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Nihilism".
    1. We do not exist52
    2. Is nihilism mad?53
    3. Is nihilism self-refuting?54
    4. Unity and simplicity55
    5. Paraphrase: the mentalistic strategy56
    6. Paraphrase: the atomistic strategy57
    7. What it would mean if we did not exist58
  9. What Now? Full Text: "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? What Now?".
    1. Some results59
    2. Some opinions60
    3. Animalism and the thinking-parts problem61
    4. Animalism and the clay-modelling puzzle62
    5. Theories of composition63
    6. Composition and what we are64
    7. Brutal composition65

References
Paper Comment

For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File72.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Contents + References")

Footnote 66: Footnote 67:
  • I have downloaded this from Cambridge Core, but not imported it into my database as it doesn’t look sufficiently relevant. We’ll see what use Olson makes of it.
Footnotes 68, 69: Footnotes 70, 71:
  • References to this work are omitted from the hard-copy book.


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? The Question"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 1 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
  • This chapter explains what it means to ask what we are1. It begins by breaking the question up into smaller ones, such as what we are2 made of, what parts we have, and whether we are substances. It makes clear that the question is not about people in general, but only about us human people.
  • It considers two ways of rephrasing the question:
    1. What do our personal pronouns and proper names refer to? and
    2. What sorts of beings think our thoughts and perform our actions?
  • The question is distinguished from the question of personal identity over time and from the mind-body problem.
  • It is then argued that thinking about personal identity without considering what we are3 leads to metaphysical trouble.
  • Sections
    1. What are we?4
    2. Some Answers5
    3. 'We'6
    4. Rephrasing the question7
    5. Must there be an answer?8
    6. How the question differs from others9
    7. Why it matters10

Paper Comment

Write-up12 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? The Question

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 1, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? The Question"), of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology", which was available online13 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book14.
  • The electronic version of the Chapter was paged backwards, though I have repaired it in the text below.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there15.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
  • A point worth noting at the start is that "Olson (Eric) - What Are We?" appears to be closely-related to this Chapter, so it’ll be worth collating my comments on the two works in due course.

Full Text
  1. What are we?16
  2. Some Answers17
  3. 'We'18
  4. Rephrasing the question19
  5. Must there be an answer?20
  6. How the question differs from others21
  7. Why it matters22
1.1 What are we?
  1. This book is about a question: What are we23? That is, what are we metaphysically speaking? What are our most general and fundamental features? What is our most basic metaphysical nature?
  2. My first task is to explain what this question means. Rather than attempting to define the daunting phrases ‘general and fundamental feature’ or 'basic metaphysical nature', I will try to give their meaning by example. We can break the large question of what we are into smaller ones that are easier to grapple with.
  3. Questions
    1. One such smaller question is what we are made of.
      • I don't mean our chemical composition … what sort of physical matter makes us up. I want to know whether we are made of matter at all. Or are we made of something other than matter? Or partly of matter and partly of something else? Come to that, are we made of anything at all? Is there any sort of stuff, material or otherwise, that makes us up?
      • It may seem obvious that we are made of matter. When you look in a mirror you see something material. You don’t see anything immaterial. And don’t you see yourself in the mirror? It follows that you are a material thing: something made of matter. But that would be too quick. You might have an immaterial ingredient that doesn't show in the mirror; so casual observation suggests at most that you are made partly of matter. Even if you were entirely immaterial, so that you didn’t strictly see yourself in the mirror at all, you could still see your body there – that physical organism by means of which you perceive and act in the world. So our appearance of being material proves nothing24. In fact the view that we are made entirely of matter – materialism25 – has not been especially popular in the history of philosophy. In any case, whether we are made of matter is an important question about what we are.
    2. If we are indeed made of matter, or of anything else, we can ask what matter or other stuff we are made of. Most materialists say that we are made of all and only the matter that makes up our animal bodies: we extend all the way out to the surface of our skin (which is presumably where our bodies end26) and no further. But a few take us to be considerably smaller: the size of brains27, for instance. I don’t know of anyone who believes that we are material things larger than our bodies28 – that we are made of the matter that makes up our bodies and other matter besides – though I suppose that is a possible view.
    3. A third question is what parts we have. This is not the same as what we are made of. Philosophers who agree about what we are made of – not only about what sort of stuff, but also about what particular stuff – may still disagree about our parts29. They may disagree about whether we have temporal parts30 – such things as earlier halves – in addition to any spatial parts we may have, such as hands31. They can even disagree about our ordinary spatial parts. Some materialists say that every part of the region of space you now occupy contains a material thing of its own that is a part of you. On their view, your current parts include not only your head and your left hand (supposing that you are made of your body’s matter), but also your northern half, "all of you but your left ear", and many further arbitrary and gerrymandered objects32 too tedious to describe. Other materialists deny that we have arbitrary spatial parts. They may accept that your parts include elementary particles, but they deny that there is such a thing as all of you but your left ear. Some even say that we extend all the way out to our skin, yet have no parts at all. So knowing what we are made of does not by itself tell us what parts we have.
    4. These considerations raise a more general question: What makes something a part of one? What determines where our boundaries lie? If your kidneys are parts of you but not your shoes, or my kidneys, why is this so? What is it about the way those things relate to you that makes some of them parts of you but not others? If you extend all the way out to the surface of your skin and no further, what accounts for this? Why say that your boundary33 is there?
    5. Here is a different sort of question: Are we abstract or concrete?
      • Though these terms are hard to define, it will suffice for present purposes to say that something is concrete if it can be causally active34 – if it can actively do something – and it is capable of change35. Whatever is not concrete is abstract. So the number seven is abstract, and donkeys are concrete – as are gods and Cartesian souls, if such there be. Hard though it may be to imagine how we could be abstract36, that is what a few people seem to think. They say that we are not so much like the number seven as like the novel Moby Dick. That novel is not the same as any of the paper tomes sitting on bookshelves, or even the original manuscript in the author's hand. Nor is it something made up of all of these concrete objects37. (It doesn't grow in size when more copies are printed.) It is, rather, an abstract object that all of those particular things exemplify. It is a universal: something that can have many instances. So it seems, anyway. A mountain, by contrast, is not an abstract universal but a concrete particular. Even if the people of Minnesota were by some heroic effort to build an exact replica of Mt. Rainier on the outskirts of St. Paul, their creation would be a reproduction and not the real thing. Mt. Rainier is not something of which the original and the reproduction would both be instances in the way that different copies of Moby Dick are instances of the novel38.
      • We can ask, then, whether we ourselves are concrete particulars like Mt. Rainier or abstract universals39 like Moby Dick. Could there be more than one of you? Suppose the people of Minnesota managed to make an exact replica40 of you: a concrete being both physically and mentally just like the original, right down to the last atom and quirk of personality. That being would be convinced (at first anyway) that she was you41. Would she be right? Would she be you in the same sense as the original is you, just42 as every copy of Moby Dick is Moby Dick? Or would only the original be you and the other a mere reproduction, as with Mt. Rainier? For that matter, might we be abstract objects other than universals43?
    6. If we are concrete beings, we can ask whether we are substances44 – metaphysically independent beings – or whether we are rather states or aspects of something else. Think of a car with a dent in it. The dent45 is not a part of the car: you couldn’t take it out of the car and put it somewhere else, as you could a wheel. It seems, rather, to be a way that the car is: a state or an aspect of the car. It is not a substance: not a thing in the most robust sense. The car, by contrast, is not a way that the dent is. In fact it does not itself appear to be a state or an aspect of anything: there is nothing, it seems, that stands to the car as the car stands to the dent. It is a good candidate for being a substance. Our question, then, is whether you are like a car or like a dent. Are you a state or an aspect46 of something other than yourself? Or an event or process47 that something else is undergoing, like the car’s cooling off? Is there something – an organism or a lump of matter, perhaps – that stands to you as the car stands to the dent in it?
    7. We can ask whether we persist through time48.
      • Do we literally continue existing for seventy years or more? Or is the sober truth that we exist only for a moment? Some say that you appear to persist only because you are instantly replaced by49 a being so much like you that no one can tell the difference – not even that being himself, for he inherits all of your mental features. Could they be right?
      • This is the sort of thing I have in mind when I ask what we are metaphysically speaking.
    8. There are many more such questions. We can ask, for instance, what our persistence conditions50 are: what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future being to be you.
    9. We can ask which of our properties are essential51 to us and which are accidental, or more generally which properties it is in any sense possible for you or me to have or lack.
    10. We can ask how exactly we relate to those biological organisms52 that we sometimes call our bodies.
  4. And so on. An answer to these questions would tell us what we are.
1.2 Some answers
  1. In understanding a question it often helps to see what would count as an answer to it; and often the answers are easier to grasp than the question itself. (Understanding the questions is the hardest thing in philosophy53.) Here, then, are some accounts of what we might be: views that would, if they were true, at least begin to tell us what we are.
  2. Answers
    1. One view is that we are animals: biological organisms. It may seem as evident that we are animals as it is that we are made of matter. We are certainly not plants54, or angels, or stones. But few philosophers say that we are animals55. It may be evident that we are in some sense animals – that we have animal bodies, for instance. (We will consider the meaning of this claim in §2.156.) But our having bodies that are animals does not by itself tell us whether we are animals. Saying what sort of thing my body is would tell me what sort of thing I am if I am my body – if my body and I are one and same thing – but whether this is so is much disputed, even among materialists.
    2. How could we be material things other than animals? Well, we might be parts of animals: brains57, for instance.
    3. Or we might be temporal parts of animals58 rather than spatial parts: you might be spatially the same size as the animal we call your body but temporally shorter, in that the animal extends further into the past or the future than you do. Many views are possible about what spatial or temporal parts of animals we might be.
    4. These two thoughts can also be combined: we might be temporal parts of brains59.
    5. Some philosophers deny that we are either animals or parts of animals, but insist that we are nonetheless material things. They say that the same matter can make up two different objects60 at once. Specifically, the matter making up a typical human organism also makes up a certain non-organism. These non-organisms, they say, are what we are. So another possible answer to our question is that we are material things made of the same matter as or “constituted by61” our animal bodies.
    6. Hume once suggested that each of us is "a bundle62 or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement" (1978: 25263). In that case we are not material things at all. Our bodies may be made of matter, but we ourselves are made up of perceptions, or mental states and events. Our parts are not organs or cells or atoms, but memories, wishes, and dreams. We are concrete particulars, but not substances: we are like dents – or, as Hume himself suggests, like theater performances.
    7. A view with a long tradition has it that we are simple immaterial substances64 – simple meaning without parts. We are not made of matter, or of perceptions, or indeed of anything else. We have no mass or shape or any other physical property. Our bodies may have such properties, but they are not what we are, or even parts of us.
    8. A related view says that each of us is a compound object65 made up of both an immaterial substance and a material organism.
    9. Some people seem to think that we are are something like novels or computer programs66: abstract universals that can be embodied in flesh or stored on magnetic disks or even written down on paper. The concrete beings that walk and talk and sleep in our beds are mere instances or "hard copies" of us.
    10. There is even the paradoxical view that there is nothing that we are. There are no such beings as you and I. We don't exist67. Strictly speaking this book has no author. The atoms we call mine may be real enough; perhaps even the thoughts and actions we call mine exist; but those atoms and events are not parts or states of any thinking, acting being.
  3. None of these views offers a complete account68 of what we are. None purports, by itself, to answer all my questions. The view that we are animals, for instance, does not by itself tell us whether we have parts, or which of our properties are essential to us and which are accidental. It is even disputable whether it implies that we persist through time. For that we should need to know whether animals persist, whether they have parts, and which of their properties are essential to them and which are accidental; and here there is room for disagreement. The same goes for the other accounts. Even so, they each tell us a good deal about69 what we are. They are mutually incompatible: if we are animals then we are not parts of animals, immaterial substances, bundles of perceptions, or any of the other sorts of things we have mentioned; if we are immaterial substances then we are not animals or parts of animals; and so on. Moreover, once we know which of them is correct, questions about our metaphysical nature become questions about the metaphysical nature of animals, bundles of perceptions, or what have you; and with any luck those questions will be easier to answer70 than the original question about our own metaphysical nature.
  4. By way of contrast, here is a view that does not answer the question of what we are: that we are people. (In this book I follow ordinary English, and depart from academic usage, in using ‘people’ as the plural of ‘person’. This is purely for stylistic purposes71.) Although in many contexts it may be a perfectly good answer to the question “What is x?” to be told that x is a person, the claim that we are people tells us nothing about our metaphysical nature. No one, no matter what her view of our metaphysical nature, thinks that we are not people. More to the point, the claim that we are people tells us nothing about the metaphysical nature of people72: whether they are material or immaterial, abstract or concrete, and so on.
  5. Nor does it answer our question to say that we are essentially or most fundamentally people. To say that we are essentially people is to say that we could not possibly exist without being people. To say that we are most fundamentally people is to say, roughly, that we have our identity conditions by virtue of our being people, and not, say, by virtue of our being organisms or concrete objects or sentient beings. Not everyone agrees that73 we are essentially or most fundamentally people. And the view that we are essentially or most fundamentally people may rule out certain accounts74 of what we are, such as the view that we are organisms (see §2.975). So this view may tell us something about what we are. But it doesn’t tell us much – not, at least, until we know whether people are76 material or immaterial, concrete or abstract, and so on.
  6. There are many other possible accounts of what we are, but this incomplete list ought to give some idea of what I am after. In particular, it shows what level of generality I have in mind. The bulk of this book is devoted to examining these views, and a number of others. I cannot discuss all possible views of what we are. I will try to divide my attention among them in proportion to their interest and importance. The rest of this chapter, meanwhile, is about the question itself:
    1. How it might be rephrased77,
    2. Some complications it raises78,
    3. How it differs from traditional questions of personal identity79, and
    4. Why it is important80.
1.3 'We'
  1. Our question is what sort of things we are, most generally and fundamentally. I have tried to say what I mean by 'what sort of things'. What do I mean by 'we'?
  2. Consider first its scope81. By 'we' I mean you and me and the people we know – we human people. I don’t mean non-human people, if there any. So our question is not about the basic metaphysical nature of people as such, but only of ourselves.
  3. Why this restriction? I don’t want to consider the metaphysical nature of people in general because for all I know there might be people of different metaphysical kinds from us. Suppose for the sake of argument that we are biological organisms. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that there are also angels or gods: rational, intelligent, self-conscious beings that are wholly immaterial. Nor does it deny that there could be inorganic artefacts with the same mental features as we have. Assuming that being rational, intelligent, and self-conscious82 suffices for being a person, all of these beings – gods, inorganic machines, and we organisms – would count as people. For that matter, there are philosophers who believe that many human people acting together can compose a larger "group" or "corporate" person83: Apple Computer, Inc. might be a person in the same sense as you and I are. I see no reason to suppose that all the items on this list would have to share the same basic metaphysical nature. That is, I see no reason to suppose that there is any one metaphysical sort of thing that people in general are, or must be. Or if there is, we cannot know it until we have either ruled out the possibility of some of the items on this list – gods, thinking machines, or the like – or else shown that despite appearances people of all these sorts would share the same basic metaphysical nature. It would be easier if we didn’t have to worry about this. So I will limit the inquiry to ourselves. That will leave us with more than enough to think about.
  4. This approach is unorthodox. Most discussions of personal identity take for it granted that claims about what we are – about our identity over time, for instance – necessarily apply to all people (see §2.884). Insofar as they consider our metaphysical nature at all, they take it to derive from our being people, rather than from our being organisms or material objects or anything else. It follows from this assumption that we must share our most basic properties with all people, including gods and inorganic thinking machines if there could be such things.
  5. This strikes me as dogmatic. Not only is it unwarranted. Worse, it rules out accounts of what we are that might otherwise be attractive. It is incompatible with the view that we are organisms, for one. It is unlikely, anyway, that the basic metaphysical nature of any organism derives from its being a person. Organisms seem to have the basic metaphysical nature they have by virtue of being organisms – a nature they share with snails and trees (which I assume are not people). It is even less likely that any organisms have the same basic metaphysical nature as gods or angels or intelligent computers would have. But if there could be people whose metaphysical nature is different from that of organisms, and all people must necessarily have the same metaphysical nature, it follows that no person could be an organism. Assuming that we are people, we ourselves could not be organisms85. This seems a poor argument for the claim that we are not organisms. Its premises were these:
    1. There could be inorganic people;
    2. Inorganic people would not have the same metaphysical nature as people who are organisms;
    3. Necessarily all people have the same metaphysical nature; and
    4. We are people.
    The most questionable of these premises seems to me to be the third86. Thus, I will not assume it.
  6. In any case, this unorthodox stance can do no harm. I am not assuming that different people could have different metaphysical natures. I am merely declining to assume that they couldn’t. If people really must all have the same metaphysical nature, then the question of what sort of things we are and the question of what sort of things people in general are will have the same answer, so we lose nothing87 by asking the first rather than the second.
  7. I said that in asking what we are I was asking about the basic metaphysical nature of us human people. By human people I don’t mean simply those people who are human beings – not, at least, if a human being is a kind of organism. Whether we are human beings in that sense, or indeed whether any people are, is a contentious matter: it is one of the questions we want answered, not something we can assume at the outset. (Despite its homely attraction, the phrase ‘human being’ is too slippery88 to be of much use in metaphysics.) Still, there is a sense in which you and I are undoubtedly human. Setting aside the possibility that some of us might be Martian foundlings, anyway, it is clear that each of us relates in an intimate way to an animal that is biologically human. When we see you, we see a human animal89; when you move, a human animal moves; you perceive the world via a human animal’s sense organs; and so on. That makes you human – rather than, say, bovine or angelic or divine. A human person is a person who relates to a human animal in this way. It is, we might say, someone with a human body. Even if in the final analysis there are really no human animals (as for instance some idealists say90), there must still be some real feature of the world – something about sense-impressions or whatever – that makes it true to say that when you look in a mirror you see a human animal and not an angel or a cow. Our question is about the fundamental nature of human people in this sense91.
1.4 Rephrasing the question
  1. So much for the intended scope of the word 'we'. Further issues about what I mean by 'we' arise if we shift from the material to the formal mode – from asking, What are we? to asking, What does the word 'we' refer to? To avoid irrelevant worries about plural reference, we can put this by asking what a human person refers to when he or she says 'I92'. I take it that I am whatever I refer to when I say 'I' – just as London is the thing we refer to when we say ‘London’. And presumably what I refer to when I say 'I' is what others refer to when they address me as 'you' or speak of me as 'he' or as 'Olson'. So anyone who finds the question, What sort of things are we? puzzling could replace it with the question, What sort things do our personal pronouns and proper names refer to?
  2. These two questions –
    1. What are we? and,
    2. What do our personal pronouns and proper names refer to?
    – are not entirely equivalent. We sometimes use personal pronouns to refer to dogs or ships, even though none of us are dogs or ships. But they come to almost the same thing. The view that we are organisms (say) amounts, near enough, to the view that our personal pronouns, in their most typical uses at least, refer to organisms93. The view that we don't exist94 – that there is nothing that we are – amounts to the view that our personal pronouns don't refer to anything because there is nothing there for them to refer to.
  3. Now this way of rephrasing the question assumes that the word 'I' and other first-person pronouns are referring expressions: expressions that purport to refer to something95, expressions that refer to something if there is anything “there” to be referred to. Anscombe (198196) has denied this. According to her, the word 'I' in 'I am walking’ no more purports to refer to something that walks than the word 'it' in 'it is raining' purports to refer to something that rains97. If she is right, then I am not the thing I refer to when I say 'I', for I don't refer to anything when I use that word. But it doesn't follow from this claim that I don't exist, or that there is nothing here speaking that could be referred to. So on Anscombe's view it is a mistake to ask what we are by asking what we refer to when we say 'I'. This suggests that it equally mistaken to ask what sort of thing I am, or what sort of things we are: that would be like asking what sort of thing it is that rains.
  4. This view seems to me to have no plausibility whatever98. Consider these apparent facts99:
    1. That I am hungry entails that something or other is hungry, just as that London is a city entails that something is a city. (That it is raining, by contrast, does not seem to entail that something is raining.) These inferences appear to be licensed by the rule of existential generalization: they have the form 'this particular thing is thus and so; therefore something is thus and so'. If so, 'I', like 'London', must be a referring expression.
    2. The sentence 'I am hungry' expresses a truth just when the being who utters it is hungry. The one who utters it is the one who must be hungry in order for it to be true. The obvious explanation for this is that 'I' refers to the being who utters it.
    3. If Rinka says 'I am hungry', we can report this by saying 'Rinka says that she (Rinka) is hungry'. This seems to imply that the word 'I' in Rinka's mouth refers to same thing as the name 'Rinka' refers to – that is, to Rinka.
    4. On solemn occasions we say such things as 'I, Alice Margaret Buggins, hereby promise...'. What could the inserted name be doing, if not specifying which person the pronoun refers to?
    5. If I am Olson and Olson is the author of this book, it follows that I am the author of this book. The most obvious explanation for the validity of this inference appeals to the principle that if x=y and y is thus and so, then x is thus and so. This assumes that 'I am Olson' is an identity sentence – one in which the identity sign is flanked by two referring expressions – in which case 'I' is a referring expression.
    Those who deny that 'I' is a referring expression need to account for these facts in a way that is consistent with their view. More generally, they need to explain what the word 'I' does do, if it doesn't refer to the person who utters it. I have never seen such an account.
  5. But no matter100: even if Anscombe is right, we can still put our question by asking what sort of things Olson and Thatcher and Socrates are, or what sort of things our second- and third-person personal pronouns and personal proper names refer to. No one denies that those words are referring expressions.
  6. What if I refer to more than one thing101 when I say 'I' or 'Olson'? Then there would be no one thing that I am. Asking what sort of thing I am would be like asking about the nature of the planet between the earth and the sun. The question would have no straightforward answer, since it would embody the false presupposition that there is only one being asking it. So perhaps we ought rather to ask, What sort of thing or things do our personal pronouns and proper names refer to?
  7. It would be especially inconvenient for our inquiry if words like 'I' and 'Olson' referred in their typical uses not just to more than one thing, but to more than one kind of thing. We cannot rule this possibility out a priori. But perhaps we can dismiss one distracting version102 of it. Some people suggest that the personal pronouns are systematically ambiguous, and refer sometimes to one's mind and sometimes to one's body, so that in one sense of the word ‘I’ I am a mind (and not a body), and in another sense of the word I am a body (and not a mind). It follows that we cannot ask what sort of thing I am without specifying which sense of 'I' (or ‘Olson’) we mean: do we mean What I am in the "mental" sense of 'I', or What I am in the "bodily" sense of that word?
  8. This view – call it linguistic dualism103 – seems to me scarcely more plausible than the view that ‘I’ is not a referring expression. Linguistic dualists are not very clear what sort of things “one's mind” and “one's body” are supposed to be, but presumably they take the mind to be the bearer of one’s mental properties, such as consciousness104 and intelligence105, and the body to be the bearer of one’s brute physical properties, such as height and weight. Further, the mind is supposed to have no physical properties (or at any rate none like height or weight), and the body is supposed to have no mental properties. Otherwise, why call one of them the mind and the other the body? Linguistic dualism therefore implies that in the mental tone of voice, where 'I' refers to my mind, I can say truly I am conscious, but have no height or weight – indeed I am entirely invisible and intangible. And it implies that in the bodily tone of voice, where 'I' refers to my body, I can say truly that I weigh 150 pounds, but am no more conscious or intelligent than a stone. The most I can say about my mental properties while speaking in the bodily tone of voice is that I relate in some intimate way to a conscious, intelligent being other than myself – a being that is not even a part of me, for the mind is not, on this view, a part of the body106. There would be no tone of voice in which I could say that I am both visible and aware of this fact, for none of the referents of my first-person pronoun would have both the property of being visible and the property of being aware of anything. Saying that I am both visible and aware of it would be like pointing to Fred and Ginger and saying, "That person is both male and female." It is tempting to call107 this a reductio ad absurdum of linguistic dualism.
  9. Nor is there any reason, even for those who believe that “the mind” is a purely mental thing and “the body” is something purely physical, to hold such a view. It would be far better for them to say that we are purely mental things. Then there would be no sense in which we are as stupid as stones. Our being invisible “minds” need not imply that such statements as 'I am visible' are always false: in ordinary contexts this may mean108 not that I have the property of being visible, but that I have the property of having a body that is visible – a property that a purely mental thing can have.
  10. Linguistic dualism looks false. But again, I needn’t insist on it. If the word 'I' in my mouth really does refer sometimes to a thinking thing and other times to an unthinking thing, then our concern is the thinking thing. Never mind the referential role of the personal pronouns. This is an essay in metaphysics, not the philosophy of language109. Our question is about the nature of the beings holding the inquiry. So we can rephrase our question in yet another way: What sort of beings think our thoughts and perform our actions?110
1.5 Must there be an answer?
  1. Let me make a few remarks about the status of the question.
  2. I take it that the question of what we are must have an answer111, whether or not it is within our power to discover or even to understand it. There must be some sort of thing that we are, if we exist at all. When we say 'I' or 'you' or 'Socrates', we either refer to something or we don't. If we do, that thing (or those things) must have some general and fundamental properties or other: it must be concrete or abstract, material or immaterial, simple or composite, and so on. If we don't refer to anything, that is presumably because there are no human people to be referred to. Again, if any beings think our thoughts112, they must have some metaphysical nature or other; if nothing thinks our thoughts, then we don’t exist.
  3. What if eliminative materialism113 is true and there is no such thing as thinking? What then becomes of the question of what we are? Well, we could still ask what sort of being wrote this book, and what sort of being is now reading it. And we could ask what sort of beings our personal pronouns denote.
  4. A more worrying possibility is that there are no hard facts about which things think. Suppose, as instrumentalists about the mental say, that it is merely useful, in explaining and predicting the behavior of certain entities, to “take up the intentional stance” towards them – that is, to ascribe to them beliefs and other mental properties (Dennett 1981114). It is more useful to attribute mental properties to chimpanzees than to amoebas or daisies: you are better off explaining the behavior of daisies115 in non-mental terms, whereas with chimpanzees psychological explanation is the only game in town116. But the question of which things really have mental properties has no answer117. There may not even be a straightforward answer to the question of what sort of things it is most useful to ascribe our mental properties to, for it may be most useful to ascribe them to one sort of thing for some purposes and to other sorts of thing for other purposes. That would suggest that our question has no answer118.
  5. If this really were so, then I suppose all we could say about the metaphysical nature of the beings that think our thoughts would be that it is most useful for certain purposes119 to attribute our thoughts to beings of one kind (organisms, say), and most useful for other purposes to ascribe them to other beings (bundles of perceptions, perhaps) – supposing that such beings actually exist, anyway. That would be at least a sort of answer to the question of what sort of beings think our thoughts, though a rather untidy one. It would make our inquiry considerably less interesting than it would otherwise be. But I don’t think there is any compelling reason to accept120 this view about the mental.
  6. In asking what we are I am not asking about our conception or our understanding of ourselves – about what sort of things we take ourselves to be121. This is metaphysics, not anthropology. What we ordinarily take ourselves to be may be wildly mistaken.
  7. Why suppose that we can discover what we are, as opposed to what we think we are? Well, why suppose that we can discover the answer to any philosophical question? All we can do is to try and see how it goes. If we seem to make progress – if many proposed answers turn out to be incoherent, or to conflict with apparently well-established facts, or to have consequences that just look plainly false, while a small number of views stand up well to interrogation – that will be a reason to think that we might be able to know what we are, or at least to muster some rational grounds in support of a partial answer. If our best efforts turn up no strong grounds for preferring one answer over any other, by contrast, or if the more we think about the possible answers the less well we seem understand them, we may have to admit that the question is too hard for us. But there is no obvious reason to suppose at the outset that we cannot learn anything about what we are. (Kant122 thought he had a reason. He thought we could not know the metaphysical nature of anything, but only how things appear to us and the conditions necessary for this appearance. If he is right, our project is doomed from the start – as is the whole of metaphysics as we know it. I hope I can be forgiven for omitting a critical discussion of Kant's philosophy from a book that is more than long enough already.)
1.6 How the question differs from others
  1. Our question may not sound quite like any of the philosophical problems we learn about as students. But it probably won’t seem completely new either: it sounds:-
    • A bit like the traditional mind-body problem, and
    • A bit like familiar problems of personal identity.
    How exactly does it relate to those problems?
  2. Those who speak of the mind-body problem are usually thinking of questions about the basic nature of mental phenomena, such as belief and conscious experience, and how they relate to such non-mental phenomena as brain chemistry and bodily movements. Our question, by contrast, is about the nature of the subjects of mental phenomena: the beings that think or are conscious. The two topics are of course related: some accounts of what we are may rule out some views on the mind-body problem and vice versa. But we could know a good deal about mental phenomena and their relation to the physical while knowing little about the basic metaphysical nature of mental subjects. If all mental events turned out to be physical events in another guise, for instance, that might rule out the view that we are immaterial substances; but it would not tell us whether we are organisms, parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or even whether we exist at all. Likewise, knowing our basic metaphysical nature is likely to tell us little about the nature of mental phenomena. Suppose it turned out that we are temporal parts of organisms123. That would leave it almost entirely open which account of the mind-body problem is true: it would be compatible with124 behaviorism, functionalism, property dualism, various psycho-physical identity theories, and eliminative materialism, for instance.
  3. It is especially important to distinguish the question of what we are from traditional questions of personal identity. Three questions have dominated discussions of personal identity since the time of Locke125.
    1. One is what it takes for us, or for people in general, to persist through time: the persistence question126. What sort of adventures is it possible, in the broadest possible sense, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you?
    2. A second question, not always distinguished from the first, is how we find out who is who: the evidence question127. What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was there yesterday? How do different sorts of evidence about who is who relate to one another?
    3. A third question asks what it is to be a person, as opposed to a non-person: the personhood question128.
  4. The question of what we are is more or less completely unrelated to the personhood question. What qualifications129 a thing needs in order to count as a person is one thing; what sort of thing meets130 those qualifications – organisms, immaterial substances, bundles of perceptions, or what have you – is another. Suppose for the sake of argument that something is a person if and only if it is, as Locke put it, "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places" (1975: 335131). I take this to be a paradigmatic answer to the personhood question. Yet for all it says, “thinking intelligent beings” might be material or immaterial, simple or composite, persisting or momentary132; they might be organisms, brains, bundles of thoughts, immaterial substances, or what have you. Locke’s definition doesn't answer any of the questions we want answered. It doesn't even tell us whether we exist at all – that is, whether anything satisfies the conditions for being a person. One could have a view about what it is to be a person without having any idea what sort of things we are metaphysically speaking. (Locke’s own position is rather like this133.)
  5. To know what it is to be a person is therefore not to know what we are. Likewise, to know what we are is not to know what it is to be a person. Suppose we are human animals. That does not imply that to be a person is to be a human animal – even assuming that we ourselves are people. It is consistent with there being gods or angels or Martians who are people but not human animals134. Nor does it imply that all human animals are people: it is consistent with the view that human animals in a persistent and irreversible vegetative state135 don’t count as people136. An account of our metaphysical nature implies nothing at all about what it is to be a person.
  6. Nor is the evidence question the question of what we are. One is epistemic; the other is metaphysical. One is about how we find out who is who137; the other concerns our metaphysical nature. They could hardly be more different.
  7. If any familiar question about personal identity is the question of what we are, it is the persistence question. Some philosophers seem to think that to say what it takes for us to persist through time is to say what sort of things we are138. It is certainly one aspect of our metaphysical nature. Knowing our persistence conditions would tell us something about what we are. But it would tell us less than you might think.
  8. Consider some examples. The most popular view about our identity over time is that it consists in some sort of psychological continuity139: you are, necessarily, that future being that in some sense inherits its mental features – personality, beliefs, memories, and so on – from you; and you are that past being whose mental features you have thus inherited. There is dispute over the precise nature of this inheritance.
    1. Some say that your mental life must be (as Unger140 puts it) "continuously physically realized": your brain or something like it must remain intact and capable of supporting thought and consciousness in order for you to survive.
    2. Some also add a “non-branching” clause141 to deal with cases where two past or future beings are psychologically continuous with you at once: they say that you are identical with a past or future being who is mentally continuous with you as you are now only if no one else is then mentally continuous with you as you are now.
  9. Imagine these matters settled: suppose, let us say, that our identity over time consists in non-branching, continuously physically realized psychological continuity. Call this the conservative psychological-continuity view142. Would it tell us what we are? Not by itself it wouldn’t. It may have implications about what we are, such as ruling out our being immaterial substances – it is hard to see how any sort of physical continuity143 could be necessary or sufficient for the persistence of an immaterial substance. It may also imply that we are not organisms, for it seems possible for any organism, even a human animal, to persist without any sort of psychological continuity whatever (see §2.8). The information that we are neither immaterial substances nor organisms would certainly tell us something about what we are. But it would also leave a lot open. Moreover, the conservative view doesn’t actually say that we are not immaterial substances or organisms, and the implication might be disputed144.
  10. So the conservative view gives at best a radically incomplete picture of what we are. Even if we can derive some of our most general and fundamental properties from it, few of those derivations will be straightforward, and even then the picture will be fragmentary. Yet it is a paradigmatic answer to the persistence question. Saying what it takes for us to persist does not tell us what we are.
  11. Other answers to the persistence question teach the same lesson. Consider what Parfit145 calls the simple view146, that our identity through time does not consist in anything other than itself, but is "simple and unanalyzable": no non-trivial conditions are both necessary and sufficient for a person existing at one time to be identical with something existing at another time. The simple view appears to be compatible with almost any view of what we are. Its advocates147 have said that we are:-
    1. Simple immaterial substances,
    2. Compounds of a simple immaterial substance and a physical organism,
    3. Organisms,
    4. Things constituted by organisms,
    5. Microscopic physical parts of our brains, and
    6. Partless material objects physically indiscernible from organisms.
  12. These examples show that we could know our persistence conditions and yet know little about our other properties of metaphysical interest. The converse also holds: we could know a great deal about our basic metaphysical nature without knowing our persistence conditions. For example, Ayers, Merricks, van Inwagen, and Wiggins148 agree that we are biological organisms, and agree to a large extent about the metaphysical nature of those organisms, yet diverge widely149 about what it takes for us150 to persist.
  13. To say what our identity through time consists in is is only to begin to say what sort of things we are, just as describing a country’s coastline only begins to tell us about its geography. What it takes for a person to persist through time is one thing; what sort of beings have those persistence conditions, or indeed whether any do, is another matter.
1.7 Why it Matters
  1. The question of what we are is often neglected. It is common practice to defend an account of our persistence conditions at great length without saying a word about what we are, except perhaps to rule out our being immaterial substances: Grice, Perry, Nozick, Parfit, and Unger are notable examples151. When the matter is addressed at all, it is frequently little more than an afterthought. For example, near the end of his well-known debate with Swinburne, Shoemaker mentions that the account of our identity conditions he has been developing rules out our being organisms. He suggests instead that we are each "physically realized in” an organism and share our matter with it. But he says little about how we are to understand this, and considers no objections. It apparently seemed to him little more than an interesting corollary of his view of our identity over time (1984: 113-114; his 1999152 attempts to remedy this defect). Rovane’s book on personal identity is silent about what we are for 200 pages before mentioning in passing, as if it were rather obvious, that a person is "a set of intentional episodes" (1998: 212153). Although Rovane says a good deal about which intentional episodes go to make up a given person, she says nothing about what sort of thing a set of intentional episodes is supposed to be, and never considers the thought that we might not be sets of intentional episodes at all.
  2. Does it matter154? Why should those concerned with traditional questions of personal identity worry about what we are? Haven't we just seen that they are different questions? Well, they are different in that one could know the answer to any of the traditional questions without knowing what we are and vice versa. Yet they are also connected, in that an answer to one may constrain the range of available answers to another. In particular, accounts of what it takes for us to persist may have troublesome implications for what we are. Those who ignore our metaphysical nature may end up with a view of our identity over time that seems attractive in itself but is incompatible with any plausible account155 of what we are.
  3. Earlier I mentioned the conservative psychological-continuity view, that we persist by virtue of non-branching, continuously physically realized psychological continuity. Many would omit the qualification about continuous physical realization. They say simply that you are that future being who inherits the mental features you have now, and that past being whose mental features you have inherited. How these mental features are passed on is irrelevant, or at any rate needn't involve the continuous existence of any physical object capable of supporting thought and consciousness. Call this the liberal psychological-continuity view156.
  4. Imagine a device that records the total psychological state of your brain ("erasing" or destroying that organ in the process) and then imposes that state, or a state with the same content, onto a new brain in another head (thereby obliterating any psychological content already present there). I take it that this device is logically possible, even though it will never be within our technological capability: if you like, imagine that the machine simply destroys both brains and makes a duplicate157 of the first out of the remains of the second. The liberal view seems to imply that this “brain-state-transfer158 procedure” would move you from one human organism to another (Shoemaker 1984159: 108).
  5. What sort of things might you and I be if this were true? What sort of thinking being160 could the brain-state-transfer machine move from one animal to another161?
    1. It is hard to see how it could move any material thing (van Inwagen 1997162). The machine doesn’t move any matter163 from one head to another. So how could it move a material thing?
    2. Surely you cannot send a concrete material object as a message164 by telegraph.
    3. At most the machine would seem to cause one material thing to lose its mental properties and another material thing165 to acquire them.
    4. What it does is analogous to reading a message written on one sheet of paper, erasing it, and then writing a message with the same content on another sheet. This process of reading, erasing, and writing doesn’t move any material thing166 from one sheet of paper to the other.
    5. Nor, for that matter, does it move any non-material thing167.
    6. No persisting, concrete object of any sort is located or “realized168” first in one sheet of paper and then in another one. So it seems, anyway.
    7. Likewise169, it is hard to see how the brain-state transfer machine could move anything, let alone a thinking being, from one head to another.
    On the face of it at least, the liberal view looks incompatible with anything we could be.
  6. I don’t say that the problem is insoluble: one could turn for help to the ontology of temporal parts170 (§5.5171). But not all advocates of the liberal view would welcome this serious metaphysical commitment172; and without serious metaphysics it really is insoluble173.
  7. Nor do the problems end there. The liberal view clearly rules out our being biological organisms. Whatever the brain-state transfer machine does, it doesn't move an animal from one place to another. If you are in Paris and I am in London and the machine erases your total brain state and copies it into my head, no biological organism thereby moves from Paris to London. Rather174, an animal in Paris has its brain erased or destroyed and another animal in London has its brain remodelled to resemble that of the animal in Paris. If you are an animal, you stay in Paris. But if the liberal view is true, you move to London. If it is possible for you to leave your animal behind in this way, then175 you are not an animal: nothing can leave itself behind. Not only are you not essentially an animal, but you are not an animal at all: nothing that is even contingently an animal176 could move from Paris to London via brain-state transfer. In the story there is only one animal in Paris, and it stays in Paris.
  8. But there is an animal that we call your body177. And human animals with normal functioning nervous systems would seem to be able to think. Or at least they think if any material thing can think, and most friends of the liberal view believe that material things can think. So an animal thinks your thoughts. Yet according to the liberal view that animal is not you. It follows that there are two beings thinking your thoughts178, you and the animal. That is one thinker too many. How could you ever know179 which one you are?
  9. For that matter, an animal that was psychologically indistinguishable from you would satisfy any ordinary definition of 'person'180: for instance the Lockean view that a person is an intelligent, rational, self-conscious being. (Surely there could not be intelligent, rational, self-conscious non-people181.) So the liberal view implies that there are two people now thinking your thoughts, an animal and a non-animal. That is hard to swallow. In fact it is incompatible with the liberal view. Human animals don’t persist by virtue of psychological continuity. If your animal body counts as a person, it follows that some people don’t persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Yet the liberal view is ordinarily taken to assert that all people, not just you and I, must persist by virtue of psychological continuity (§1.3182). The liberal view appears not only to have repugnant consequences183, but to be inconsistent184.
  10. Again, I don’t want to claim that these problems are insoluble. But they are problems. In fact they afflict not only the liberal psychological-continuity view but the conservative view as well, for it too appears to imply that we are not animals: no animal persists by virtue of185 non-branching, continuously physically realized psychological continuity.
  11. I will say more about all this in the next chapter186. My point here is that these popular views about our identity over time have troubling consequences. Though some psychological continuity theorists have tried to address the problems, many more appear to be unaware of them. The reason, I think, is that they have not asked what we are. They have not asked, for instance, whether their view about our identity over time is compatible with187 our being animals. More generally, they have not asked what sort of things we could be if their view is true. If they had, the difficulty of finding a good answer might have led them to think again.
  12. Why it is that so many philosophers have neglected to think about what we are is an interesting question. I suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that metaphysics was out of fashion188 for a long time (and is still not fully respectable in many circles). This led people to believe that they could theorize about personal identity by doing conceptual analysis. But I don’t want to speculate about history here.
  13. That completes my discussion of the meaning and importance of our question. Let us turn now to the answers.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? The Question")

Footnote 12:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 13:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 14:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 15: Footnote 23:
  • See my Note on this question: What Are We?.
  • I shan’t repeat the link each time this expression recurs.
Footnote 24:
  • While the above – rather annoying – observations are correct, I would like to argue that our being material should be the default position that dissenting views need to argue against. It’s ‘obvious’ – indeed, by looking in the mirror – that we are material beings; also, that we are human animals. Any philosopher who claims that these obvious facts are only apparent needs to provide arguments. It’s not really up to the materialist to do so.
  • That said, Olson denies certain ‘obvious’ facts – that he has hands, or that he goes where his brain goes. But he does provide arguments.
  • All-in-all, I think the whole question is one of inference to the best explanation: what philosophical position does the best at accommodating all the facts, intuitions and problem cases, and has the best counter-arguments to contrary intuitions and positions.
Footnote 25: Footnote 26:
  • This is complicated – as Olson will doubtless point out in due course.
  • The upper layer of our skin consists of dead cells. Are these still part of us. The same goes for hair.
Footnote 27:
  • See my Note on Brains.
  • This will be covered in detail later in this Chapter, and in Chapter 4.
  • I don’t think philosophers who hold the view ‘we are our brains’ really believe this, but believe that ‘we go with our brains’ and that ‘we would survive as our brains’.
  • My current view is that a human brain is a ‘maximally mutilated human animal’, along the lines of ‘I would survive if I lost an arm and if I lost a …’.
Footnote 28:
  • See my Note on Bodies.
  • This raises the question whether we can become Cyborgs. See "Clark (Andy) - Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence".
  • While ‘we’ – as a kind – might not be larger than our bodies, individuals might become so. I need to be on the look-out for whether Olson makes this distinction.
  • Two things immediately come to mind:-
    1. Transplants: are recently transplanted organs part of our bodies, or do they only become so once they have been assimilated.
    2. What about prosthetics, that are never assimilated? Even this is an ambiguous usage of ‘assimilation’. Prosthetics would seem not to become part of our bodies, but they are become ‘accommodated’ by (or ‘integrated’ with) our brains as though they were. Take varifocal spectacles, for example. When initially work, the field of vision appears to wobble around as the head moves. But eventually, this sensation goes away, so our brains have been rewired to take the variable focal length into account.
  • Whether externals that we rely on – our websites or libraries – are part of ‘us’ is doubtful, though they might be important to our Narrative Identity.
  • See Andy Clark and "Clark (Andy) - Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence".
Footnote 29: Footnote 30:
  • See my Note on Perdurantism and related Notes.
  • Olson covers this topic later in this Chapter, as well as in Chapter 5.
Footnote 31: Footnote 32:
  • This is a special case of mereological universalism, which posits the existence of even more gerrymandered objects. Any region of spacetime is said to contain an object – its contents – irrespective of whether the region is topologically connected or not. Something like the combination of my nose and the Eifel Tower is a favourite example. Presumably this allows for parts as separately-existing objects, as these are also the contents of regions of spacetime.
  • Olson – along with Peter Van Inwagen – denies the DAUP. See "Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts".
Footnote 33:
  • Olson is suspicious of ‘bodies’ and prefers to talk about ‘organisms’ on the grounds that there is a principled account of what forms part of them. We’ll cover this later.
Footnote 34:
  • See my Note on Causality.
  • I don’t like this definition. Don’t ideas have causal force? And books?
Footnote 35:
  • See my Note on Change.
  • Again, can’t abstract things change. Books go through several editions. Are these not editions of the same book?
Footnote 36: Footnote 37:
  • This could get complicated, and is a matter of dispute between Nominalists and Realists. Is a species something over and above its members?
Footnote 38:
  • Again, this is difficult. What is an ‘instance’. Each copy of Maby Dick – at least if printed rather than electronic – is a concrete particular. It is more than the information it contains. It has dog-ears, coffee stains, annotations … that are not part of the abstract object that is the novel.
Footnote 39:
  • See my Note on Universals, which is – or will be – relevant to the Notes above.
Footnote 40:
  • See my Note on Replication.
  • The use of this terminology is tendentious, of course, as it implies that the replica is not you.
Footnote 41:
  • She would, but she’d find out – from external cues – that she wasn’t you. Initially, because there’s a better candidate for being you. But even if not, on theoretical grounds.
  • See my Note on Closest Continuers.
  • All this is discussed in my Note on Teletransportation.
Footnote 42:
  • I don’t think this analogy is correct, as stated above.
Footnote 43:
  • What might these be?
Footnote 44: Footnote 45:
  • See my Note on Holes & Smiles, which is the same sort of thing – especially ‘smiles’.
Footnote 46:
  • Spinoza would think so, as there’s only one substance in his metaphysics – Deus sive natura – of which anything else is a mode, but I doubt there are many Spinozists these days.
  • But, those who think we are computer programs – and maybe holders of the Constitution View – may be committed to some such idea.
Footnote 47:
  • Our lives are events or processes (that may individuate Organisms, though I’m not convinced).
  • There’s a general metaphysical choice whether to prioritise substances over processes: see my Note on Process Metaphysics.
Footnote 48: Footnote 49:
  • Is this the idea behind Exdurantism?
  • Also, does this relate to the Logic of Identity, and the supposed distinction between ‘loose and popular’ and ‘strict and philosophical’ forms thereof?
Footnote 50:
  • See my Note on Persistence Criteria.
  • Clearly, our persistence conditions are intimately related to what we are, and what events that we intuit that we can survive guides our beliefs as to what we are.
Footnote 51:
  • See my Notes on Properties and Modality.
  • Most philosophers – and most people – seem to think that having a mind with an adequate – and continuous – psychology is an essential property of a person. They may be right, but the assumption is that we are essentially persons, which Olson and other Animalists deny.
Footnote 52:
  • See my Note on Organisms.
  • The animalist contention is that we are identical to – rather than merely constituted by, or in possession of – the biological organisms ‘we call our bodies’.
Footnote 53:
  • This is a very important point. Once the question is properly understood and clearly formulated, the answer may pop out. Much philosophical hot air is wasted in disputes where the question is unclear, or where the disputants are addressing different questions.
  • I might say, though, that it’s the ‘formulating’ of the (right) question that’s ‘the hardest thing in philosophy’.
Footnote 54:
  • See my Note on Plants, not that this is very relevant in the context.
Footnote 55: Footnote 57:
  • As previously mentioned, this will be covered in Chapter 4, so there’s no need to discuss the matter here.
Footnote 58:
  • Olson discusses Temporal Parts in Chapter 5, probably in Sections 5.6-7.
  • The suggestion will be that we should combine elements of animalism with the psychological view and say that we are those stages of human animals during which we qualify as persons.
  • This leads to all sorts of problems – including intermittent existence.
  • My view is that being a person is an honorific assigned to the human animal (and maybe others) and best dealt with via Phase Sortals.
Footnote 59:
  • This just highlights the tension between the two views and the desperate measures sometimes adopted to reconcile them in the ‘having cake and eating it’ sense.
Footnote 60: Footnote 61:
  • I have a lot to say on Olson’s treatment of this topic – for instance critiques of his Thinking Animal Argument, but this can wait until we get to his Chapter 3.
Footnote 62:
  • See my Note on Bundle Theories.
  • Olson treats of these theories extensively in Chapter 6, so my comments can wait until then.
Footnote 63: Footnote 64: Footnote 65: Footnote 66:
  • This was mentioned by me above, but the first time by Olson.
  • From a quick scan, it seems he covers this in detail in his Chapter 6 on Bundles
    (Bundles – The Program View
  • This view is of great contemporary relevance, but my comments will have to await Olson’s treatment of the topic in due course.
Footnote 67: Footnote 68:
  • Well, the bald statement – say – that we are (identical to) human animals doesn’t answer all Olson’s questions, but a fully fleshed-out account ought to, I’d have thought. Elaborations and clarifications are required to argue for this position as against its rivals.
Footnote 69:
  • Surely, Olson ought to say that the positions ‘purport to tell us’, though I dare say a lot can be learnt from considering positions that are incorrect, as most – if not all – of them must be.
Footnote 70:
  • Yes – this was Olson’s original strategy, and it is sensible. But it is somewhat circular, though maybe virtuously so. Lots of the detail has to be touched on in defending the overarching thesis.
Footnote 71:
  • I don’t believe this for a minute, and it’s the most annoying aspect of Olson’s programme. This usage is tendentious and an example of NewSpeak.
  • ‘Person’ is a term of art, invented to prise apart the concepts of human beings and appropriately qualified psychological and moral beings. Olson thinks this is a mistake, which is fair enough, but he shouldn’t adjust the philosophical language so we can’t talk about it.
  • It’s also not even common usage. When we ask ‘how many people are in the room’ we basically mean ‘how many human beings are in the room’, or – as ‘human being’ is also a term of art – how many members of the species Homo Sapiens are in the room. If there are a few great apes or AIs in the room, these may be persons, but they will be not people. And if some infants or severely mentally incapacitated people are in the room, some philosophers might consider them people but not persons. The tension arises when we consider that all people – but not all persons – have legal protection – which is maybe the reverse of what it ought to be.
  • So, Olson is right in saying that saying that we are people tells us nothing, but saying that we are (essentially, identical to ..) persons does. It claims – maybe falsely – that we cannot exist unless we are persons, so we persons may come into existence later and depart the scene earlier than mere people. This is a substantive philosophical position with potentially huge moral implications (it already does with respect to Abortion and may yet do with respect to ‘end of life’ issues when the practicalities so demand.
Footnote 72:
  • This is more complicated than Olson – or maybe I – think.
  • it seems to me that Olson – in confusing people with persons – has confused himself.
  • The claim that we are persons says that we have the metaphysical nature of persons – whatever these might be. Now, how that person is ‘realised’ will vary from persons to person. Human persons are ‘realised’ by their human animals, and this tells us a lot more about them than their ‘just’ being persons.
  • I used to think that Person wasn’t a Natural Kind term, because different kinds of person had different persistence conditions. But I now think this is a confusion. While aliens qua aliens might have different persistence conditions to angels qua angels (should either exist) their persistence conditions – qua persons – would be the same (presumably based on psychological connectivity and connectedness).
  • Olson has difficulty taking the Constitution View seriously; I suspect for reasons associated by this self-inflicted confusion.
Footnote 73:
  • What has this got to do with the matter? Not everyone – even those qualified to have an informed opinion – agrees that we are essentially human animals but that doesn’t mean that we can dismiss the position out of hand.
Footnote 74:
  • It sure would, depending what is meant by ‘people’, but any substantive philosophical position rules out others.
Footnote 76:
  • Well, we’ll never know this as the term ‘Person’ doesn’t refer to whatever instantiates them.
Footnote 78: Footnote 81:
  • I agree with what Olson has to say in this section, despite terminological reservations about people and persons.
  • It is sensible to restrict our discussions to people like us. Other sorts of Person should only be introduced ‘for the sake of the argument’ rather than being a primary focus.
  • So, while it is important to consider whether intelligent computers or AIs are – or might one day become – persons, it is outside the scope of the question of what we are. ‘We’ refers to Human Animals – if we are such – or Human Persons, if that’s what we are (and so on).
  • It is within the scope of my Thesis, however, to consider wider issues.
Footnote 82:
  • See (again) my Note on Persons for what qualifies an individual for being a Person. Olson’s list is a good start, though it doesn’t mention Forensic aspects.
Footnote 83:
  • I’m glad that Corporate Persons are out of scope. In my view, this legal notion is an extension of the term that makes no real sense, other than picking up on ‘person’ being a Forensic Concept. Lawyer like companies to be persons so they can be morally – and hence legally – accountable.
Footnote 85:
  • Well, this argument is valid, but not sound because – as it happens – we are not most fundamentally persons but are organisms. But we might have been persons.
Footnote 86:
  • This argument is difficult because the use of terms is a bit shifty.
  • The difficulty – to my mind – stems from what we are referring to when we talk of ‘persons’. If we’re talking of what constitutes them, then obviously, they have different metaphysical natures. But I don’t think most philosophers – even those who accept a psychological view but don’t explicitly accept the constitution view – are referring to the person’s ‘infrastructure’ but the persons themselves.
  • So, the premise I’d reject is the fourth. We are not essentially persons, because we can exist without being persons.
Footnote 87:
  • I found this paragraph difficult to understand, for some reason. But what Olson means is that – because his discussion is restricted to us – any answers to the wider question of the natures of persons in general is irrelevant in this context.
Footnote 88:
  • See, again, my Note on Human Beings.
  • Olson doesn’t elaborate on the slipperiness of the term.
  • Is it just down to Mark Johnston?
Footnote 89: Footnote 90:
  • Do they really? Surely not. I suspect what they say is that there are human animals, but that human animals only exist in a mind of some sort.
  • Take The Matrix: both Agent Smith and Neo exist in the Matrix, but only Neo exists in the real world. For an idealist, there is no real world.
Footnote 91:
  • I didn’t find that this paragraph added or clarified anything, so I may not have understood it.
Footnote 92:
  • See my Note on I.
Footnote 93:
  • Olson has stated that we’ve moved on to the ’formal mode’. By this, he means language and grammatical usage.
  • We’re about to consider questions raised in the middle of the last century – in particular by Wittgenstein and his followers – suggesting that ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ ("Wittgenstein (Ludwig) - Philosophical Investigations" (1953) pt. 1, sect. 109)
  • Olson doesn’t seem to acknowledge that linguistic usage can be philosophically misleading, and that the muddles that arise can depend on the language in which the muddles are expressed (what options there are for expressing the various thoughts in different natural languages).
  • Some languages have neuter personal pronouns to refer to inanimate objects; others have grammatical genders that apply even to inanimate objects. Nothing philosophically interesting can be deduced from this, other that in some languages personal pronouns don’t – in general – refer to organisms.
  • Earlier, Bertrand Russell had hoped to circumvent such problems by creating a fully logical language (references required!).
Footnote 94: Footnote 95:
  • This is all very slippery. As noted, Olson – and van Inwagen – reject the DAUP, so don’t believe in the existence of ‘hands’. Yet, I doubt this would stop them saying they have a tennis racket in their right hand (if so) even though they may not even agree that tennis rackets exist, only ‘atoms arranged tennis-racket-wise’.
  • Oslon discusses such matters in Chapter 2.7: Revisionary Linguistics.
Footnote 96:
  • See "Anscombe (G.E.M.) - The First Person".
  • This is a fairly long, and doubtless difficult, paper that would need to be read carefully to see if Olson’s points from it are valid.
  • I’ve found an electronic version exported to my Kindle, so I’ll be able to read it while walking Bertie! It’s important reading material for my Note on I, so is worth the attention. However, it’s too difficult just to be skimmed to get the gist.
  • From a quick look, it’s addressing Descartes’ use of ‘I’ in the Cogito and is unlikely to be saying anything as absurd as Olson suggests.
Footnote 97:
  • It is true that – in saying ‘it is raining’ – we are simply referring to a state of affairs, yet even so there are clouds that are sending down rain. And an atmosphere that is ‘muggy’.
Footnote 98: Footnote 99:
  • I agree with Olson in all this. I just doubt that Anscombe & Wittgenstein really mean what Olson and company think they mean.
Footnote 100:
  • Indeed – is the above worth wasting any time on?
Footnote 101:
  • This is Olson limbering up for the Constitution View, which he accuses of positing multiple occupancy (which holders of that view deny).
  • So, ‘I’ would refer both to the human animal and to the person constituted by it.
Footnote 102: Footnote 103:
  • So, this view is distinct from substance dualism, which is taken seriously and receives extensive treatment in Chapter 7:Souls.
Footnote 104: Footnote 105: Footnote 106:
  • Is Olson a mind-brain identity theorist?
  • The brain is part of the body, but saying the mind is part of the body sounds odd, or at the very least tendentious.
  • That said, I’m not sure I believe in the existence of ‘minds’. What are they supposed to be?
Footnote 107:
  • This is all a bit quick and – as Olson admits – dismissive.
Footnote 108:
  • So, language is not straightforward and transparent. Why is Olson happy in this context but not in others?
Footnote 109:
  • Indeed. So why this rather superficial diversion?
Footnote 110:
  • Yes, that’s a good way of clarifying what the question ‘What are We’ is about.
Footnote 111:
  • If this wasn’t philosophy, this would be taken as read. If we asked ‘what are dogs’ (or chimpanzees) it would be a biological question.
  • So, it’s really only a philosophical question that has arisen because of a long history of giving speculative – and wrong – answers.
  • Contemporary interest derives from three areas:-
    1. Those still holding to – and wanting to justify – historical non-Animalist positions,
    2. Puzzle cases and Thought-Experiments.
    3. The hopes of Transhumanists.
Footnote 112:
  • While Olson thinks psychological matters are irrelevant to our persistence, our ‘thoughts’ are important to him because the Thinking Animal Argument is essential (for him) in proving that we are animals in the first place.
Footnote 113:
  • See my Note on Physicalism.
  • I don’t think that eliminative materialism denies that thinking goes on, only that it is carried out by brains rather than immaterial minds.
  • I should cover this in the above Note, which doesn’t currently mention eliminative materialism. Even my Note on Mind doesn’t cover it, though there’s an Aeon video on the topic referenced.
Footnote 114:
  • See "Dennett (Daniel) - True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works".
  • Dennett doesn’t think that thermostats actually have intentions, only that we do will to act towards them as though they do – in their restricted range of action; the reason being that human beings have designed them that way.
  • The same stance is sensible for animate creatures – because evolution has ‘designed them’ that way.
  • Whether other animals have minds is a difficult question, as Olson notes.
Footnote 115:
  • There’s a recent fad at attribute minds to Plants, but I’m not convinced.
  • Even so, we can still adopt the intentional stance towards them (to explain why daisies turn their faces towards the sun, and so on).
Footnote 116:
  • Despite the attempts of behaviourists to operate as though this was not the case.
Footnote 117:
  • Why so? Is this for metaphysical or epistemological reasons? Is it down to vagueness, borderline cases and so on. Or is it that we don’t even know if we have mental properties?
Footnote 118:
  • Why so? Has the question ‘What are We?’ really got anything to do with minds?
Footnote 119:
  • Is this a pragmatist view (of sorts) or is it a Hybrid View?
  • That is, is Olson saying we might just adopt a stance – in an anti-realist way – depending on the circumstances, as though we were thus and so, or is he saying that we might be different things in different circumstances?
  • I note in passing that I don’t have a Note on either Realism or Anti-Realism.
Footnote 120:
  • Maybe so, but it’s a bit early in the discussion for this to be anything other than an Intuition.
Footnote 121:
  • This is an important point, though such ideas will be touched on passim in arguing against contrary positions. So:-
    1. This is not folk-psychology, nor
    2. The history of ideas (in this area), nor
    3. A report of the results of an exercise in Experimental Philosophy.
  • Olson is really trying to find out what we are, not what people at various times and places have thought – or think – we are.
Footnote 122:
  • See my Note on Kant.
  • While Kant thought we only had access to the phenomena (things as they appear to us) rather than the noumena (things in themselves) and that things appear to us the way they do because that’s how our minds work, we can still investigate the phenomena, and some theories of the phenomena will be better than others. Also, the phenomena are all that matter to us.
  • I seem to remember that there are arguments that even if we are brains in vats, we still have knowledge within our constraints. The same might be true if we are SIMs or live in The Matrix.
Footnote 123:
  • This is a position close to – but distinct from – animalism; it’s almost a hybrid view, trying to take the best bits from animalism and the psychological view.
  • However, it’s not Olson’s view, but is posited for the sake of the argument.
  • It’s also not my view. While I would argue that human persons are ‘temporal parts of (human) organisms’ – in the phase sortal sense – that’s not that we are: we are human animals (I agree with Olson on this, though maybe not for his reasons entirely) and are only persons for part of our lives.
Footnote 124:
  • No doubt; I’ve not really thought this through as it’s not hugely relevant. The point is that the mind-body problem is mostly orthogonal to what we are.
Footnote 125: Footnote 126:
  • See (again) my Note on Persistence.
  • As will always be the case with Olson, ‘us, or for people in general’ reads oddly, as though the ‘we’ are some sort of elite. Of course, he means ‘persons in general’, which includes non-human persons.
  • As noted elsewhere, it is possible that persons- qua persons – all have the same (psychological) persistence conditions.
  • Thinking about this again, though, the sort of ‘adventures’ different kinds of person can encounter differ according to kind. Presumably angels don’t have brains, so we can’t ask whether they could survive a brain transplant. But – I might ask – is a brain transplant – for those beings that have brains – something that happens to the person or to that person’s body? Presumably that depends on how we think of the person – whether as a substance in its own right or as a quality of another substance. We might get different answers depending on how the question is framed, and what our background assumptions are.
  • More on this in due course.
Footnote 127:
  • This distinction of metaphysical from epistemological questions is very important.
  • I just note here that the evidence of the individual – for instance in reduplication situations – is not reliable (or so I would claim).
Footnote 128:
  • See my Note on Person.
  • The key point is whether ‘person’ is an honorific (like ‘professor’) that an individual can earn or lose or whether it is a substance term. Also, whether persons form a natural kind.
Footnote 129:
  • Olson seems to assume – contrary to many philosophers – that ‘person’ is not a substance term.
  • More on this when we consider Locke’s view below.
Footnote 130:
  • This is where things get complicated.
  • It’s simple when we consider – say – whether a chimpanzee meets the qualifications. We draw up a (maybe somewhat arbitrary) list, and it either satisfies them or it doesn’t. Often, you’ll find the list gerrymandered to ensure that chimpanzees don’t qualify: if it looks like they might, then an extra caveat is added to the list of qualifications. In the ‘qualification’ sense, we’re stipulating rather than discovering anything.
  • Where things get interesting is when philosophers consider what adventures a person – however ‘hosted’ – can survive. They get really interesting when post-mortem survival is considered.
Footnote 131: Footnote 132:
  • How could something momentary “consider itself as itself in different times and places”? Well, a thing might consider itself as existing at different times even if it doesn’t exist at different times – just as I might consider myself rich and famous without being rich and famous.
  • Is Olson suggesting that any neo-Lockean holds this somewhat absurd view?
Footnote 133:
  • Again, see my Note on Locke.
  • Locke was interested in giving an account of personhood that would allow for the resurrection of the very same Individual (I use this term so as not to beg any questions). But, he didn’t want to rely on the existence of Souls.
  • Famously, he drew a distinction between the person and the ‘man’ – the human being.
  • He also – equally famously – allowed that a rational parrot would be a person.
  • He had a ‘resurrection trial run’ in his ‘prince and the cobbler’ Thought Experiment.
  • While Locke affects not to care which Substance the person is, presumably he thinks it is one? It’s the person that persists, after all. I presume he thought we were probably Souls.
  • For the Constitution View, which Olson so hates, the persisting element is the First Person Perspective, though quite what this is – metaphysically- rather than phenomenologically-speaking – is somewhat obscure.
  • The persistence conditions of the person – on these accounts – just are not those of the person’s ‘host’. I’m not sure such views are coherent, but Olson doesn’t seem to engage with them properly.
Footnote 134:
  • This is not news. Reference Locke’s rational parrot. But it’s true, for all that.
Footnote 135:
  • See my note on PVSs.
Footnote 136:
  • This illustrates the irritating nature of Olson’s terminological reductionism.
  • People in a PVS naturally count as ‘people’ but not – on some accounts – as ‘persons’.
Footnote 137:
  • As previously remarked, this point is well made. I have no issues with it.
Footnote 138: Footnote 139: Footnote 140: Footnote 141: Footnote 142:
  • Hereafter – unhelpfully – the Conservative View.
  • Presumably ‘conservative’ because of the ‘continuously physically realized’ clause?
Footnote 143: Footnote 144:
  • I agree with Olson that it’s difficult to see how we could be immaterial substances if there’s a ‘continuous realisation in a brain’ clause. But the best option for securing ‘non-branching’ conditions is for us to be Souls, so why bother mentioning brains?
Footnote 145:
  • See my Note on Parfit, though is he really an advocate of the ‘simple view’. He advocates the ‘no further fact’ view, but is that the same thing?
Footnote 146:
  • See my Note on the Simple View.
  • The above Note has references to a whole book on the subject, published in 2012 – ie. 5 years after this book, containing a paper by Olson.
Footnote 147: Footnote 148: Footnote 149:
  • I’ll need to tease out the differences between them in due course, as they are all Animalists of various stripes.
Footnote 150: Footnote 151: Footnote 152: Footnote 153: Footnote 154:
  • Note that this ‘does it matter?’ question has nothing to do with Parfit’s ‘What matters in survival’ question.
  • Olson’s question is why it matters to us what we are metaphysically; Parfit’s concerns why we care about survival.
Footnote 155:
  • I agree, unless ‘person’ is a substance-term in its own right, in which case that is what we are.
Footnote 156:
  • So, the difference between the ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ variants of the PV is that the latter – but not the former – demands continuous physical realisation of the psychology.
  • This is purely terminological (though the distinctions are important), but I’d place the ‘Soul View’ in the ‘conservative camp’ as there is a (purported) infrastructure than continuously realises the psychology.
Footnote 157: Footnote 158: Footnote 159: Footnote 160:
  • The following argument is so important that I’ve split it up so that the various assertions and intuitions are segregated out for individual comment.
  • The question is ‘what sort of thinking being’ could be moved in this way.
Footnote 161:
  • So, how are we consider the ‘thinking being’? If it is itself an animal, then (as Olson argues) it doesn’t make sense to say it has moved (except – just maybe – we posit temporal parts, as Olson suggests at the end of the Section).
  • But, if it’s not an animal, but only constituted by one, it might move.
Footnote 162: Footnote 163:
  • Even if it did move matter, it’d depend on what matter and how the matter was moved.
  • In certain variants of Teletransportation, matter rather than information is beamed across; even then, it’s doubtful that the individual is transferred.
  • What might work is a brain transplant, though Olson doesn’t accept this either.
Footnote 164:
  • Intuitively this doesn’t seem possible.
  • If the object were broken into its constituent atoms and reassembled at the other end, it would have been totally destroyed in the process.
  • Worse still if only information is sent and new atoms are repurposed.
  • Yet – it seems – most philosophers intuit that Teletransportation is a form of travel rather than death.
Footnote 165:
  • My intuition also, but it depends on the mind being a property of a physical thing, though this is our assumption here.
Footnote 166:
  • While this analogy is probably correct, I didn’t find it enlightening.
  • It’s true that it’s not the ink that’s transferred but the information it signifies.
  • Maybe Olson is just trying to clarify what’s happening in a Brain-State Transfer.
Footnote 167:
  • It ‘sends’ Information, but doesn’t exactly ‘move’ it.
  • Can non-material things be moved? Do they have locations?
Footnote 168:
  • I wonder whether this is another case of Olson not taking constitution views seriously.
  • What is the candidate for being a ‘concrete object’ in this case?
  • It’s a message – but not the information therein, but the ink thereof.
  • Clearly, the ink isn’t transferred.
  • But – maybe – a constitutionalist would claim that the message was first constitute by the ink on one sheet and then by the ink on another.
  • Now – if it’s claimed that the message is ‘essentially ink’ – then the message has moved and was in each case physically instantiated. But the ink hasn’t moved.
Footnote 169:
  • Well, it doesn’t move the matter, but does move the form as the Hylomorphists might say.
Footnote 170: Footnote 172:
  • This isn’t really a proper response. However, it’s true that we shouldn’t accept some outlandish metaphysical system – or one with enormous ramifications or implications for all else we hold dear – just to fix a spandrel in one area of philosophy (like reduplication problems).
Footnote 173:
  • What’s the ‘it’ – precisely – that’s insoluble?
Footnote 174:
  • I agree entirely with this description. Does anyone doubt it? As far as animals are concerned, that is.
Footnote 175:
  • This logic is absolutely fine. Holders of the ‘Liberal View’ just don’t accept that we are animals (probably for these very reasons).
Footnote 176:
  • This is where things get difficult again. According to the CV, it is metaphysically possible for your FPP to migrate from one animal to the other. These are different animals, but neither ‘is’ you – they only constitute you.
  • Also, one or other of them might not have constituted you, so you might not have ‘been’ that animal.
Footnote 177: Footnote 178: Footnote 179:
  • This is the epistemological consequence of the TA argument, the primary thrust of which is metaphysical. I’ve never been too worried by it.
Footnote 180:
  • This is true – and the reason this is not widely enthusiastically accepted is most likely down to a downplaying of our ‘animal natures’. Lynn Rudder Baker goes to town on this, if I remember correctly, and accuses Animalists of not Taking Persons Seriously. She sees and ontological step-change happening when the FPP comes into existence, so humans differ from other animals not just in degree. I don’t agree with this, of course.
Footnote 181:
  • It may mean what’s intended by ‘Self-Conscious’. If this means ‘phenomenal consciousness – of self and everything else’ then fine; otherwise, the conditions for personhood listed by Olson can be strengthened a little. Basically, we want to exclude AIs that phenomenal Zombies, but have some conception of themselves as Selves.
Footnote 183:
  • What are these? That I don’t know which thinking thing I am?
Footnote 184:
  • So, the logic behind this claim of inconsistency is that human animals are persons; animals can survive total loss of psychology; so there are some persons that can survive total loss of psychology, contra the liberal claim.
  • Now, the liberal will reply that – after the human animal has lost all psychology, it is no longer a person. So, it’s not a person that loses all psychology. So, the liberal can have his cake and eat it.
  • Back to constitution and / or phase sortals again.
Footnote 185:
  • This is true because – as Olson has oft pointed out (to much consternation) ‘psychology is irrelevant to our survival’ (or words to that effect), given that it is irrelevant to the survival of animals, and we are animals.
Footnote 187:
  • It’s difficult to know the degree to which Darwinism and ‘the Descent of Man’ has – until recently – really convinced the philosophical community that ‘we are animals’ and also that animals are much more sophisticated than ‘brute beasts’. After all, the accepted wisdom after Descartes was that they were mere machines. Humanity wouldn’t have treated animals the way they did – and do – if it realised their capacity to suffer.
Footnote 188:
  • Indeed – the Logical Positivists used the term ‘metaphysical’ as a general term of abuse.
  • I agree that speculative metaphysical system-building needed reigning in, but nothing could be more important than seeking answers to fundamental metaphysical questions where they can be addressed with scientific insight as it develops.
  • The latter point needs to be stressed even today if only to discredit some impossible thought-experiments. Taking account of ‘what we are’ needs to accommodate us as we actually ‘work’ rather than blindly assuming that brains can be transplanted or zapped with only a little technical development without needing to understand how information is stored in them and how it affects their physical structure.


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Animals"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 2 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
Paper Comment

Write-up14 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Animals

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 2, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Animals"), of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology", which was available online15 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book16.
  • The text differs slightly from the book.
  • The electronic version of the Chapter was paged backwards, though I have repaired it in the text below.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there17.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.

Full Text
  1. Animalism18
  2. What is an animal?19
  3. The thinking-animal argument20
  4. Are there animals?21
  5. Can animals think?22
  6. Too many thinkers23
  7. Revisionary linguistics24
  8. Animalism and our identity over time25
  9. Further objections26
2.1 Animalism
  1. What sort of things might we be? Let us begin our study of answers to this question with the view that we are animals27: biological organisms28, members of the primate species [Homo sapiens29. This has a certain immediate attraction. We seem to be animals. When you eat or sleep or talk, a human animal eats, sleeps, or talks. When you look in a mirror, an animal looks back at you. Most ordinary people suppose that we are animals. At any rate if you ask them what we are, and make the question clear enough to indicate that “animals” is one of the possible answers, they typically say that it is obviously the right answer. Few people would deny that we are animals. No one is going to feel immediately drawn to any of the alternative views – that we are bundles of perceptions, or immaterial substances, or non-animals made of the same matter as animals, say. Compared with those proposals, the idea that we are animals looks like plain common sense30.
  2. But things are not so simple. As we saw earlier, the appearance that we are animals may owe merely to our relating in some intimate way to animals – to our having animal bodies31, if you like – rather than to our actually being those animals. The weight of authority is overwhelmingly opposed32 to our being animals. Almost every major figure33 in the history of Western philosophy denied it, from Plato and Augustine to Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. (Aristotle34 and his followers are an important exception.) The view is no more popular in non-Western philosophy35, and most philosophers writing about personal identity today either deny outright that we are animals or say things that are incompatible with it. We will come to the reasons for this unpopularity later.
  3. The view that we are animals has become known as animalism36. Because animalism is easily confused with similar-sounding claims, I will say something about how I understand it. Animalism37 says that each of us is numerically identical38 with an animal: there is a certain organism, and you and it are one and the same. This would not bear stating but for the fact that some philosophers who deny that we are identical with any animal nonetheless insist on saying that we are animals. What they mean is that we “are” animals in some loose sense: in the sense of having bodies39 that are animals, or of being “constituted by” animals, or the like. We are animals in something like the sense40 in which an actor playing Lear is a king. That is not animalism.
  4. This terminological point calls for a brief comment. I wish I could persuade philosophers not to state views according to which we are non-animals by saying that we are animals. It forces us to express the view that we are really animals – that we are animals in the ordinary, straightforward sense in which we are people41 – with the ugly phrase ‘we are numerically identical with animals’. This is linguistically perverse42: the most obvious interpretation of the sentence ‘That is an animal’ is surely that the denoted object really is an animal, and not that it relates in some way to something else that really is an animal. It is also tendentious43: it makes animalism sound complicated and difficult when it ought to be simple and intuitive. Likewise, stating the view that we are non-animals constituted by animals (for instance) by saying ‘we are animals’ makes it sound simple and intuitive when it ought to be complicated and difficult. I, for one, refuse to play this mug’s game44. When I discuss the view that we really are animals, I will state it by saying ‘we are animals’. And I will state the view that we are non-animals constituted by animals by saying ‘we are non-animals constituted by animals’. I encourage others to do the same45.
  5. Anyway, animalism says that we are animals, not that people in general are; so it is compatible with the existence of people who are not animals (gods or angels, say), and of animals – even human animals that are not people. Animalism is not an account of what it is to be a person, and implies no answer to the personhood question46 of §1.647.
  6. The view that we are animals may call to mind the idea that we are identical with our bodies48. What does animalism say about this? Is it49 the same as the view that we are our bodies? Does it at least entail that we are? I find these questions hard to answer50. Suppose that a person's body, or at least a human person's body,
    1. Must always be a sort of animal: none of us could possibly have a non-animal body.
    And suppose also that
    1. None of us could ever be an animal other than the animal that is his body.
    If these assumptions51 are true, then our being animals amounts to our being identical with our bodies. But are they true?
  7. I don’t know. Someone might doubt whether a person's body must always be an animal. It is often said that we could have partly or wholly inorganic bodies: “bionic” bodies with plastic or metal parts, say, or even entirely robotic bodies. But no biological organism could come to be52 partly or wholly inorganic. If you cut off an animal's limb and replace it with an inorganic prosthesis, the animal only gets smaller53 and has something inorganic attached to it54. It doesn’t acquire prosthetic parts55. If you were to replace all an organism’s parts with inorganic prostheses, it would no longer be there at all56. You couldn’t point to an inorganic machine and say truly, “That machine developed in its mother’s womb.” So it seems to me, anyway. If this is right – if we could acquire inorganic bodies, but no organism could become inorganic – then replacing some or all of your parts with inorganic gadgets could give you a body that was not an organism57: a body that was at most partly organic. In that case you could be identical with your body without being an animal – or else be an animal without being identical with your body. Being an animal would be something different from58 being your body, even if ordinarily, when our bodies are wholly organic, the two conditions coincide.
  8. What it is right to say here depends on whether having some of your parts replaced by inorganic bits could give you a partly inorganic body (one that was not an animal), or whether it would only cause your body to shrink and become attached to those inorganic bits (as the animal would). And that depends in turn on what thing someone's body is. It depends, in other words, on what it is for a thing to be someone's body. For any objects x and y, what is necessary and sufficient for x to be y's body? What does it mean to say that
    1. A certain thing is your body, or that
    2. Your body is an animal, or that
    3. Someone might have a robotic body?
    Unless we have some idea of how to answer these questions59, we shall have no way of saying whether someone might be identical with his body without being an animal or vice versa.
  9. I have never seen a good account of what makes something someone's body (see60 van Inwagen 1980, Olson 1997: 144-150, 2006a). I don’t know how to complete the formula61 ‘necessarily, x is y’s body if and only if…’. Because of this I have no idea what would happen to62 someone’s body if some of a human animal’s parts were replaced with organic prostheses; and I therefore have no idea whether someone could be his body without being an animal or vice versa. So I cannot say how animalism relates to the thesis that we are our bodies. More generally, I find the word ‘body’ unhelpful and frequently misleading in metaphysical discussions. (§2.563 below gives an example of the sort of confusion it can cause.) For the sake of convenience I will sometimes use64 the term 'x's body' to mean
    1. The human animal intimately connected with x:
    2. The animal we point to when we point to x,
    3. The animal that moves when x moves,
    4. The animal that x would be if x were an animal at all,
    5. …and so on.
    This is merely a stipulation, however, and does not pretend to reflect the way other philosophers use the word 'body’.
  10. Here is another delicate matter. Suppose someone said, "We are animals, but not just animals65. We are more than mere biological organisms." Is that compatible with animalism? Does animalism say that we are nothing more than animals? That we are mere animals?
  11. The answer depends on whether being "not just" or "something more than" an animal is compatible with being an animal. And that in turn depends on the import of the qualifications 'not just' and 'more than'. If a journalist complains that the Cabinet is more than just the Prime Minister, she means that the Cabinet is not the Prime Minister: it has other members too. If we are more than just animals in something like that sense, then we are not animals at all66; at best we may bear some intimate relation to those animals we call our bodies. That may be because we have parts that are not parts of any animal, such as immaterial souls. On the other hand, we say that Descartes was more than just a philosopher: he was also a mathematician, a Frenchman, a Roman Catholic, and much more. That is of course compatible with his being a philosopher. We could certainly be more than just animals in this sense67, yet still be animals. We could be animals, but also mathematicians or Frenchmen or Roman Catholics. There is nothing "reductionistic68", in the pejorative sense of the term, about animalism. An animal can have properties other than being an animal69, and which do not follow from its being an animal. At any rate there is no evident reason why not. Despite its ugly name, animalism does not by itself imply that our behavior is determined by a fixed, "animal" nature, or that we have only crudely biological properties, or that we are no different in any important way from other animals. We could be unique among animals70, and yet be animals.
  12. Finally, animalism does not say that we are animals essentially71; for all it says, our being animals might be only a contingent or perhaps even a temporary feature72 of us, like our being philosophers. Whether we could be animals contingently depends on whether human animals are animals contingently: whether it is possible for something that is in fact a human animal to exist without being an animal. Animalism implies that we have the metaphysical nature of human animals; but what that nature amounts to73 is a further question (see below). My own view, and that of most philosophers, animalists or not, is that animals are animals essentially74; but few arguments for or against our being animals turn on this claim.
2.2 What is an Animal?
  1. Saying that we are animals will tell us little about what we are unless we have some idea of what sort of thing an animal is. I mean by 'animal' what biologists mean by it: animals are biological organisms, along with plants, bacteria, protists, and fungi. Animals are what zoologists study. Someone might say that ‘animal’ in the ordinary sense of the word means nothing more than ‘animate being’ – a thing that can move and perceive – and that whether animals in this sense are biological organisms is an open question. If that is the case, then my use of the word ‘animal’ is not the ordinary one, and I ought to have used the term ‘organism’ or ‘animal in the biological sense’ instead.
  2. Anyway, here is a brief sketch of what I take to be the metaphysical nature of animals. The view I will offer has [controversial elements}75, but it is nonetheless widely held. (More detailed accounts more or less consistent with mine are found in76. van Inwagen 1990b: §14, Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1997: ch. 4 and Wilson 1999: ch. 3.)
  3. As I see it, animals, including human animals, have more or less the same metaphysical nature as other biological organisms. This is not to deny that some animals may have properties of considerable metaphysical interest – rationality and consciousness, for instance – that no plant or fungus could ever have. But if we ask
    1. What organisms are made of,
    2. What parts they have,
    3. Whether they are concrete of abstract,
    4. whether and under what conditions they persist through time,
    … and the like, I believe that the answer will be more or less the same for human organisms as it is for plants and fungi. So we need an account of the metaphysical nature of organisms generally77.
  4. I take it that
    1. Organisms are concrete particulars.
    2. They are substances78, and not events or states or aspects of something else.
    3. They persist through time; moreover
    4. They continue to be organisms when they persist.
    5. I will assume for the present that they do not have temporal parts, though we will revisit this assumption in Chapter 579.
    6. I also assume that organisms are made up entirely of matter: they have no immaterial or non-physical parts.
    Descartes thought that each normal human animal was somehow attached to an immaterial substance that is necessary for a thing to think rationally, but not necessary for it to be alive in the biological sense. If this were true, I take it that the animal would be the material thing80, and not the object made up of the material thing and the immaterial one.
  5. Organisms differ from other material things by having lives. By a life I mean more or less what Locke meant (1975: 330-31): a self-organizing biological event81 that maintains82 the vastly complex internal structure of an organism. The materials organisms are made up of are intrinsically unstable, and must therefore be constantly repaired and renewed83, else the organism dies and its remains decay. An organism must constantly take in new particles, reconfigure and assimilate them into its living fabric, and expel those that are no longer useful to it. An organism's life enables it to persist and retain its characteristic structure despite constant material turnover84.
  6. There may be things besides organisms that are in some sense alive: certain parts of organisms, such as arms, and things made up of several organisms, such as packs of wolves. They are not organisms because they lack lives of their own85. My arm's tissues are kept alive by the vital processes of the human animal it is a part of: there is no self-organizing biological event of the right sort to be a life going on throughout my arm and nowhere else.
  7. Organisms have parts86: vast numbers of them. A thing is alive in the biological sense by virtue of a vastly complex array of biochemical processes, and the particles caught up in these processes are parts of the organism. (If Aristotle87 thought that organisms were mereologically simple, that is presumably because he thought that matter was homogeneous and not particulate.) Owing to metabolic turnover, organisms are made up of different parts at different times88.
  8. What are the parts of an organism? Where does an organism leave off, and its environment begin? Where an organism's boundaries lie has presumably to do with the spatial extent of its life89. But just how its life determines its boundaries90 is not obvious. It is tempting to say that an organism is made up at a given time of just those particles that are caught up in its life – its metabolic activities91 – at that time. If you are an organism, you extend all the way to the surface of your skin and no further because that is the extent of your biological life92. Your clothes, or a prosthetic limb93, are not parts of you
    1. Because damage to them is not repaired in the way that damage to your living fabric is repaired,
    2. Because they are not nourished by your blood supply,
    3. Because their parts are not renewed and replaced in the way that parts of your kidneys are,
    … and so on. Neat though this view is, however, some find it too restrictive. They say that the particles in an animal's hair or in the dead heartwood of an ageing tree are parts of the organism, despite no longer being caught up in its life (Ayers 1991: 22594.). We needn’t settle this matter for present purposes95.
  9. As for identity over time, I am inclined to believe that an organism persists if and only if its life continues96. This has the surprising consequence that an organism ceases to exist when the event that maintains its internal structure97 stops and cannot be restarted – that is, when the organism dies. Whatever is left behind – the organism's lifeless remains or its corpse or what have you – is something other than the organism. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a dead organism: no organism can be alive at one time and dead at another. I believe this because I have never seen a plausible alternative account of what it takes for an organism to persist (Olson 2004: 269-27198.). It is not a wholly eccentric view: in addition to Aristotle (see Furth 1988: 156-15799.) and Locke (1975: 330-331), it has several contemporary advocates100. (van Inwagen 1990: 142-158, Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1997: 159, Wilson 1999: 89-99). It is controversial, however, and nothing I say in this book turns on it. The persistence conditions of human animals will concern us again in §2.7101 and §7.7102.
2.3 The Thinking-Animal Problem103
  1. Why suppose that we are animals? Well, there are about six billion human animals walking the earth – the same as the number of human people. For each of us there is a human animal, and for every human animal (pathological cases aside104, perhaps) there is one of us. Those animals are very like ourselves: they sit in our chairs and wear our clothes; they do our work and read our newspapers and chat with our friends. They appear to be so like us, both physically and mentally, that it is hard to tell the difference. These apparent facts pose a formidable obstacle to anyone who would deny that we are animals: the thinking-animal problem.
  2. There is a human animal intimately related to you, which some call your body. Consider that animal’s mental properties. It would seem to have mental properties. You have mental properties, and the animal has the same brain and nervous system as you have (and the same surroundings too, if that is relevant). It went to the same schools as you did, and had the same teachers. It shows the same behavioral evidence of mentality as you do. What more could be required105 for a thing to have mental properties? In fact the animal seems to be mentally exactly like you: every thought or experience of yours appears to be a thought or experience on the part of the animal. How could you and the animal have different thoughts? But if the animal thinks your thoughts, then surely it is you. You could hardly be something other than the thing that thinks your thoughts106.
  3. Consider what it would mean if you were not the animal. The animal thinks. And of course you think. (We can’t suppose that the animal thinks and you don’t think. Nor can we suppose that you don’t exist, when your animal body thinks.) So if you were not that thinking animal, there would be two beings thinking your thoughts: there would be the thinking animal, and there would be you, a thinking non-animal. We should each share our thoughts with an animal numerically different from us. For every thought there would be two thinkers107.
  4. Or perhaps the animal located where you are doesn’t think, or doesn’t think in the way that you do. Something might prevent it from thinking. Someone might even suppose that it was a mistake to concede the existence of an animal sitting there in the first place: maybe there is strictly speaking no such thing as your body. In any case, there are just three alternatives to your being an animal:
    1. There is no human animal where you are;
    2. There is an animal there, but it doesn’t think in the way that you do; or
    3. There is an animal there, and it thinks exactly as you do, but you are not it.
    There is no fourth possibility108. The repugnancy of these three alternatives seems to me a powerful reason to suppose that you are an animal. Let us consider them.
2.4 Are there animals?
  1. If you are not an animal, the reason may be that there is no animal that you or anyone else could be. How could there be no human animals? What reason could anyone have for believing this?
  2. A number of general metaphysical principles are incompatible with the existence of animals. For instance, some versions of idealism entail that there are no material objects at all (so I should describe those views, anyway); and if there are no material objects, then there are no biological organisms. But let’s not discuss idealism109. Another example is the principle that nothing can have different parts at different times. According to this principle110, whenever something appears to exchange an old part for a new one, the truth of the matter is that the object composed of the old parts ceases to exist (or else begins to disperse111) and is instantly replaced by a new object composed of the new parts. Yet organisms by their very nature constantly exchange old parts for new ones. If nothing could ever survive a change of any of its parts, then organisms are metaphysically impossible112; what we think of as an organism is in in reality only a series of "masses of matter" that each take on organic form for a brief moment- -until a single particle is gained or lost – and then pass that form on to a numerically different mass.
  3. The principle that nothing can change its parts is both theoretically elegant and strikingly implausible113 (we will return to it in §7.3114-§7.4115). But few opponents of animalism deny the existence of animals. They have good reason not to: anything that would rule out the existence of animals would also rule out the existence of most of the things we might be if we were not animals. If there are no animals, then there are no beings constituted by animals, for instance, and no temporal or spatial parts of animals. And if nothing can change its parts, then persisting bundles of perceptions are no more possible than animals. If there are no animals, there will be few items remaining among the furniture of the earth116 that we might be.
2.5 Can animals think?
  1. The second alternative to our being animals is that the animals we call our bodies exist but don’t think in the way that we do. (Let any sort of mental activity or state count for present purposes as thinking.) There are two possibilities here:
    1. that human animals don’t think at all, and
    2. that they think but not as we do.
  2. Consider first the idea that they don’t think at all. You think, but the animal sitting there doesn't. The reason for this can only be that the animal cannot think: it would certainly be thinking now if it were able to. And if that animal cannot think now, no human animal can ever think, for no human animal is better suited for thinking that it is. Presumably no biological organism of any sort could think. The claim, then, is that animals, including human animals, are no more sentient or intelligent than stones; in fact they are necessarily incapable of thought. It may still be that most human animals relate in some intimate way to thinking beings – to us – and stones do not; and it might be appropriate for certain purposes to describe this fact loosely by saying that human animals are more intelligent than stones117. But strictly speaking human animals would have no mental properties whatever.
  3. That would be surprising. Human animals seem to think. Could this really be only a misleading appearance? If human animals and other organisms cannot think, there must surely be some impressive explanation of why they can’t – that is, some account of what prevents them from using their brains to think.
  4. One possible explanation is that nothing can think: there is no such thing as thinking, any more than there is such a thing as phlogiston (a chemical substance once thought to be a constituent of solid matter and released in combustion). This view is known as eliminative materialism118. But no opponents of animalism that I know of accept it. If it were true, it could not be the case that our identity through time consists in psychological continuity, or that we have our mental properties essentially; and that would leave little reason to suppose that we are anything other than animals (see §2.8119 and §2.9120).
  5. Suppose eliminative materialism is false. In that case, the reason why human animals cannot think must presumably be that they have some property that prevents them from thinking – a property that we, who clearly can think, lack. (Or maybe they lack a property of ours that is necessary for thought.) The most obvious candidate for such a property is being material. If any material thing could ever think, surely it would be some sort of animal; so if animals cannot think, we should expect the reason to be that only an immaterial thing could think121. You and I must therefore be immaterial. Of course, simply denying that any material thing could think does nothing to explain why it couldn't; but those who hold this view have said many things that would, if they were true, explain why no material thing could think. So you might expect anyone who denies that you and I are animals to deny that we are material things of any sort. But this is not so: many opponents of animalism claim to be materialists122. They cannot explain human animals' inability to think by appealing to the fact that animals are material.
  6. They might say that human animals cannot think because they are mere bodies, and mere bodies cannot think. It could only be some sort of joke, the idea goes, to say that Newton’s body believed123 in absolute space, while Leibniz’s body disagreed. Since we think, it would follow that we are not our bodies, and therefore not animals. But that wouldn't mean that we are immaterial: we might be material things other than our bodies.
  7. Now even if this is a reason to believe that animals cannot think, it does nothing to explain why124 they can’t. That a human animal is someone’s body and that it is somehow absurd to say that someone’s body thinks tells us nothing about why a human animal, call it what you will, should be unable to think. It makes that claim no less surprising or easier to believe. (Compare125: if Professor Hawking tells us that light cannot escape from a black hole, that is a reason to believe it, but no explanation of why it is so.)
  8. In any case, it is hardly an impressive argument against animal thought. I grant that there is something odd about the statement that Newton’s body believed in absolute space. But a statement can be odd without being false. Though it sounds preposterous to say126 that there is a liter of blood in my office, it is nevertheless true: I am in my office, and there is a liter of blood in me. The statement is odd because it suggests that blood is stored in my office in something like the way it is stored in blood banks, which really would be preposterous. The statement that Newton’s body believed in absolute space might be odd for a similar reason. For instance, the reason it sounds wrong might be127 that it suggests the false claim that believing in absolute space is in some sense a “bodily” property.
  9. In any case, the oddness of saying that Newton’s body believed in absolute space should not lead us to infer that the phrase ‘Newton’s body' denotes something of Newton’s – a certain human organism – that was unable to think. Compare the word 'body' with a closely related one: mind. It is just as odd to say128 that Newton’s mind was tall and thin, or indeed that it had any other size or shape, as it is to say that Newton’s body believed in absolute space. But no one would conclude from this that Newton had some mental thing with no size or shape. That would be a poor argument for substance dualism. We cannot always substitute the phrase 'Newton’s mind' for the name 'Newton' without something going wrong; but it is doubtful whether any important metaphysical conclusion follows from this. We ought to be equally wary of drawing metaphysical conclusions from the fact that we cannot always substitute the phrase 'Newton's body' for the name 'Newton' without something going wrong.
  10. Anyone who wants to explain why some material objects can think but animals cannot has his work cut out for him. I know of just two possible explanations worth considering. The first says that animals cannot think because they are too big129. The true thinkers are brains, or perhaps parts of brains. A whole animal can be said to think only in the derivative sense of having a thinking brain as a part, much as a car is powerful in the sense of having a powerful engine as a part. Animals are stupid things inhabited by clever brains. I will take up this idea in Chapter 4130.
  11. The second, which is far more interesting, is due to Shoemaker131. (1984: 92-97, 1999, 2004). He says that animals cannot think because they have the wrong identity conditions132. Mental properties, he says, have characteristic causal roles. For you to be hungry, for instance, is for you to be in a state that, among other things, is typically caused by your having low blood sugar, and which tends to cause you to act in ways you believe would result in your eating something nourishing. Now your hunger is a state that tends to combine with your beliefs – not mine – to cause you, and no one else, to behave in certain ways. That is part of the nature of hunger. More generally, for you to have any mental property is at least in part for you to be in a state disposed to combine with certain of your other states to cause you, and no one else, to do certain things.
  12. But that, Shoemaker claims, is to say that any being whose later states or actions are caused in the appropriate way by your current mental states must be you133. Now suppose your cerebrum134 is put into my head tomorrow. Then your current mental states will have their characteristic effects135 in the being who ends up with that organ, and not in the empty-headed thing left behind. The subject of those states – you – must therefore go along with its transplanted cerebrum136. It follows that137 psychological continuity of a sort must suffice for you to persist through time. More generally, the nature of mental properties entails that psychological continuity suffices138 for anything that has them to persist. Since no sort of psychological continuity suffices139 for any organism to persist – no human animal would go along with its transplanted cerebrum140 – it follows that no organism could have mental properties141. The nature of mental properties makes it metaphysically impossible for animals to think. However, material things with the right identity conditions would be able to think. Shoemaker believes that human organisms typically "constitute142" such things.
  13. It is important to see just how surprising this view is143. Suppose you and I are physically just like human animals. (Shoemaker more or less accepts this.) Then the view implies that beings with the same physical properties and surroundings can differ radically in their mental properties. In fact this happens regularly: every human person coincides with an animal physically indistinguishable from her – a perfect physical duplicate – that has no mental properties whatever. There are physically identical beings, in identical surroundings, that differ as much in their mental properties as we differ from trees. Mental properties fail to supervene on physical properties in even the weak sense that any two beings with the same physical properties will have the same mental properties. A thing's having the right physical properties and surroundings does not even reliably cause it to have any mental properties.
  14. I find Shoemaker’s argument against animal thought unpersuasive. It doesn’t seem absolutely necessary that the characteristic effects of a being’s mental states must always occur in that very being. In fact it seems that it would not be so in fission cases144. Suppose your cerebrum is removed from your head and each half is implanted into a different empty head. Then your mental states have their characteristic effects in two different people. If the nature of mental states entails that the donor must be identical with the recipient in the “single” transplant case, it ought to entail that the donor must be identical with both recipients in the double transplant. But that, as Shoemaker himself agrees, is impossible.
  15. There is more to say about Shoemaker’s argument, but this is not the place for it (see Olson 2002c145.). What if human animals do think, but not in the way that we do? There are two possibilities here.
    1. One is that they have different mental properties from us: for instance, they are conscious but never self-conscious146.
    2. The other is that human animals have the same mental properties as we have, but they have them in a different way: for instance, they think only in the derivative sense of relating in a certain way to us, who think in a straightforward and non-derivative sense147.
    By itself, however, neither of these suggestions does anything to solve the thinking-animal problem148. It would be just as surprising if human animals were incapable of having the sorts of thoughts that we have, or if they could not think in the sense that we do, as it would be if they could not think at all. It would demand the same sort of explanation, and the prospects for finding one would be similar. It is hard to see what opponents of animalism would gain by proposing such a view.
2.6 Too many thinkers
  1. Suppose human animals think in just the way that we do: every thought of yours is a thought on the part of a certain animal. How could that thinking animal be anything other than you? Only if you are one of at least two beings that think your thoughts. (Or maybe you and the animal think numerically different but otherwise identical thoughts. Then you are one of at least two beings thinking exactly similar thoughts.) If you think, and your animal body thinks, and it is not you, then there are two thinkers there, sitting and reading this book. Call this the cohabitation view. It is unattractive in at least three different ways149.
  2. Most obviously, it means that there are far more thinking beings150 than we thought: the overcrowding problem. Defenders of the cohabitation view – and it has its defenders – typically respond by proposing linguistic hypotheses. They propose that the things we ordinarily say and believe about how many people there are do not mean or imply what they appear to mean or imply. They interpret, or reinterpret, our ordinary, non-philosophical statements and beliefs in a way that would make them consistent with the cohabitation view. When I write on the copyright form that I am the sole author of this book, for instance, I might seem to be saying that every author of this book is numerically identical with me, which according to the cohabitation view is false. But it may not be obvious that that is what I mean. Perhaps I mean only that every author of this book bears some close relation to me: that they all share their thoughts with me, say, that they exactly coincide with me. In that case the ordinary statement that I am the sole author of this book comes out true, even if strictly speaking the book has at least two authors. My wife is not in any ordinary sense a bigamist151, even if she is married both to me and to this animal. At any rate it would be badly misleading to describe our relationship as a ménage à quatre.
  3. The general idea is that whenever two thinking beings relate to one another in the way we relate to our animal bodies, we "count them as one" for ordinary purposes (Lewis 1993152). Ordinary people – people not engaged in metaphysics – have no opinion about how many numerically different thinkers there are. Why should they? What matters in real life is not the number of numerically different thinkers, but the number of non-overlapping thinkers. Human people and thinking human animals don’t compete for space. The world is overcrowded only in a thin, metaphysical sort of way and not in any robust quotidian sense.
  4. If this is right, the cohabitation view is consistent with everything we ordinarily say and believe about how many of us there are. But that does not entirely deprive the overcrowding problem of its force. Philosophers of language who know their business can take any philosophical claim, no matter how absurd153, and come up with a linguistic hypothesis according to which that claim is compatible with everything we say and think when we’re not doing philosophy. If I say that I had breakfast before I had lunch today, there is no doubt something I could be taken to mean that would make my statement compatible with the unreality of time154. But that would not make it any easier to believe that time is unreal – not much, anyway. For the same reason, the mere existence of the hypothesis that we “count” philosophers by a relation other than numerical identity does little to make it easier to believe that there are two numerically different philosophers155 sitting there and reading this now. That is because that linguistic hypothesis seems to most of us to be false156.
  5. In any case, the troubles for the cohabitation view go beyond mere overcrowding. The view makes it hard to see how we could ever know that we were not animals157. If there really are two beings, a person and an animal, now thinking your thoughts, you ought to wonder which one you are158. You may think you're the person – the one that isn't an animal. But since the animal thinks exactly as you do, it ought to think that it is a person. It will have the very same grounds for thinking that it is a person and not an animal as you have for believing that you are. Yet it is mistaken. If you were the animal and not the person, you would still think you were the person. So for all you know, you are the one making the mistake. Even if you are a person and not an animal, it is hard to see how you could ever have any reason to believe that you are159. Call this the epistemic problem.
  6. The cohabitation view is unattractive in a third way as well. If your animal thinks just as you do, it ought to count as a person160. It satisfies every ordinary definition of 'person': it is, for instance, "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places," as Locke put it. But no one supposes that your animal body is a person numerically different from you – that we each share our thoughts with another person. If nothing else, that would contradict the popular claim that people – all people – have properties incompatible with those of animals (see §2.7161 below). It would also mean that some human people are animals, even if others are not. And if human animals are not only psychologically indistinguishable from ourselves but are also people in their own right, it is even more difficult to see how anyone could have any reason to believe that she was not one of the animal people.
  7. If ordinary human animals are not people, on the other hand, despite having the same mental properties as people, all familiar accounts of what it is to be a person are too permissive. There could be non-people whose inner life was entirely indistinguishable from ours; indeed, there would be at least one such non-person for every genuine person. That would deprive personhood of any psychological or moral significance. For that matter, it would make it a real epistemic possibility that we are not people. I can verify easily enough that I am rational, self-conscious, and so on; but how could I assure myself that I have that extra feature required for personhood that rational human animals lack? Call this problem – that our animal bodies would be people different from ourselves – the personhood problem162.
2.7 Creative linguistics
  1. Some say that the epistemic problem163 has a linguistic solution (Noonan 1998164, forthcoming). They make two surprising claims.
    1. First, they say, not just any rational, self-conscious being, or more generally any being with our mental capacities, is a person. To count as a person, a thing must have not only the appropriate mental qualities, but something else as well: it must persist by virtue of psychological continuity165, or have those mental qualities essentially166, or the like. Call this extra feature F. That beings must have F in order to fall within the extension of the word ‘person’ is supposed to be a contingent fact about how we use167 that word. Human animals lack F168, and therefore do not qualify as people, despite being psychologically indistinguishable from ourselves. That is the first claim.
    2. The second is that the word 'I' and other personal pronouns, at least in their most typical uses, refer only to people169: that's why we call them personal pronouns. A being that says 'I' in normal circumstances refers thereby to the person who says it. This too is supposed to be a contingent fact about how we use language170.
  2. These two claims, together with the cohabitation view, yield the startling conclusion171 that first-person utterances (and presumably first-person thoughts as well) do not always refer to the beings that utter or think them. In particular, when your animal body says 'I', it doesn't refer to itself, as it isn't a person. But presumably you have F; so you are a person, and when you say or think 'I', you do refer to yourself. Since your animal body says and thinks just what you say and think, its first-person utterances and thoughts therefore refer to you – the person who produces them – rather than to itself. If it says, "I am hungry," it means not that it itself is hungry, but that you are. More to the point, if the animal says or thinks, "I am a person and not an animal," it does not say falsely that it is a person and not an animal, but truly that you are. So neither you nor the animal is mistaken172 about which thing it is.
  3. Call this linguistic hypothesis – that personal pronouns refer only to people and that people by definition have F – personal-pronoun revisionism173. How would it solve the epistemic problem? Suppose there are two beings thinking your thoughts: an animal, and also a nonanimal with psychological persistence conditions – a psychological continuer for short. Better, suppose that you know this. Suppose further that having psychological persistence conditions is the extra person-making feature F. Now imagine wondering which of the beings thinking your thoughts you are, the animal or the psychological continuer. How could you work out the answer to this question?
  4. Well, as a competent speaker of English you would know at least implicitly
    1. That each occurrence of the word 'I' refers only to the person who utters it. You would also know, or be able to work out,
    2. That something counts as a person only if it is a psychological continuer, which according to pronoun revisionism is true by definition. And of course you know
    3. That you are whatever you refer to when you say 'I'. These are supposed to be linguistic and conceptual facts that we can know a priori. Given that a psychological continuer thinks your thoughts, it follows from these claims
    4. That you are a person and a psychological continuer.
    If you know that animals are not psychological continuers, you can infer from this that you are not an animal – even if you share your thoughts with an animal psychologically indistinguishable from you. You can therefore know that you are a psychological continuer and not an animal. You can know which of the beings thinking your thoughts you are. That would solve the epistemic problem174.
  5. There is much to be said about this proposal (I discuss it at greater length in175 Olson 2002b; see also Zimmerman 2003: 502-503). I will make just one comment. We are supposing that the human animals that walk and talk and sleep in our beds have the full range of human attitudes and emotions, and are psychologically indistinguishable from ourselves176. (We discussed the view that human animals are psychologically different from ourselves in the previous section.) Now consider your understanding of the word ‘person’. In particular, think of the sense of the word that informs your use of the personal pronouns. What features must a being have in order for you to call it a person in that ordinary sense? What must it have in order to be a someone rather than a something, a he or a she rather than an it? If something were psychologically indistinguishable from yourself, or from one of your close friends, would you refuse to call it a person or a someone until you were told whether it persists by virtue of psychological continuity? That seems to be no part of what we ordinarily mean by ‘person’. If human animals really are psychologically just like ourselves, they will count as people in any ordinary sense of the word. It couldn’t turn out that177 half of the rational, self-conscious, human-sized beings that we know and love and interact with in daily life are not people. Human animals may fail to satisfy some specialized philosophical sense of ‘person’, owing to their having the wrong persistence conditions or on some other trivial grounds. But they are surely people in the sense of the word that informs our ordinary use of the personal pronouns.
  6. Maybe it isn’t always clear to us what we mean by our words. Some ordinary words may mean something very different from what they seem to mean. Perhaps we cannot dismiss personal-pronoun revisionism as absurd. But it is hardly part of an attractive alternative178 to animalism.
2.8 Animalism and our identity over time
  1. Those who say that we are not animals will probably want to argue either that179 human animals cannot think in the way that we can, or that we can somehow know that we are not the human animals that share our thoughts. Neither prospect looks promising. That, to my mind, is the principal case for our being animals180. What is the case against181 it?
  2. Historically, the main reason for denying that we are animals is hostility to materialism182. The conviction that no material thing, no matter how complex, could ever think in the way that we do is clearly incompatible with our being animals. But few philosophers183 set much store by it nowadays. The main contemporary objection to animalism has to do with our identity over time, the most popular account of which is that we persist by virtue of some sort of psychological continuity184. That rules out our being animals, for no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient185 for a human organism to persist.
  3. To see that it isn’t necessary,
    1. Consider the fact that each human animal starts out as an embryo186 incapable of any sort of mental activity. There is no psychological continuity of any sort between an adult human animal and the embryo it once was: the adult animal’s mental properties cannot derive in any way from those of the embryo, for the embryo had none. The embryo is187 the adult human organism, yet there is no psychological continuity between the embryo as it started out and the full-grown animal as it is today. A human animal can therefore persist without any psychological continuity whatever. Or
    2. Consider what would happen if you were to lapse into a persistent and irreversible vegetative state188. The result of this would be a human organism that was clearly alive, in the biological sense in which an oyster189 is alive: it would breathe spontaneously, digest its food, fight infection, heal wounds, and so on. It would presumably be the very human organism190 that was once able-bodied: no one supposes that a human animal that lapses into a persistent vegetative state thereby ceases to exist and is replaced by a new animal. But the animal would no longer be capable of any mental activity. Again, a human animal can persist despite complete psychological discontinuity.
    If any sort of psychological continuity is necessary for you to persist, then your animal body existed before you did, and it could outlive you. But nothing existed before it itself existed, and nothing can outlive itself. It follows that you are not that animal191.
  4. Now the claim that psychological continuity is necessary for us to persist may sound unattractive192. Those who have actually suffered the misfortune of having a loved one lapse into a persistent vegetative state do not often believe that that person has literally ceased to exist193, and that the living thing lying on the hospital bed is a numerically different being. (They may say that their loved one’s life no longer has any value, or that he ought to be allowed to die; but that is another matter194.) Nor does this attitude appear to rest on the mistaken belief195 that there is some sort of psychological continuity in these cases. And when we see an ultrasound picture of a 12-week-old foetus, most of us are inclined believe that we are seeing something which, if all goes well, will come to be196 a full-fledged human person, even though it now has no mental properties. (This is something that most parties to debates over the morality of abortion197 agree on.) We don’t ordinarily suppose that the foetus cannot itself become a person, but can only give rise to a person numerically different from itself.
  5. In fact animalism appears to be compatible with everything we believe about our persistence in real-life situations. In every actual case, the number of people we think there are is the same as198 the number of rational human animals. Every actual case in which we take someone to survive or perish is a case where a human animal survives or perishes. Or at least this is so if we leave aside religious beliefs – our being animals may be incompatible with our being resurrected or reincarnated (though some leading philosophers of religion disagree199: see van Inwagen 1978, Zimmerman 1999, Merricks 2001a).
  6. But animalism conflicts with things we are inclined to say about science-fiction stories. This appears to show a deep and widespread conviction that some sort of psychological continuity is sufficient for us to persist200.
  7. Imagine that your cerebrum is put into another head. The being who gets that organ, and he alone, will be psychologically continuous with you on any account of what psychological continuity is: he will have, for the most part anyway, your memories, beliefs, and other mental contents and capacities; he will have your “first-person perspective201”; he will take himself to be you202; all these mental properties will have been continuously physically realized throughout the process; and there are no troublesome rival claimants. If any psychological facts suffice for you to persist, that being would be you: you would go along with your transplanted cerebrum. And many people are convinced that you would indeed go along with203 your transplanted cerebrum.
  8. What about your animal body? Would it go along with its cerebrum? Would the surgeons pare that animal down to a lump of yellowish-pink tissue, move it across the room, then supply it with a new head, trunk, and other parts? Surely not204. A detached cerebrum is no more an organism205 than a detached arm is an organism: if the animal went along with the cerebrum, it would have to cease being206 an animal for a time and then become an animal once more when the transplant is complete. More importantly, think of the empty-headed thing207 left behind when your cerebrum is removed. It is an animal. If the surgeons are careful to leave the lower brain intact, it may even remain alive208. It seems to be209 the very animal that your cerebrum was a part of before the operation. The empty-headed being into which210 your cerebrum is to be implanted is also a living human organism. And putting your cerebrum into its head surely doesn’t destroy211 that organism and replace it with a new one.
  9. So there appear to be two human animals in the transplant story. One of them loses its cerebrum and gets an empty head. That organ is then fitted into the empty cranium of the other animal, which is thereby made whole again. The surgeons move an organ from one animal to another, just as212 they might do with a liver. No animal moves from one head to another. Even though there is full psychological continuity between the cerebrum donor and the recipient, they are not the same animal. Thus, no sort of psychological continuity suffices213 for a human animal to persist through time. One human animal could be psychologically continuous in the fullest possible sense with another human animal214.
  10. The conviction that you would go along with your transplanted cerebrum is therefore incompatible with your being an animal. Your animal body would stay behind if your cerebrum were transplanted. If you would go along with your transplanted cerebrum, then you and that animal could go your separate ways. And of course a thing and itself can never go their separate ways. It follows that you are not that animal, or indeed any other animal. Not only are you not essentially an animal. You are not an animal at all, even contingently: nothing that is even contingently an animal215 would move to a different head in a cerebrum transplant.
  11. So the principal case against animalism216 is this: If we were animals, we should have the persistence conditions of animals, conditions which have nothing to do with psychological facts. Psychology would be completely irrelevant to our identity over time. Cerebrum transplants would be no different, metaphysically, from liver transplants: you could donate your cerebrum to someone else, just as you could donate your liver. But that is absurd. Psychology clearly is relevant to personal identity. You would go along with your transplanted cerebrum; you wouldn’t stay behind with an empty head. Therefore we are not animals.
  12. Taken in isolation, the transplant argument may look strong. Why deny that we should go along with our transplanted cerebrums? Isn’t it obvious that that is what would happen? But we have seen how this “transplant conviction” could be wrong: it would be wrong if we were animals. Would it really be so surprising if it were wrong? To my mind, it would be surprising if it were right217. That would mean either that human animals cannot think, or that you are one of two beings thinking your thoughts, and one of those beings would not go along with its transplanted cerebrum. That would be surprising.
  13. In any case, there are other reasons to doubt the transplant conviction. For one thing, the sort of psychological continuity that would hold between you and the recipient of your cerebrum could hold between you and two future beings. If your cerebrum were divided218 and each half implanted into a different head, at least one of the resulting beings would be mistaken in thinking that she was you, for the simple reason that one thing (you) cannot be numerically identical with two things219. Someone can be fully psychologically continuous with you and yet not be you: psychological continuity is not sufficient220 for us to persist. That undermines the judgment that the one mentally continuous with you in the original transplant story would be you. If the claim that anyone psychologically continuous with you must be you fails to hold in fission cases, it might fail221 to hold in cerebrum transplants too.
  14. For another, the transplant conviction gets much of its support from a questionable assumption about our practical attitudes – "what matters in identity222", as the jargon has it. Imagine that your cerebrum is about to be transplanted into my head. The empty-headed being left behind will then get a new cerebrum. The hospital has only enough morphine for one of the two resulting people; the other will suffer unbearable pain223. If we asked you before the operation who should get the morphine, how would you choose? (Imagine that your motives are entirely selfish.) Most people say that you would have a strong reason to give the morphine to the one who ends up with your cerebrum. You would have less reason, if any, to give it to the other person. This may lead us to infer that you would be224 the one who ends up with your cerebrum.
  15. But this inference is questionable. Many philosophers doubt whether your selfish interest in the welfare of the person who gets your cerebrum must derive from the fact that he or she is you. In the double-transplant case, they say, you would have a selfish reason to care about the welfare of both offshoots. Better, you would have the same reason225 to care about the fission offshoots as you would have to care about the one who got your whole cerebrum. Yet neither of the fission offshoots would be you. In that case the concern you would have for the person who got your cerebrum in the single transplant case would not support the claim that he or she would be you, thus depriving the transplant conviction of what appears to be its principal support226.
  16. If the transplant conviction is false, why did anyone ever accept it? Well, someone’s being psychologically continuous with you is strong evidence227 for her being you. Conclusive evidence, in fact: no one is ever psychologically continuous with anyone other than herself in real life. That makes it easy to suppose that the one who gets your cerebrum228 in the transplant case would be you, even if, because we are animals, it isn’t so.
  17. Here is another reason why someone might find the transplant argument a conclusive refutation of animalism. Suppose there are, in addition to human animals, thinking non-organisms229 that would go along with their transplanted cerebrums, or more generally beings that persist by virtue of some sort of psychological continuity. And suppose that such a being thinks your thoughts. Then there would be two beings that are otherwise equally good candidates230 for being you, except that one has the sort of persistence conditions we believe you to have and the other (the animal) doesn’t. Would it not be perverse, in that case, to suppose that you are the second being? That would make animalism look plainly wrong. I believe that many advocates of the transplant argument do assume that certain non-animals think our thoughts231. Few of them give any reason to accept that metaphysical claim, however, and some such reason is surely needed. We will consider some reasons for it in Chapters 3 and 5232. But even if assuming that human animals coincide with thinking non-animals would make the transplant argument an irresistible attack on animalism, it would not make it a strong argument for any positive view about what we are. That is because of the thinking-animal problem: the difficulty of knowing that233 we are anything other than the animals thinking our thoughts.
2.9 Further Objections
  1. We have seen that animalism conflicts with traditional thinking about our identity over time. Here are some further objections234.
  2. First, animalism seems to imply that you and I are only temporarily and contingently people235. At least this is so on most proposed accounts of what it is to be a person. Every human animal was once an embryo with no mental properties. If being a person implies having certain mental properties – rationality and self-consciousness or the like – then each human animal was once a non-person. Even if a thing need only have the capacity to acquire the relevant mental properties in order to count as a person, so that unthinking embryos might be people, human animals in a persistent vegetative state will not count as people, and any human animal could end up in such a state.
  3. I don’t want to argue about what it is to be a person. (I don’t find it an interesting question236.) The important fact is that our being animals would make our having mental features of any sort a temporary and contingent condition of us – even if it is our normal or proper condition. It would mean that any of us could exist at a time without having any mental properties whatever at that time, or even the capacity to acquire them. What is more, any of us could have existed without237 having any mental properties at any time: any of us could have died six weeks after conception. Your being able to think or experience would be no more essential to you than your being a philosopher. It would not, so to speak, be part of your being238.
  4. Second, animalism appears to entail that there are no persistence conditions for people as such239: no persistence conditions that necessarily apply to all people and only to people. The persistence conditions of human animals presumably derive from their being animals, or organisms. That makes their persistence conditions no different from those of oysters, which are not people by anyone’s lights. If so, then our being animals implies that we have the same persistence conditions as some non-people. Animalism is also consistent with there being people whose persistence conditions are different from ours240: inorganic people such as gods or angels, for instance. If there could be such beings, it would not be necessary that all people have the same persistence conditions. People’s persistence conditions, and for that matter their metaphysical nature in general, would derive not from their being people241, but from their being animals, or immaterial substances, or whatever metaphysical sort of person they are. Person would not be a kind242 that determines the identity conditions of its members.
  5. Some philosophers see in these implications a grave objection to animalism (Baker 2001: 218-20243). They find it absurd to suppose I might be a person only temporarily and contingently. We might as well say244 that the moon is only temporarily and contingently a material object. This thought appears to be incompatible with our being animals.
  6. The claim that there are no persistence conditions for people as such is said to conflict with the very idea of personal identity (Baker 2001: 124245). To think about personal identity, the objection goes, is to inquire into the identity conditions of people as such – identity conditions that things have by virtue of being people. That, they say, is why we call it personal identity246. If there are no such conditions, as animalism seems to imply, then there is no such thing as personal identity – an implication that is also taken to be absurd.
  7. I suppose these objections have some force. That you and I are people essentially is an attractive claim. But it doesn’t seem obvious. If we take seriously the idea that a person could be an organism, and we accept that organisms have mental properties only contingently, and we take being a person at a time to entail having mental properties at that time, then we can understand well enough how someone might be a person only contingently. And if nothing else, the thinking-animal problem247 shows that our being organisms is a claim that we must take seriously.
  8. That we must have our persistence conditions by virtue of being people, so that there must be persistence conditions for people as such, is another interesting conjecture. Here is how I see it. You and I have many important properties. We are people. We are also (let us suppose) material, composed of parts, biologically alive, sentient, and awake. For that matter, we might also be philosophers, Hindus, women, or Ukrainians. What principle dictates that our being people must determine our identity conditions248, rather than any of these other properties? None that I know of. It may be plausible on the face of it; but its incompatibility with our being animals249 looks like an excellent reason to doubt it.
  9. One further objection to animalism is that it implies the wrong account of what determines how many of us there are at any one time (Lowe 1996: 31250) – a topic sometimes called "synchronic identity251". If we are animals, then the number of human people at any time will always be equal to252 the number of human animals that have whatever it takes to be a person at that time. And what determines the number of animals is presumably a matter of brute biology. Perhaps it is determined by the number of biological lives in the sense sketched in §2.2253. But many philosophers, beginning with Locke, have assumed that the number of people or thinking beings at any given time is determined not by brute biology but by psychological facts: facts about mental unity and disunity.
  10. My mental states are unified in the sense of being disposed to interact with one another, and not with any others, in an especially direct way. For instance, my desire to get a train to London will tend to combine with my belief that this train goes to London to cause me to board it. My desires don't interact with your beliefs in this way to produce action. That, the idea goes, is what makes it the case that my desires and my beliefs are the states of a single person254, whereas my desires and your beliefs are not. More generally, mental states belong to the same person or thinking being just when they relate to one another in this way (Shoemaker 1984: 94- 97255). So the number of people, or thinking beings generally, is necessarily equal to the number of unified systems of mental states. Call this the psychological individuation principle.
  11. This principle looks incompatible with animalism. It seems possible for an animal to have disunified mental states – supposing that an animal can think at all, anyway. It may even be possible for an animal to have a mental life that is no more unified than yours is with mine: perhaps a single human animal could be the home of two unified mental systems. This might happen in an extreme case of multiple personality256 – not in any actual case, but in a case that we could imagine by extrapolating from actual cases. The psychological individuation principle implies that such an animal would be the home of two people.
  12. This doesn't yet show that the psychological individuation principle conflicts with animalism. Animalism doesn't say that all people are animals. Why couldn't we normal human beings be animals, while people with extreme split personality are something else? But that would be an uncomfortable view257. What sort of things would the people in those unusual cases be? They must be something. Perhaps they would be bundles of mental states, or parts of brains. But if an animal with split personality could house two or more such non-animal people, we should expect your animal (which I take to be normal and mentally unified) to house one non-animal person. And if there is a non-animal person within you, it will be hard to maintain that you are the animal. How could you ever know which person you are258? Animalism at least strongly suggests that for every animal there can be at most one human person, no matter how disunified that animal's mental states might be; and that appears to be incompatible with the psychological individuation principle.
  13. As I see it, the psychological individuation principle is yet another debatable conjecture (Olson 2003b259). In §6.3260 I will argue that it is incompatible with our being material things of any sort, and is best combined with the view that we are bundles261 of mental states.
  14. I believe that the most serious worries for animalism are very different from those we have considered here. We will come to them in Chapter 9262. In the meantime let us turn to the other views of what we are.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Animals")

Footnote 14:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 15:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 16:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 17: Footnote 27: Footnote 28: Footnote 29: Footnote 30:
  • This must be right – and the default view. As such, I don’t think the philosopher’s main job is to argue for this view, other than as an inference to the best explanation. However, the animalist needs to critique rival theories.
Footnotes 31, 39:
  • This is discussed later in the Chapter, so I won’t touch on it now.
Footnote 32: Footnote 33: Footnote 34: Footnote 35:
  • This could do with some justification as it is an important point.
Footnote 36: Footnote 37: Footnote 38: Footnote 40:
  • Is this analogy apposite?
Footnote 41:
  • What does Olson mean here by ‘people’, such that it is meant in an ‘ordinary, straightforward sense’?
Footnote 42:
  • Language is much more subtle than Olson has it.
  • ‘Is’ has more meanings than ‘is numerically identical to’. Saying that Eric Olson is a professor doesn’t mean that he would cease to exist if he got the sack.
  • ‘Is’ often applies a job, status, quality or something to an individual or thing that is fundamentally something else.
  • I’ve a feeling that this idea came up in a PhD supervision I had with Jen Hornsby many years ago and that I got challenged on it. I need to look this up.
Footnote 43:
  • Natural language isn’t designed to make animalists feel comfortable.
Footnote 44: Footnote 45:
  • Maybe, for the sake of clarity, I should refer to Olson as ‘a human animal who is currently a Professor’?
Footnote 46:
  • See my Note on Persons.
  • This is important – and a useful contribution Olson has made to the debate on PID, in shifting it from talk of Persons to talking about Us. Locke had already made this distinction, but talk had been almost universally about Persons.
Footnote 48: Footnote 49:
  • It? That is, ‘is animalism the view that we are our bodies’.
Footnote 50:
  • At least the questions make sense. For the Animalist, some proposed answers to the question often asked – about the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘our bodies’ – don’t make sense. We can’t ‘have’ bodies – for instance – if there’s no ‘I’ distinct therefrom (unless all animals are said to ‘have’ bodies).
  • But … maybe things are more nuanced? Do animals ‘have’ bodies? Olson goes on to discuss this later in the Section.
Footnote 51:
  • This discussion is initially within the context where Animalism is assumed as the correct account of PID. Non-animalists would deny both these assumptions without further thought; it’s been assumed that we can swap bodies or cease to be animals (ref: Locke’s Prince and the Cobbler Thought Experiment and also the Christian hope of Resurrection into qualitatively dissimilar bodies discontinuous with our present ones.
Footnote 52:
  • Olson is not – at this point – denying that we might become Cyborgs or undergo Metamorphosis. At least I don’t think so.
  • It’s what happens to the organism during such a process that he’s interested in now.
Footnote 53:
  • This might be the case initially, and in this extreme and clear-cut case.
  • But – over time – even in this case it’s use would produce changes in the brain which would rely on it for locomotion. But, I suppose, no more so than the reliance of spectacles for vision.
  • See a Footnote in Chapter 1.1 which discusses spectacles.
Footnote 54:
  • This is clear in this case, but less so in others.
  • For instance, if I had a deformity in my leg, this might be addressed by my wearing a leg brace, which is clearly external to the leg and therefore not part of the organism.
  • However, an alternative approach would be to break and straighten the leg, inserting pins and titanium rods and the like. Over time, these inorganic parts would be integrated by the body during the healing process. Bone would grow to join with the inorganic bits. To the external view, it wouldn’t be obvious that all this had taken place, and the repaired leg would be more useful to the organism than it had been originally. Does it make sense – say a length of bone had been removed to make way for the titanium rod – that the animal had ‘got smaller’?
Footnote 55:
  • So Olson claims, but can this claim not be resisted?
  • Organisms contain lots of ‘parts’ that might be treated as ‘alien’ and therefore not part of the body. We couldn’t digest our food without our microbiome (see Wikipedia: Microbiome) and ostriches can’t without ingesting stones (see Wikipedia: Gastrolith). We have mitochondrial DNA (see my Note on Chimeras). Then there’s organ Transplants. Admittedly, all but the gastroliths are organic.
Footnote 56:
  • It would have metamorphosed – or been metamorphosed – into an Android.
  • But, could it really be useful to say that the animal had ‘got smaller and smaller’ until it finally vanished?
  • I imagine there’s a Sorites paradox lurking here somewhere.
Footnote 57:
  • So, when I point to someone with embedded inorganic prostheses, am I pointing incorrectly if my pointing includes the inorganic bits?
  • It seems our language wouldn’t really consider such an individual to be full of holes where holes ought not to be.
Footnote 58:
  • As Olson says at the end of the sentence: normally we have coincidence, but modal considerations point to non-identity even in the normal case.
  • These considerations might make us reconsider what we are. It might move us back to the Body Criterion which was the popular rival to the Psychological Criterion before the Biological Criterion came along.
  • All this connects to Transhumanism, of course.
Footnote 59:
  • Maybe it’s worth having a go now – or at least deciding whether there’s anything important at stake.
  • So:-
    1. A certain thing is your body: We can always point to someone’s body, whether or not it’s riddled with inorganic repairs. Your body is that physical thing through which you do your stuff. It would – in normal usage – tend to focus on physical stuff and ignore your mental attributes, in the dichotomy ‘mind and body’ but strictly-speaking it includes your brain and whatever it does.
    2. Your body is an animal: if you’re an animal, then you don’t ‘have’ a body, you ‘are’ one. We have a choice with prostheses – deny that what appears to be your body (albeit one that’s patched up) is your body or say that patched-up animals are still animals
    3. Someone might have a robotic body: What does this mean? What is the ‘someone’ that ‘has’ a robotic body? In normal parlance it’d be taking the ‘someone’ as a brain – ie. adopting the Brain Criterion.
Footnote 60: Footnote 61:
  • Sometimes this is asking too much. Wait until we get to asking ‘what is an animal’. Maybe we’re stuck with Wittgenstein’s approach to games – a family resemblance?
Footnote 62:
  • What does he mean? What happens is what happens! Is he asking whether it remains in existence?
Footnote 64:
  • Well, this usage is perfectly normal, even if it is a ‘stipulation’.
Footnote 65:
  • Yes – this is an important complaint against Animalism. Baker harps on about this. I think Olson has satisfactory answers.
Footnote 66:
  • This depends – as we’ve discussed – on what the ‘parts’ of the higher animals are. But we can’t be animals if we are supposed to have parts that (other) animals cannot have.
  • But none of this can be stipulated.
Footnote 67:
  • As Olson goes on to say, we are very special animals, but animals for all that.
Footnote 68:
  • See my Note on Reductionism.
  • I’m not fully clear on what the ‘pejorative’ sense of reductionism is in this context.
Footnote 69:
  • ‘Being an animal’ is rather a clunky property that all animals share! Obviously they all have multitudinous properties.
  • Importantly, most human animals, and maybe some others, have the property of being a Person.
Footnote 70:
  • So, Olson is careful – without prejudice – to distance animalism from the excesses of evolutionary psychology.
  • However, Baker goes further and claims a new ‘kind’ – a Person – comes into existence when the FPP comes into existence. Yet it is members of the species Homo Sapiens – and maybe some other animals – that have this very special property.
Footnote 71: Footnote 72:
  • I think Olson concedes too much here, though he does back-track later on.
  • He makes it sound like ‘being an animal’ could be a phase sortal.
Footnote 73:
  • Maybe. But it means that – at this stage – animalism isn’t differentiated from its rivals in ruling out certain eventualities.
  • Also, Olson had already decided that animals can’t acquire organic parts. But, this seems to imply that – in principle – human animals might do so, thereby ceasing to be Animals.
Footnote 74:
  • Including human animals.
  • A holder of the Constitution View can agree that animals are animals essentially, but deny that we are animals essentially.
Footnote 75:
  • What are these?
Footnote 76: Footnote 77: Footnote 78: Footnote 80:
  • This raises an important point. Is Olson more committed to our being material things than he is to our being animals?
  • Say it was the case that all higher animals with an ounce of rationality had a rational immaterial soul? Then Olson should acknowledge that.
  • Of course, this would require a radical change of direction for zoology, but if it was true, then zoologists would have to acknowledge the situation.
  • Of course, it’s most likely not true, but that’s not the point.
Footnote 81:
  • See my Note on Life. There’s a distinction in common parlance (and theological language) between ‘life’ and ‘lives’.
  • I agree that ‘lives’ are long complex events. Presumably such events have temporal parts even if – according to Olson’s assumption – the animal which has the life doesn’t?
Footnote 82:
  • That sounds like there’s a central controller – the ‘life force’ of the organism. Things are even more complex, with all sorts of semi-independent sub-plots going on.
  • This will become clearer when we consider Death, with some subsystems taking longer to shut down than others.
Footnote 83:
  • While this is true, there’s also the process of growth in the early stages and then of nutrition to provide energy.
Footnote 84:
  • It takes argument to insist that this is more than smoke and mirrors. The objection is that any persistence is in the ‘loose and popular’ form of identity.
Footnote 85:
  • Things get complicated. There are slime-moulds that look like organisms but are collections of individuals.
  • I agree that arms don’t have separate lives, though the cells in the arm may live on after the organism is dead.
  • I also agree that packs of wolves don’t have a life over and above those of their constituent wolves.
  • Yet ‘life’ is still somewhat mysterious. Some ‘superorganisms’ – ant colonies – seem to be more than the sum of their constituent ants which can’t survive for long outside their colony (or at any rate, ‘lead a meaningful life’.
Footnote 86:
  • This is obviously true, but I thought Olson denies it. Maybe – like Peter Van Inwagen he restricts ‘things’ to organisms and ‘simples’?
Footnote 87: Footnote 88:
  • What is meant by this? What does Olson take to be ‘parts’? Just individual molecules or major substructures?
Footnote 89:
  • Most people would think of ‘lives’ as having temporal rather than spatial extent.
  • Olson is using ‘life’ in a technical sense as the (momentary) event that an organism is involved in.
Footnote 90:
  • This is all rather strange. What sort of thing – metaphysically-speaking – is a ‘life’? Is it anything over and above the activities of the parts of the organism?
Footnote 91:
  • So, is the ‘life’ the sum total of the organism’s ‘metabolic activities’, or does it include other activities as well.
  • When asked ‘what have you done with your life’ I wouldn’t proudly say I’ve spent it metabolising.
Footnote 92:
  • This is complicated because the top skin layer – the epidermis (see Wikipedia: Epidermis) is replaced every 48 days, and presumably the top layer will be of dead cells about to slough off.
Footnote 93:
  • Clothes would certainly not seem to be ‘part of you’ despite their importance in temperature regulation as fur-substitutes.
  • The same may well go for prosthetic limbs, despite their integration with your nervous system to ensure accurate ambulation or manipulation.
  • Olson’s reason – that they are not ‘maintained’ by the usual metabolic processes, so are not caught up in the organism’s life – seems sound.
  • But I wonder whether closely-integrated repairs should ‘count’. Say a bone is repaired with a mesh into which bone is deposited over time. Or a mesh is used for hernia surgery (as was used for Bertie, our dog). Sometimes the mesh ‘dissolves’, if organic, or stays in situ, if – say – it’s a titanium mesh; see Wikipedia: Surgical Mesh and Wikipedia: Cranioplasty.
Footnote 94: Footnote 95:
  • Will it be addressed later? It might be important.
Footnote 96:
  • This is along the right lines, but is somewhat vague and open to arbitrary decisions.
Footnote 97:
  • This is it’s ‘life’. I presume that Death – like Life – is a Process.
  • Maybe we should adopt a Process Metaphysics for Organisms rather than a Substance metaphysics?
  • ‘Cannot be restarted’ has modal implications. Presumably some organisms we normally take to be dead should – for fairly brief periods – be considered alive because their vital processes could be restarted with appropriate intervention?
Footnote 98: Footnote 99:
  • I have downloaded this from Cambridge Core, but haven’t ‘processed’ it yet.
  • A relevant passage from p. 157 is:-

      We are being told
      1. That for living things, to exist is to be alive, and
      2. That one function for which any organized body that is alive must have the capacity or 'psyche' is metabolic self-sustenance or trophe di hautou, and
      3. That the continued existence of such a living thing consists at least in the continuity of that capacity, so that for a specific kind F, being the same individual = being the same F = being the same threptikon F
Footnote 100: Footnote 103:
  • This section introduces a – fairly brief – account of Olson’s ‘Thinking Animal Argument’, also known as his ‘Master Argument’. See my Note.
  • It does seem fairly plausible, both as an Argument for Animalism and as ammunition against other accounts of PID.
  • I wonder why it’s the ‘thinking’ of the animals that’s so important? After all, as Olson goes on to point out, there’s an animal doing lots of things that I’m doing: there will be too many sitters and typists as well as thinkers.
  • Presumably there’s a reaction to Descartes’ Cogito here? Note also "O'Brien (Lucy) - Ambulo Ergo Sum" and the profane joke Coito Ergo Sum.
Footnote 104: Footnote 105:
  • Historically, people would have said ‘a Soul’, where that thinking thing is not part of the animal, but this is ruled out in the context of the present discussion.
  • That would be to deny that animals think, which Olson comes on to later.
Footnote 106: Footnote 107:
  • Why is this such a great problem? The (supposedly) two thinkers share the same matter and configuration and are in the same place at the same time. It’s not as though there are two independent lots of thinking going on.
  • The ‘derivative thinking’ central to the Constitution View (CV) is completely ignored as a possibility.
Footnote 108: Footnote 109:
  • Yes, better not. In any case, idealism doesn’t deny that animals exist, only that they are not made of matter but are ideas in a mind.
Footnote 110: Footnote 111:
  • Yes – it becomes a Scattered Object.
  • Mereological essentialism and mereological universalism seem to be linked.
Footnote 112:
  • Is this really the case? Or is it just that organisms don’t Persist, at least not in any ‘strict and philosophical’ sense?
  • Also, isn’t this what Exdurance says? There’s a ‘counterpart relation’ between the successive stages. I know that Olson has explicitly excluded any idea of temporal parts, but this was purely stipulative.
  • Finally, as intimated earlier, Process Metaphysics might come to our aid.
Footnote 113:
  • It means that no complex concrete particulars persist for long.
  • This is not a very useful idea. Even if things don’t Persist – strictly speaking – we need to consider them as though they do.
Footnote 116:
  • Even inanimate objects wouldn’t persist, though – as I’ve said – they would exist.
Footnote 117:
  • Put thus baldly, the suggestion is absurd. Why would anyone be tempted by such ideas?
Footnote 118:
  • Surely this is a misdescription? Eliminative materialism doesn’t eliminate thought or other elements of folk psychology as such but eliminates ‘Minds’ and propositional attitudes as anything over and above brains and what brains ‘do’.
  • Maybe I need to look into this a bit more!
  • See "Ramsey (William) - Eliminative Materialism".
Footnote 121:
  • This used to be common sense. How could ‘mere matter’ be conscious, and all that.
  • Now we know that our thinking is done for us by our brains, common sense that ‘mere matter’ must be able to think and be phenomenally conscious. It’s just that – for consciousness, at least – we have no idea how.
Footnote 122:
  • Well, yes. There are very few non-physicalists around these days. Which materialists think that animals can’t?
Footnote 123:
  • Surely the initial reaction to this strange locution is to understand ‘body’ as it contrast to ‘brain’?
Footnote 124:
  • Indeed. Our reactions need to be at the level of metaphysics (or – better – neuroscience) than linguistic.
Footnote 125:
  • Is this a fair comparison?
  • Actually, Stephen Hawking claimed (in "Hawking (Stephen) - A Brief History of Time - From the Big Bang to Black Holes") that ‘Black Holes Ain’t so Black’ – and that they can evaporate by ripping particle-anti-particle pairs outside the event horizon in half – half of which fall into the black hole and annihilate with their anti-particles and the other half escapes. See Wikipedia: Hawking Radiation.
  • That’s beside the point, of course, which is … just the difference between knowing something (maybe on someone’s authority) and knowing why something is the case?
Footnote 126:
  • Another analogy. Is this a fair one?
  • Yes, because it does – as Olson goes on to show – why certain ‘odd’ locutions – while true – sound preposterous.
Footnote 127:
  • As I said, because it makes it sound like Newton’s body – as distinct from his brain – had the belief. Even that sounds odd in normal parlance: we say that ‘people’ believe x, not that their brains do. That’s partly because our linguistic practices arose before we knew how things work.
Footnote 128:
  • Well, I’d say this was much more odd. Minds just aren’t the sort of thing that have spatial characteristics.
  • Even mind-brain identity theorists would speak ‘oddly’ to claim that their mind could fit into a hat-box.
  • But I agree with Olson that nothing metaphysically interesting follows from these linguistic conventions.
Footnote 129:
  • This is a silly and pejorative way of putting things. It’s quite natural to say that an animal’s brain is in the business of thinking which the rest of its body is not.
  • But we can leave this discussion until Chapter 4, just as Olson does.
Footnote 131: Footnote 132: Footnote 133:
  • I misinterpreted this initially – that the being so caused needs to be you (for forensic reasons), and added that Parfit seems to deny – or at least downplay – this; but that – otherwise – it seems to be correct, and was the whole point of the ‘Forensic concept’ of PID.
  • But I now see that this is a claim – based on the Psychological View – that such a being so caused to do things by your prior mental states is you … leading up to the claim that the recipient of your cerebrum is you.
Footnote 134:
  • See my Note on Cerebrum and Brain Transplants.
  • This Thought Experiment trades on is the Brain Transplant Intuition – that ‘you go where your brain goes’.
  • This Intuition is very hard to resist, and resist it Olson does because he’s convinced that an Animalist ought to.
  • I’d prefer to find another way out.
Footnote 135:
  • There’s a general presumption in these thought experiments that cerebrums are like DIMMs (see Wikipedia: DIMMs) that can just be plugged in and will work fine in their new housing.
  • It’s admitted that there are technical wiring problems yet to be overcome, but the idea of such transplants is not deemed to be metaphysically impossible.
  • I’m not so sure about this. If we were androids with digital computers as brains then all would be relatively plain-sailing. At least the module would ‘fit’.
  • But, given we’re talking about ‘us’ – human animals – we have to consider our actual architecture. In particular, how our brains acquire the abilities and contents they do and how tightly-integrated this makes them with the bodies they belong to.
  • There’s also the issue of neurons distributed throughout the body in the PNS – not just to regulate it, but also assisting with emotions (the ‘feelings of the heart’ and ‘gut feelings’ have an element of truth to them). Not as bad as for the octopus, of course, which has its nervous system distributed throughout its body.
Footnote 136:
  • That is because – according to Shoemaker – the being that has your beliefs and desires (properly caused) is you.
Footnote 137:
  • Does it really ‘follow’, or is this an intuition or stipulation that appeared earlier in the TE?
Footnote 138:
  • So, Psychological Continuity suffices for PID, but isn’t necessary? Anyway, the recipient of the Cerebrum is you, according to this view.
Footnote 139:
  • For organisms, psychological continuity is neither necessary nor sufficient. The failure of sufficiency is explained by the (intuition of the) organism not persisting in the Cerebrum transplant case.
Footnote 140:
  • I think this is correct – no animal moves with its cerebrum. How should we describe what would happen in a cerebrum transplant? Firstly, the scenario is – it seems – of a transplant of both hemispheres, which is the simpler scenario. There are basically three:-
    1. Single-cerebral-hemisphere transplants.
    2. Double-cerebral-hemisphere transplants.
    3. Whole brain transplants.
  • Taking these cases one at a time:-
    1. SCTs: Well, the ‘donor’ animal loses some of its memories and abilities and capacity for thought. The ‘recipient’ animal might or might not be able to integrate this. If he could do so, and became convinced he was the donor, he’d be wrong, as in many other cases of fission or duplication. Olson later considers the case where the two hemispheres are transplanted individually into different donors.
    2. DCTs: Since the regulatory functions aren’t moved, the animal stays put. The donor, if he survives, has no mental life so is no longer a person but is still an animal, albeit a badly-mutilated one. If the recipient manages to integrate the new cerebrum, he’s probably just deceived into thinking he’s the donor animal. He’ll be mightily confused anyway, as any motor skills encoded in the received cerebrum most likely won’t work in the recipient’s body as they have been fine-tuned for another environment.
    3. WBTs: most people probably think – as I do – that a whole brain is a ‘maximally-mutilated human animal’ and that – if the transplant can be got to work – that you ‘go with your brain’.
Footnote 141:
  • Where does this come from? Is this a conclusion that Shoemaker draws or that Olson foists on him? Does it only follow from Olson’s ‘Too many thinkers’ argument? Ie. because you are not the animal, and you think, and because you can only have one thinker, so the animal can’t be that thinker?
Footnote 142:
  • So, Shoemaker hold to the CV? Human organisms think because they ‘constitute’ things with the right ‘identity conditions’?
Footnote 143:
  • Well, it’s only Olson’s interpretation of Shoemaker’s view.
  • It’s a deduction from what Shoemaker says, and can’t be what Shoemaker believes, … because it’s absurd.
  • If Shoemakers holds some sort of constitution view, Olson should engage with it. Maybe he does, in the next Chapter. Until then, it’s just the same old yada yada.
Footnote 144:
  • See my Note on Fission.
  • Fission cases cause problems for most non-Animalist views (ie. all views in which fission is ‘possible’). Indivisible souls escape.
  • Elsewhere, Olson agrees that Perdurantism provides general solace against fission problems, but takes it that it comes at too high a metaphysical price. I tend to agree.
  • Note also, though, that there’s a long-running discussion related to cerebrums and the corpus callosum.
  • See my Note on Commissurotomy.
  • Also, see "Puccetti (Roland) - Brain Bisection and Personal Identity", which Olson quotes in Chapter 4.1: The Brain View.
Footnote 145: Footnote 146:
  • So, this allows ‘animalian’ phenomenal Consciousness, but not Consciousness of Self.
  • But, it’s difficult to see how these could be separated in the same organism. Obviously, different organisms might pass or fail the ‘mirror test’, taken as a guide to whether the organism has a sense of self. But, how could the Animal associated with a person fail, but the Person pass?
Footnote 147:
  • Baker combines these proposals (2000: 12-18, 68n., and 2002: 42). She says that human animals have thoughts requiring a “first-person perspective” only in the derivative sense of constituting non-animals (ourselves) that have them non-derivatively, while the opposite is the case for other thoughts: human animals have them non-derivatively and we have them derivatively. .
  • See:-
    1. "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View"
    2. "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - On Making Things Up: Constitution and Its Critics"
  • Olson at least acknowledges Baker’s position, and I think he has it right.
  • I do find the ‘two-way derivative thinking’ a little hard to credit. However, I’ll leave further thought on the matter (as no doubt does Olson) until Chapter 3: Constitution.
  • I suppose, though, that ‘thinking in a different way’ might just be possible. I take it that the human animal thinks throughout more of its life than the human person does: before it has become a person and after it has ceased to be so. That’s on one of the views that distinguishes animals from persons (so, most views really: the PV, Temporal Parts View, Constitution View and even my own phase-sortal Animalism View). So, the animal can be thinking at times when the person is not, on account of non-existence. There is, however, only one thinker at this time.
Footnote 148:
  • As we’ve noted, Baker alleges a 4th possible solution – Constitution – which Olson doesn’t seem to take seriously at this point.
Footnote 149:
  • These ‘three ways’ are revealed during the rest of this Section, and are:-
    1. The Overcrowding Problem
    2. The Epistemic Problem
    3. The Personhood Problem
  • As these are all explained as this Section progresses, I’ll comment on them ad loc. Enough to say here that I think there are satisfactory answers to them all.
Footnote 150:
  • This ‘overcrowding problem’ is only an issue for those who take Persons and Human Animals to be separate substances and don’t adopt the Constitution View.
  • No-one complains of overcrowding when we count the number of French citizens and the number of philosophers at a philosophy conference and find the total exceed the number of attendees to the tune of the number of French philosophers.
  • Olson enjoys himself with his examples, but they are all beside the point and only cogent in Philosophy 101.
Footnote 151:
  • This shows how silly all this lampooning is.
  • Bigamy is a crime (where it is) for reasons of property-rights (given that adultery isn’t a crime, where it isn’t). Where the animal and person cannot ‘go their separate ways’, this isn’t an issue. However, it would become an issue were there to be two cerebral hemispheres to go into different heads. Then we’d need to decide who was who. But, until that contingency, there’s no practical issue, even for Roland Puccetti and Commissurotomy.
  • Does Olson consider Multiple Personality Disorder anywhere?
Footnote 152:
  • See "Lewis (David) - Many, But Almost One".
  • I think this is a perfectly satisfactory response.
  • There’s no reason to expect our natural language usage to track how things are in detail (below the surface), as this usage arose in a haphazard manner in a pre-scientific age and was subject to all sorts of cultural prejudices.
  • Besides, few philosophers think that there a ‘really’ two things that we count as one.
  • There are all sorts of philosophical puzzles that fall under this head.
Footnote 153:
  • Well, it depends on the situation. Some philosophical positions may well be absurd (David Lewis mentions the ‘incredulous stare’ in response to his modal realism).
  • But you can’t write off all philosophers of language as though they Mafia lawyers.
Footnote 154:
  • Personally, I agree that Time is ‘real’; yet, time isn’t Newtonian and can be counter-intuitive, especially how simultaneity is determined in Special Relativity.
  • So, things are often not as straightforward as they seem.
Footnote 155:
  • But these philosophers of language also – in general – don’t believe there are two different philosophers sitting there. They may think there are two ways of referring to the same philosopher, or that the philosopher shares stages with an animal. Nor do they believe that there are 1,001 cats sitting on the mat.
Footnote 156:
  • No it doesn’t.
Footnote 157:
  • Again, this worry assumes that there are two independent persons – or a person utterly distinct from, though qualitatively identical to, the human animal. The holder of the constitution view would say – perfectly intelligibly – that you – a person – are presently constituted by an animal. You know you are fundamentally a Person, but derivatively an animal by virtue of being constituted by one.
  • Maybe this is wrong, but they don’t have any epistemological worries.
Footnote 158:
  • You are both, in different senses of ‘are’.
Footnote 159:
  • Someone might think that this problem arises only on an "internalist" epistemology. If you are the person and not the animal, the idea would go, then your belief that that is what you are is guaranteed to be true, and so is reliably formed, and so counts as knowledge. I don't think any serious epistemologist would endorse this reasoning. Suppose I come to believe, in an insane delusion, that I am Napoleon. And suppose I am in fact Napoleon reincarnated. Finally, suppose that who I am has no influence on who, in my demented state, I believe myself to be. Then my belief is guaranteed to be true; yet it has no epistemic virtue whatever, and certainly doesn’t count as knowledge.
  • This objection of Olson sounds like the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. It’s also related to Gettier problems about what constitutes knowledge.
  • The example is rather contrived. How about …
  • Say George III, in his demented state, wandering around incognito in Windsor Great Park, claims to a passer-by to be George III. Would he be believed? No. Would he be justified in his claim, given that he is in fact George III (just as in Olson’s TE, Olson was in fact Napoleon)? Both claims are unlikely; claims by maniacs to be famous persons are usually false – that to be Napoleon only seems to be more unlikely because most analytic philosophers don’t believe in Reincarnation.
Footnote 160:
  • Well, it does count as a person, either in the innocuous ‘phase sortal’ sense or as constituting one. Or a temporal part of it does. This – the personhood problem – is just the other two problems in another guise.
Footnote 162: Footnote 163:
  • This is the second of the ‘3 ways’ in which Olson says (in the previous section) that the ‘Cohabitation View’ is unattractive, the other two being the Overcrowding Problem and the Personhood Problem.
Footnote 164: Footnote 165:
  • This claim – Persons persisting in virtue of mental qualities – is not ‘surprising’ – as Olson tendentiously claims – but is part and parcel of the Psychological View.
Footnote 166:
  • This claim – having mental properties essentially – is also foundational to the PV, so isn’t ‘surprising’ either.
Footnote 167:
  • Is this really Noonan’s position? Contingencies of our language can have no metaphysical implications as to what we are, can they? This is just – at most – ‘what we consider ourselves to be’.
Footnote 168:
  • This is true. Human Animals do not persist in virtue of mental properties, nor do they have any such properties essentially, as Olson is fond of – but correctly – pointing out.
Footnote 169:
  • That is, to Persons. Is this really Noonan’s position? It’s clearly false; as is the etymological suggestion behind ‘personal pronouns’; even the gendered pronouns are used of dogs and ships, and ‘it’ is used of stones.
Footnote 170:
  • Unlike the previous ‘contingency of language’ this is a perfectly respectable idea, with no metaphysical implications, though I believe it to be false. But nothing can be deduced metaphysically from our linguistic practice (though Wittgenstein pointed out that many metaphysical pseudo-problems arise from the ‘bewitchment of language’.
Footnote 171:
  • Again, tendentious words. The positions and associated arguments need to be taken seriously.
  • This is all ‘same old same old’.
  • No-one thinks that first-person thoughts aren’t thought by the being that thinks them. That’s what all this discussion about language is all about.
  • No-one thinks you and ‘your’ animal are as distinct as Tom and Jerry, or even Jekyll and Hyde.
Footnotes 172, 174:
  • So far, so good, then?
Footnote 173:
  • Why ‘revisionism’?
  • Earlier, Noonan had claimed – maybe falsely – that this theory is a contingent fact about how our language works.
Footnote 175: Footnote 176:
  • Could a being that cannot refer to itself in the first person be self-conscious? Well, pronoun revisionists agree that human animals have first-person thoughts just like our own. All that prevents them from referring to themselves in the first person, the idea goes, is the contingent linguistic fact that we (and they) use the personal pronouns to refer only to psychological continuers. We could change the way we talk, so that our personal pronouns referred only to beings with animal persistence conditions. If we did that, we should be unable to refer to ourselves in the first person, though our mental lives would otherwise remain unchanged. Would that deprive us of our capacity for self-consciousness? Not in any important sense, surely. Someone might point out, however, that according to pronoun revisionism a human animal could not “think of itself as itself”, and would therefore fail to satisfy Locke’s definition of ‘person’.
  • Wouldn’t the last point – that animals aren’t persons – be just what the whole argument is about?
  • Noonan would presumably be happy, and Olson’s third problem – the ‘Personhood Problem’, that Animals are persons – would disappear?
Footnote 177:
  • Well, indeed it couldn’t. But no-one thinks it could. You can’t ‘know and love’ a human animal apart from knowing and loving the human person. There just aren’t two beings there. This discussion just goes round and round in circles.
  • To be fair to Olson, the problems he raises do need to be ‘solved’. It’s just that the holders of non-Animalist views think they are solved – if their views are properly understood – while Olson disagrees.
Footnote 178:
  • I agree. But it’s part of the defence of these alternatives, not their primary motivation.
Footnote 179:
  • I don’t think this dichotomy properly reflects the options open to non-Animalists. Holders of the Constitution View would certainly disagree. But we’ll have to move on from this until taking a serious look at those forms of the PV that do seem subject to these options only.
Footnote 180:
  • This is important. For Olson, Animalism rests on the Thinking Animal Argument which – he thinks – shows that if we are not animals, then either human animals cannot think as we do or we cannot know that we are not animals.
  • My view is that the Animalist shouldn’t rest his case on the TA Argument, but on an abductive argument that Animalism is the default position and best answers all the puzzles cases.
  • See my Note on Animalism – Arguments For
Footnote 181: Footnote 182: Footnote 183:
  • Yet, some eminent philosophers are Dualists (usually for religious reasons; doubly misguided in my view).
  • See my Note on Christian Materialists, which has a long list of non-Materialists, though it doesn’t say what their motivation is.
  • As Olson treats dualism seriously, and has Chapter 7: Souls devoted to it, the espousal of Dualism may be motivated by other reasons than arguing that Matter cannot think.
Footnote 184: Footnote 185: Footnote 186:
  • See my Note on Embryos.
  • Most people think we started off as Embryos, apart from extreme ‘pro-lifers’ who think we started as Zygotes. The latter idea is rejected by most philosophers because of the possibility of Twinning (see "Anscombe (G.E.M.) - Were You a Zygote?").
  • Recently, it has been argued (by Elselijn Kingma) that Fetuses are part of the mother, and so the new Human Animal doesn’t arise until birth, by a process of Fission. Olson’s ante-natal argument wouldn’t work in this case.
  • But, most holders of the Psychological View or the Constitution View, believing that we are essentially psychological beings, would agree that we were never fetuses.
Footnote 187:
  • Most would say that the embryo ‘developed into’ the adult human animal, but they might not all say that it ‘was’ the very same individual.
  • Not just those who believe that the implanted embryo is part of the mother, either.
  • The embryo isn’t really a self-sustaining organism. It’s totally dependent on the mother for oxygen, nutrition and other support (though this may be analogous to adult humans on ‘life support’).
  • The same is true of the early-term fetus. That’s why Abortion is legal for any reason up to a certain point, after all.
  • By the time all are agreed that the fetus is an independent being deserving of our protection it will have developed a rudimentary psychology of its own.
  • I need to check up precisely what Baker’s position on this. When does she think the FPP develops? I think when the development of the FPP is ‘around the corner’ the fetus receives honorary personhood status, at least.
  • At least the situation isn’t as clear-cut as Olson claims.
Footnote 188:
  • See my Note on Persistent Vegetative State.
  • This is probably a clearer indication than the ‘fetus’ situation, but it’s still not incontestable.
  • Some people – even in the case of Brain Death – claim that their loved one is still ‘fighting’. They are probably wrong. See Wikipedia: Archie Battersbee Case.
  • But in the case of a PVS, it’s never clear whether the state is irreversible, nor even – given the necessarily non-invasive monitoring – whether there isn’t some cognition ‘going on in there somewhere’ (if there is, the situation might well be worse than death, so we may hope not).
  • Note that holders of the PV allow for periods with no psychological activity (dreamless Sleep – though – in fact – there’s all sorts of activity – including Memory-consolidation – going on in the brain during non-REM sleep; see "Walker (Matthew P.) - Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams"). The alternative would be to allow Intermittent Objects.
  • So, the jury is out until the animal has died and there’s no possibility of recovery.
  • Again, the situation isn’t as clear-cut as Olson claims.
Footnote 189:
  • Philosophers must like oysters; they seem to feature in multiple contexts: the other I know of is the ‘higher pleasures’ problem for utilitarianism, with oysters clocking up the ‘hedons’ and outscoring Socrates.
  • Whether patients in a PVS are like oysters – or really like plants – is an empirical matter.
Footnote 190:
  • I agree with Olson – as would most philosophers. So, this may make Human Organisms and Human Persons ‘come apart’.
Footnote 191:
  • I think all parties to the debate – despite quibbles – probably agree that if (the possibility of having) psychological states is an essential property of a Person then, if you are a person essentially, you are not numerically identical to a human animal.
Footnote 192:
  • Olson has a way of saying the opposite of what most people believe as though it’s either common sense or philosophically obvious.
Footnote 193:
  • Indeed they don’t; nor would they thinks this were the unfortunate individual brain-stem dead (when Olson would probably agree that the Organism had died.
  • The reasons are multifarious, but usually rest on hopes for a recovery, or beliefs that they are in there somewhere ‘fighting’.
  • It is popularly believed, though, that no-one can survive irreversible loss of consciousness. It’s just that no-one, when it comes to it, comfortably believes that such a state has come to pass.
  • We can’t deduce anything from popular beliefs on the matter.
Footnote 194:
  • This is an important point, with which I’m in total agreement.
  • Matters of value are orthogonal to those of metaphysics, despite PID being a Forensic Concept.
Footnotes 195, 196, 197:
  • See my comments above.
Footnote 198:
  • Is this the case? I suppose it depends which cases are ‘normal’ and who you ask.
Footnote 199: Footnote 200:
  • I wish Olson had said ‘some sorts of psychological continuity are …’.
  • The intuition of most people is that if it appears to us that we have survived, then we have. If it seems from our FPP that we’re still there, then we are.
  • Now in some TEs, it seems this Intuition is unreliable: a duplicate would be deceived as to the true situation. Backward Psychological Continuity isn’t enough.
  • However, it might – just – be possible for you to (appear to) survive some adventure fully conscious throughout. See my Note on Psychological Continuity – Forward. In that case would not direct experience of Survival trump any metaphysical argument?
  • Unfortunately most TEs would be excruciatingly painful without loss of consciousness, so the situation would never be put to the test, hopefully.
Footnote 201:
  • The FPP is very important. Everything that matters to us is delivered through this (though – I might add – non-human Animals also have a ‘window on the world – a ‘perspective’ in the ‘first person’ – though they are mostly not Persons and may not have Selves, if there are any such things).
  • This thought experiment, like most, is under-described. As I’ve said before, the cerebral hemispheres aren’t DIMMs that can be unplugged and re-plugged. Who knows whether any useful psychological properties would be ‘transferred’ and would become the property of the recipient animal?
Footnote 202:
  • As noted – and as Olson argues – this isn’t sufficient for ‘being you’.
  • The question whether the Transplant will work isn’t just a technical challenge never likely to be achieved, but there are questions over its coherence as a TE.
  • The cerebrum contains a Cortical homunculus (see Wikipedia: Cortical Homunculus); in fact, two – one for the senses, the other for motor coordination. Now these are mapped on to a particular body, with connections and weights established as the fetus developed and fine-tuned as we learnt to control our bodies and do all the things we’re good at. You can’t just plug this in to a new body and expect it to work. Maybe – over time – it could be rewired, but initially the recipient ‘person’ would be entirely insensate and paralysed.
  • Also, we don’t know which bits of the brain are necessary for ‘generating’ Consciousness and the FPP. It might require sub-cortical areas or even the PNS.
  • We’d be more confident with head Transplants – better described as Body Transplants – and better than Whole Brain Transplants (because of the integration with the major senses) though the same paralysis would occur.
  • Why is all this important? All this has to do with arguments that ‘we would go with our cerebrum’, but if this TE is metaphysically impossible, any argument depending on it would fail.
Footnote 203:
  • Well, if it could be got to work and did preserve your FPP, that would be a sensible deduction. It would show that you were not an animal. But I don’t think the TE makes sense on closer inspection.
Footnote 204:
  • Is this anything other than an Intuition?
  • I share this intuition, but not so for a whole brain transplant (or a head transplant).
Footnote 205:
  • Agreed … it’s not an organism. But the Brain’s controlling, organisational and phenomenal functions make it – or parts of it – more important than other organs.
Footnote 206: Footnote 207:
  • This is hyperbolic language. The head isn’t really empty. As Olson goes on to say, it contains the brain stem and presumably other structures of the brain.
Footnote 208:
  • Maybe so; it's not clear to me just how much cortical damage an animal can survive. I suspect rats have been subjected to such procedures.
Footnote 209:
  • ‘Seeming’ isn’t really enough as it can be a superficial assessment. Does Olson mean ‘it arguably is’? I would agree.
Footnote 210:
  • I think the TE is best described as two Human Animals having had their cerebrums destroyed and nothing of any use transferred from one to the other.
Footnote 211:
  • I agree. But, as I said earlier, things are more complicated as more and more of the brain is transplanted.
  • Fusion is more difficult to describe than Fission. Is there any correct way? It’s not just that our Concepts aren’t up to it; nor is ‘Nature’.
Footnote 212:
  • I think this ‘just as’ is designed to annoy people.
  • Livers are fungible, once ‘rejection’ problems are overcome. Provided they do their job, who cares where they came from. The same is not the case with our brains – or the most significant parts of them. They are not just ‘another organ’, not even in this context.
Footnote 213:
  • To keep track of the argument, the sections on the termini of life demonstrated failure of ‘necessity’. Cerebrum transplants are supposed to demonstrate failure of ‘sufficiency’ (of psychological continuity for the persistence of animals).
Footnote 214: Footnote 215:
  • From its logic, identity is a necessary relation. So, Olson is right if the ’is’ is the ‘is’ of identity (rather than of constitution, which is contingent; if I’m constituted by this animal I’m only contingently so constituted; that’s the whole point). See (eventually) my Note on Modality.
Footnote 216:
  • This is a useful summary. As with all syllogistic arguments, we have a choice between modus ponens and modus tollens. I’ve tended to treat it as the former, while in the context it should be treated as the latter.
  • I’d not really considered it as an Objection to Animalism but rather as an awkward and counter-intuitive consequence.
Footnote 217: Footnote 218:
  • This division– though not transplantation – occurs in Commissurotomy, of course.
  • But, this whole TE seems to rely on the idempotency of the Cerebral Hemispheres. Otherwise – given asymmetry and lateral specialisation, only part of the (supposed) person would be transplanted. There are odd features in the Psychology of patients who have had a Commissurotomy to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy, but the two hemispheres can communicate via external cues. This wouldn’t be possible if only one hemisphere was transplanted.
  • Also, if the hemispheres really were idempotent, wouldn’t the Person already have Fissioned?
  • It is difficult to imagine how fissioning would be experienced. Presumably the two idempotent hemispheres could be kept synchronised via the corpus collosum, maybe being used alternately and ‘backed up’. But they would start to diverge once the corpus collosum was cut.
  • Maybe this idempotency occurs in cetaceans which Sleep with one hemisphere at a time?
Footnote 219:
  • Advocates of the temporal-parts view have a way of denying this claim: see §5.7.
  • Yes. Perdurantists would say that there were two Persons inhabiting the animal all the time, sharing stages, but this was only revealed when fissioning took place.
Footnote 220:
  • Of course, this depends what we are, as Olson will go on to discuss.
Footnote 221:
  • What’s the logic behind this claim?
Footnote 222:
  • This sounds like a garbling of Parfit’s question – what matters in survival (‘not Identity’, is the claim).
Footnote 223:
  • This seems to be a bungled version of the Future Great Pain Test devised to tease out our Survival Intuitions in "Williams (Bernard) - The Self and the Future".
  • The reason it’s bungled is that – in this case – it doesn’t clearly show who you think you’ll be after the operation.
  • In this case, you know that – in extracting your cerebrum for transplant – without anaesthetic you’ll be in unbearable pain while your skull is cut open and the painstaking work of extracting your Cerebrum takes place. Meanwhile the recipient – who is not you at this point on anyone’s account – will be ‘happily’ unconscious undergoing a similar operation. After this, who knows whether the transplant will work. The cerebrum itself feels no pain, and it might take years to ‘bed in’ to the recipient’s body, if it ever does, by which time the peripheral surgery will have healed. So, even if I thought I went with my cerebrum, I’d choose that the donor should receive the morphine.
  • It should be phrased in Williams’s way – the evil scientist will mercilessly torture either the cerebrum donor or the cerebrum recipient after the successful transplant. Selfishly, which would you – the donor – ‘prefer’ to be tortured? Well, if you believe you ‘go with your cerebrum’ you’d clearly say ‘the donor of your cerebrum’, because by then you’d have made your escape, you’d think.
Footnote 224:
  • Well, it would if the TE is repaired as suggested above.
Footnote 225:
  • What’s the logic behind these claims?
  • If you thought – for whatever reason – that fission was identity preserving, you’d care for both (on the grounds that the fission process had already taken place prior to the transplants, or for other reasons).
  • But, if you were convinced on logical grounds that neither could be you, then you’d want the donor to receive the morphine.
  • This is – sort of – analogous to Intuitions about whether Teletransportation is a form of transport or a means of dying.
  • The idea behind the FGPT is to get the philosopher to really think about the issue. Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged (Mark Twain: The prospect of hanging focuses the mind or Samuel Johnson: The prospect of hanging focuses the mind).
Footnote 226: Footnote 227:
  • While this is true, I don’t think this is the key point, which is that what we experience, whether gross or refined, is all that matters to us. Even the hedonists want it to be they themselves that experience their debaucheries.
  • I suppose we’re to ask at this point – and maybe should have earlier – what’s it like in the envisioned circumstances? Is it supposed that the recipient of your Cerebrum, feels himself to be you? Well, yes – that’s the point. Is he deceived? Well, maybe but does this matter? How are ‘you’ supposed to experience what goes on? If you – a convinced animalist – receive the cerebrum of someone else, do you suddenly experience someone else’s psychology? And does the recipient of your cerebrum suddenly gain your psychology? What happens to your FPP?
  • Unless we can answer these questions, the TE is underspecified.
Footnote 228:
  • I’m more interested – as an Animalist – on what it feels like to be the donor. I suppose you’d lapse into a PVS, having lost most of your brain, so it wouldn’t feel like anything?
  • And would it feel like you’d gone under the anaesthetic and never woken up, or would it feel like you’d woken up in a new body, which – almost on a technicality – isn’t you (or – as this is an indexical; I’m always me – isn’t the individual I – the experiencer – thought I was)?
Footnote 229: Footnote 230:
  • Well, people tend to choose their candidate theory of PID in accord with their needs – particularly on post-mortem survival.
  • But you can’t ‘choose’ which of two beings is you.
Footnote 231:
  • Well, maybe. But most think we ‘are’ animals in that that’s what our bodies are but think we can escape our animality in some way.
Footnote 232: Footnote 233:
  • I don’t find the epistemological aspect of the TA Argument worrying.
Footnote 234: Footnote 235:
  • Olson’s non-standard terminology makes this claim sound silly. But it’s true that – for the Animalist – we are only temporarily and contingently Persons.
  • Quite why this is seen as objectionable will emerge later in this Section.
Footnote 236:
  • Hmmm … so Baker is right that Olson doesn’t Take Persons Seriously!
  • I suppose – if you don’t take Person to be a Natural Kind concept, but a term invented for human purposes, maybe not all of them benign, then
  • But it’s a Forensic term, and has lots of moral and legal implications.
Footnote 237:
  • This is where Olson and Baker part company.
  • Baker thinks we are Persons essentially and Animals contingently, and Olson vice versa.
Footnote 238:
  • ‘Being’ is a tricky concept. Again, Olson’s terminology seems designed to antagonise his opponents.
  • Olson is talking metaphysics, where his opponents are often talking Narrative Identity. When people say that something (maybe a character trait, or an interest) is ‘part of their very being’ – part of what makes them ‘them’ – they are talking about Narrative Identity. Appearing to trivialise this ‘existential’ aspect just annoys people.
Footnote 239:
  • This follows from treating person as an honorific or a Phase Sortal (like ‘Professor’).
  • Maybe there are – or we could devise – persistence conditions for Professors qua Professors. I won’t try that here.
  • But philosophers (and people generally) think the persistence conditions for Persons are psychological. They think it’s possible for an individual no longer to be ‘the same person’. I think what they are referring to is a radical change of Personality, and best described that way, but others think it’s more than that – that such a change can undermine some of the Forensic aspects of Personhood, such as abrogating promises and vows made in one’s foolish youth, or having people ignore your ‘future directives’ when one is a dribbling old fogey who no longer wants to be put down.
Footnote 240:
  • Again, this assumes that ‘Person’ is not a Substance-term in its own right, and that Persons take their persistence criteria from the substance that constitutes them (‘constitution’ here taken in the informal sense).
  • But, it might be possible – and people have had many an attempt – to devise (or discover) persistence conditions for persons qua persons. A waste of effort, in my view.
Footnote 241:
  • That’s what Olson claims.
Footnote 242:
  • It looks to me that Olson has just assumed this. He thinks it’s self-evident – because gods have different persistence conditions from animals (one may assume).
  • He’s so convinced that the ‘Thinking x Argument’ doesn’t allow two substances to be in the same place at the same time that he always has the person as being the same thing as whatever else ‘is’ that person, and so the person’s persistence conditions are subsumed under that other thing.
Footnote 243: Footnote 244:
  • Is this a fair comparison? Does Baker use it?
Footnote 245: Footnote 246:
  • As Olson notes elsewhere, he’s not interested in PID as such, but in ‘our’ identity. He thinks PID – asking for the reidentification of persons – makes an assumption that he wishes to challenge. He’s retained the subject topic PID for reasons of historical continuity.
Footnote 247:
  • I think Olson leans too heavily on the TA Argument.
  • It doesn’t seem necessary to invoke it in this circumstance. The abductive – inference to the best explanation – argument is sufficient, in my view, and is not open to counter-arguments.
Footnote 248:
  • Baker thinks that being a Person makes an Ontological difference – that some ontological novelty arises when we have a person.
  • I agree with this – but would claim that the ‘novelty’ arose (maybe vaguely) when Homo Sapiens (or a prior hominin) evolved the mental capacity for personhood: achieved a FPP in Baker’s terms.
  • Baker thinks the ‘novelty’ arises for each individual when they develop their FPP, but – if I remember correctly – is a little shaky on whether it’s the capacity itself or the ‘certain’ capacity to develop one. She denies it to early-term fetuses, but may have them as persons in an honorary capacity.
  • But I agree with Olson that choosing introspective self-awareness as the definitive characteristic of persons can appear arbitrary.
Footnote 249:
  • I agree with Olson here, but not because of the TA Argument.
  • The difference in persistence conditions is sufficient – provided we can otherwise refute all the apparatus of the Constitution View.
Footnote 250: Footnote 251:
  • ‘Diachronic identity’ is the identity relation between one thing at different times.
  • Synchronic identity is the identity relation between the same thing picked out in two different ways at the same time.
  • I’m not sure how this ties in with Olson’s usage.
  • See my Note on the Logic of Identity.
Footnote 252:
  • On reflection, I suppose this is correct.
  • While Olson is clearly right in the normal case, does animalism have an agreement of counting ‘persons’ in psychopathological cases?
  • Maybe it does. Animalism treats ‘person’ much as it treats ‘professor’. If someone is a professor at both Oxford and (visiting) at Cambridge, then such a person only counts as one professor, not two.
Footnote 254:
  • This is all well said, as an account of the Psychological View.
  • Does animalism really care whether a human animals happens to ‘run’ more than one person – in this sense – at the same time?
Footnote 255: Footnote 256: Footnote 257:
  • I agree … with Olson’s next sentence and ensuing discussion. It’d be a fudge, at best.
Footnote 258:
  • The same old epistemological non-worry.
Footnote 259:
  • See "Olson (Eric) - Was Jekyll Hyde?".
  • I agree with Olson here. The ‘psychological individuation principle’ may possibly be useful in some clinical, legal or ethical circumstances, but it has no metaphysical standing.
Footnote 261:
  • See my note on Bundle Theories. Discussion will have to wait until later.
Footnote 262:


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Constitution"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 3 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
  • This chapter is about the view that we are material things constituted by organisms; this view is advocated by Baker, Shoemaker, and others. Each of us is made of the same matter as an organism, but our persistence conditions1 or essential properties preclude our being organisms ourselves. This goes together with the general view that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once: constitutionalism.
  • Constitutionalism is supported by arguments involving the persistence of artifacts. It is argued, however, that the view faces the thinking-animal problem, that it rules out any principled account of when one thing constitutes another, that it cannot explain why our boundaries lie where they do, and that it conflicts with a popular claim about synchronic identity.
  • Sections
    1. Material things constituted by animals
    2. The clay-modelling2 puzzle
    3. The replacement puzzle and the amputation puzzle
    4. Thinking animals3 again
    5. When does constitution occur?
    6. What determines our boundaries?

Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File4.

Write-up5 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Constitution

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 3, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Constitution", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online6 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book7.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there8.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
  • I had considered leaving the review of this Chapter until I’d completed a full review of:-
    → "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Materialism with a Human Face", and
    → "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View".
    … the reason being that "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology' by Eric T. Olson" is severely critical of Olson’s treatment of the Constitution View9 in this book.
  • However, I’ve decided to plough ahead and adjust my comments later if necessary. The primary reason is that Olson treats of holders of the CV other than Baker10, and it’ll be useful to get a flavour of some of these before focusing on Baker’s treatment.

Full Text
  1. Material things constituted by animals11
  2. The clay-modelling puzzle12
  3. The replacement puzzle and the amputation puzzle13
  4. Thinking animals again14
  5. When does constitution occur?15
  6. What determines our boundaries?16
3.1 Material things constituted by animals
  1. It is easy to suppose that we have properties incompatible with those of animals: that we are essentially capable of thinking, say, or that what it takes for us to persist is different from what it takes for an animal to persist. These claims17 rule out our being animals. Yet we appear to be material things. Not only that, but each of us appears to be made of just the same matter as a certain animal. We are no larger or smaller than our animal bodies18, and are located just where they are.
  2. The idea that we are not animals, but are nevertheless material things made of the same matter as our animal bodies and located in the same place, may sound strange. We can increase the tension by noting the apparent truism that no two material things can be in exactly the same place at once19. If we know anything about material things, we know that they compete for space and exclude one another. So we find ourselves drawn to each of four inconsistent claims:
    1. We are material things;
    2. Each of us has the same location as an animal (which is also a material thing);
    3. We are not animals; and
    4. Two material things can never be in the same place at once.
  3. What to do? Those who think that we are partly or wholly immaterial deny the first claim. Those who think that we are temporal parts of animals deny the second: they say that our animal bodies are not located precisely where we are, but occupy larger spatio-temporal regions. We will come to these views in due course20. Animalists deny the third claim. But some deny the fourth: they say that two material things can be in the same place. Not just any two material things, of course: you will never get a dog and a cat into the same place. Material things can be in the same place only if they are made of the same matter21. That, the thought goes, is the truth behind the idea that material things compete for space.
  4. The claim, then, is that two or more things can be made entirely of the same matter at the same time. For technical reasons it will be useful to recast this idea in slightly different terms22. Let us say that some things, the xs, compose something y if and only if each of the xs is a part of y, no two of the xs share a part, and every part of y shares a part with at least one of the xs23. So when a child builds a castle of Lego bricks, the castle is composed of those bricks. If each brick is itself composed of atoms, then the castle is also composed of atoms, for a part of a part of something is itself a part of that thing. So our suggestion is24 that the same things can compose two different objects. In other words, different material objects can coincide materially, where x coincides materially with y if and only if x and y are material objects and some things, the zs, compose x and also compose y. Applied to ourselves, the idea is that we coincide materially with animals, even though we are not animals ourselves. One can be made of the same matter as one’s animal body while having properties that no animal could have.
  5. If the relation between you and your animal body is not identity but material coincidence, we should expect to find more examples of material coincidence without identity; and indeed those who hold this view take it to be ubiquitous. The particles that compose a clay statue, they say, also compose a lump of clay; yet the lump and the statue are numerically different because the lump will ordinarily have existed before the statue did (before it was statue-shaped), and because squashing it would destroy the statue but not the lump. The blocks that compose the child's castle might also compose a material object called an “aggregate” of blocks, which predated and will outlive the castle. If we replaced one of the castle’s blocks, the castle would come to coincide with a different aggregate. Owing to metabolic turnover, an organism coincides with a different mass of matter or aggregate of atoms every fraction of a second. And so on.
  6. In each of these examples, our proposal says, numerically different objects not only coincide materially, but also differ in important qualitative respects – where by 'qualitative' I mean any property that doesn't specify the identity of its bearer (being Stan Getz would be a non-qualitative property). The objects differ in kind: one is a statue and not a lump, the other is a lump and not a statue; one is a person and not an animal, the other is an animal and not a person. They differ in their modal properties: statues are essentially statue-shaped, but statue-shaped lumps are only contingently statue-shaped; people are essentially able to think, but the animals coinciding with them think at best only contingently. They have different persistence conditions: statues and people can survive things that lumps and organisms cannot, and vice versa. There is no point in saying that coinciding objects are numerically different but qualitatively identical – that we are animals that coincide with other animals exactly like us, say. The attraction in saying that statues are not lumps or that we are not human animals is that statues and people have properties that lumps and human animals lack. These are not merely historical properties: a statue and its coinciding lump are supposed to differ not only in that the lump existed before the statue did. They are supposed to differ while they coincide: for instance, while they coincide the lump but not the statue is capable of surviving squashing. A statue and its coinciding lump, or a person and her animal body, would differ qualitatively even if they coincided throughout their entire careers.
  7. The view that qualitatively different things can coincide materially is called the metaphysic of constitution or constitutionalism. The name alludes to the fact that whenever two things coincide materially, one of them is supposed to “constitute” the other. Few of those who speak of constitution bother to say what they mean by it, and those who do say different things25. But most agree that constitution is necessarily asymmetric and irreflexive: two things cannot constitute each other, and nothing can constitute itself. (Material coincidence, by contrast, is an equivalence relation.) And when constitutionalists take two things to coincide materially, they usually agree about which constitutes which: people are constituted by their bodies, for instance, which in turn are constituted by masses of matter, and not vice versa. (Do not confuse constitution with composition. Constitution by definition relates one thing to one thing, whereas many things can jointly compose something.)
  8. Constitutionalism is a principle about material things in general, and not about ourselves in particular. It doesn’t say what you and I coincide with, or even whether we coincide with anything. For all it says we might be animals coinciding with masses of matter (Thomson 199726), or material objects that do not coincide with anything else, or even immaterial things. Most constitutionalists, though, say that we are non-animals coinciding materially with human animals. Or at least this is the usual situation. Although we are all non-animals, they say, we may not all coincide with animals. Perhaps some of us coincide with a thing made up of a human animal and a plastic knee. Someone who had a cerebrum transplant might coincide with different animals at different times, and briefly coincide with a naked cerebrum. Perhaps, by gradual replacement of parts, someone might one day come to coincide with a wholly inorganic machine. If we are lucky, we might be constituted in the next world by something glorious and indestructible but not in any recognizable sense biological. In this regard, say the constitutionalists, we are like statues, which by careful replacement of parts can coincide with different lumps of matter at different times. Coinciding with a particular human animal is supposed to be only a contingent and perhaps a temporary feature of us. But most constitutionalists say that we must always coincide with some material thing other than ourselves, be it animal, machine, or what have you: we could not become immaterial.
  9. Most constitutionalists say that we have certain mental properties essentially, or that some sort of psychological continuity is necessary for us to persist through time. It follows that we come into being later than our animal bodies do: you appeared when a human animal reached a certain point in its development – perhaps when it acquired those mental features that distinguish people from non-people. Depending on what those features are, this could happen at any time between the appearance of the first mental properties five or six months after fertilization and the onset of full self-consciousness a year or two after birth. And you ordinarily cease to exist when your animal body ceases to support the relevant mental features, as it would if it lapsed into a persistent vegetative state. Here again we are like clay statues, which constitutionalists say come into being when a lump of clay is modelled in a certain way, and perish, outlived by the lump, when squashed.
  10. I will call the view that you and I are non-animals coinciding with animals – as opposed to constitutionalism in general – the constitution view27.
3.2 The clay-modelling puzzle
  1. Whether the constitution view is right depends largely on the truth of constitutionalism in general. If constitutionalism is false, so is the constitution view. If constitutionalism is true, on the other hand, and if we are material things, it will be hard not to accept the constitution view.
  2. Suppose constitutionalism is true. Then statue-shaped lumps of clay in the right circumstances constitute things that are essentially statue-shaped: statues. Likewise, lumps of matter in the appropriate organic configuration constitute things that are essentially living: organisms. These are supposed to be paradigm cases of constitution. Now it doesn’t strictly follow from this that human animals in the right state and the right circumstances constitute things that are essentially able to think. It could be that statue-shaped lumps constitute things that are essentially statue-shaped but human animals never constitute things that are essentially thinkers. But that would be surprising. We should expect there to be an explanation for this important difference. The most likely explanation, it seems, would be that no material thing of any sort could think, essentially or otherwise: thinking beings are immaterial, and are not constituted by anything. (Remember, constitutionalism in general does not imply that we are material things.) The claim that thinkers are material, but don’t stand to human animals as clay statues stand to lumps of clay, sounds rather unprincipled.
  3. If human animals of the right sort constitute essential thinkers, it is but a short step to the constitution view. Those essential thinkers would not themselves be animals, for no animal is essentially able to think. And it would be hard to find any reason to suppose that we were the animals and not the essential thinkers. On the contrary, the apparently widespread and deeply held conviction that we are essentially able to think will be a reason to suppose that we are things constituted by animals.
  4. So the truth of constitutionalism in general would provide a fairly strong case for our being non-animals constituted by animals. (Someone might say that we are constituted by brains or other parts of animals, rather than by whole animals. I see this as a near variant of the constitution view, and most of what I will say about the view that we are constituted by animals applies equally to the view that we are constituted by brains.) The constitution view and constitutionalism in general are likely to stand or fall together. In effect, then, any argument for constitutionalism is an argument for the constitution view. If we can find any case where qualitatively different objects coincide materially, that will be a reason to suppose that we are constituted by animals (or perhaps by brains). And there are plenty of arguments for constitutionalism.
  5. Consider first the clay-modelling puzzle28. Take a lump of clay of nondescript shape and knead it into the form of, let us say, Margaret Thatcher. (Iron might be a more appropriate material in this case, but clay suits our purposes better.) Then squash the lump and model it into a cube. We seem to have here a material object – a lump or mass or portion of clay – that is first shapeless, then Thatcher-shaped, then cubical. There also seems to be, for a time, a statue of Thatcher. During that time the lump and the statue coincide materially. Yet we wouldn't say that the statue starts out shapeless and ends up cubical. We wouldn't say, "See that statue? It was nothing but a shapeless lump this morning. Tomorrow it will be a cube." The statue doesn't seem to start out as a non-statue, become a statue for a while, and then revert to being a non-statue. It doesn’t merely cease to exist as a statue when we squash it. It seems to go out of existence altogether.
  6. It is easy enough to make this into an argument for constitutionalism. The story invites us to accept these claims:
    • 1. There is a lump of clay that is first shapeless, then Thatcher-shaped, then cubical.
    • 2. There is a statue that is never shapeless or cubical.
    • 3. The statue coincides materially, while it exists, with the lump.
    1 and 2 imply that there are two different clay objects in the story. They have to be two because they exist at different times, and because one is shapeless for a time and the other is never shapeless. It follows, given 3, that two different things can coincide materially.
  7. Now this is not yet constitutionalism – not quite. Constitutionalism says that different things can not only coincide materially, but also differ qualitatively while they coincide. If the statue and the lump were qualitatively exactly alike while they coincided – if both were statues and both were lumps, and they shared all the same dispositions, essential properties, and so on – then the clay-modelling puzzle would support only the claim that you and I coincide materially with human animals numerically different from us. That is not yet the constitution view, since it doesn’t imply that we in any way qualitatively different from those animals.
  8. To make the clay-modelling puzzle into an argument for constitutionalism we need to establish that the statue and the lump in the story differ qualitatively while they coincide. But that is just what the story suggests. According to the story it is no accident that the lump persists throughout the various changes of shape while the statue does not. If we took a thousand shapeless pieces of clay and kneaded each of them first into the shape of Thatcher and then into a cube, it would always be the lump – the thing that was first shapeless – that survived the loss of its human shape and became cubical. The statue – the thing that comes into being when the lump becomes Thatcher-shaped – would always perish when it loses that shape. That is because lumps have the capacity to survive those changes and statues lack it: lumps, but not statues, have the modal property possibly surviving radical changes of shape. If that is right, then the lump and the statue in our story have different qualitative properties while they coexist. In fact they would differ in this way even if they were to coincide throughout their careers. So the story suggests a fourth claim as well:
    • 4. The lump has a qualitative property, while it coincides with the statue, that the statue then lacks.
    Grant this, and constitutionalism follows.
  9. There is no easy way to avoid this conclusion. If constitutionalism is false, one of the four claims must be false; yet they all seem to be true.
  10. We have already considered affirming the first three claims while denying the fourth – the view that the lump predates and outlives the statue but is qualitatively identical with it while they coincide. It is unsurprising that no one holds that view.
  11. A more likely way out would be to accept the first claim but deny the second: to say that there is a lump that changes it shape twice, but there is no statue that is always Thatcher-shaped. The only large clay object in the story is the lump, which simply happens to be temporarily Thatcher-shaped. No new material object comes into being when we knead the lump into that shape, and none ceases to be when we squash it. No two things coincide materially. Call this suggestion lumpism.
  12. Another possibility is that the second claim might be true and the first false: there is, if you like, a statue but no lump. Perhaps, when we knead the clay into the shape of the former Prime Minister, a new object, a statue, comes into being, and perishes when we squash it. But no clay object persists through these changes: nothing is first shapeless, then Thatcher-shaped, then cubical. (What about the clay? Isn’t it first shapeless, then Thatcher-shaped, then cubical? Maybe so; but that doesn’t obviously imply that any material object changes its shape. Perhaps the expression ‘the clay’ refers not in the singular to any one thing, but in the plural to a lot of particles29 – particles that never compose anything that can survive radical changes of shape. That is, perhaps the clay is merely a lot of particles and not a large composite object.) Call the view that 1 is false and 2 is true statuism.
  13. The trouble with these proposals is that they are hard to generalize (Olson 199630). Though they may sound attractive in the case of the statue and the clay, they are implausible in other cases.
  14. Take lumpism, the idea that statues are merely statue-shaped lumps. If there are such things as lumps of clay, there ought to be such things as lumps of flesh and bone as well. Why should clay particles stuck together compose lumps, but not flesh particles stuck together? But although it may sound attractive to say that clay statues are just special lumps of clay, it is not plausible to say that living things are just special lumps of flesh.
  15. Lumps of flesh ought to be able to survive crushing if lumps of clay can. So the lump composed of the flesh particles of a dog ought to be able to survive the same sorts of radical changes of shape as a lump of clay can survive. But the dog cannot survive that. If something analogous to squashing the statue and making the clay into a cube were to happen to the dog, the dog would not merely change its shape. It wouldn’t just cease to be a dog, and come to be a cubical piece of meat. Surely the dog would cease to be altogether. Or consider that dogs can survive wholesale changes of parts, owing to metabolic turnover. Lumps of flesh cannot survive this: if you take away half a lump’s particles and replace them with new ones – even if you do it gradually – you end up with a numerically different lump from the one you began with. So say those who believe in lumps, anyway. If there are such things as lumps of flesh, the lump now coinciding with a dog is not the one that coincided with it a year ago. A dog is not a lump of flesh. If there is only a lump of flesh in the dog story, in the way that according to lumpism there is only a lump of clay in the statue story, then there are really no dogs or other organisms at all: what appears to be a persisting organism is reality a series of numerically different lumps, each taking on organic form only briefly.
  16. Those who would avoid constitutionalism by saying that statues are just lumps are likely to end up concluding that all material things are lumps – things that can survive radical changes of shape but cannot be composed of different particles at different times. They will arrive at a general “lump ontology”. Because most familiar material objects – organisms, artefacts, and ourselves as well, if we are material – are not lumps, the lump ontology implies that there are no such things. That may not be a reductio ad absurdum of the lump ontology, but it shows how tough-minded you have to be to accept it. Lumpism offers no easy way round the clay-modelling argument.
  17. Now consider statuism, the idea that the only Thatcher-shaped object in the story is the statue, which has that shape throughout its career. What's wrong with that? Well, if clay particles arranged in the shape of Thatcher compose a clay statue, we should expect the organic particles that compose Thatcher herself to compose something analogous to a statue – not a statue, exactly, but something of the same metaphysical sort as a statue, with the same persistence conditions: a "statue-type object". (If you believe that Thatcher is immaterial, consider her animal body.) What principled reason could there be to suppose that clay particles arranged in the shape of Thatcher compose a statue-type object but flesh particles arranged in that way do not?
  18. But Thatcher can survive things that no statue-type object could survive. She grew in size enormously in the course of her development. She could become a good deal smaller as well. She could survive the loss of her arms and legs. Given enough life-support machinery she could probably even survive as a severed head. No one thinks that a clay statue could have that sort of history. Thatcher herself is therefore no statue-type object. If the only Thatcher-sized material thing in the story is a statue-type object, then there is no such thing as Thatcher. Or if Thatcher really is a statue-type object, her history and persistence conditions are radically different from anything anyone ever thought. Those who would avoid constitutionalism by saying that lumps are really statue-type objects are likely to end up with something at least as repugnant as the lump ontology.
  19. You might find my attempts to generalize lumpism and statuism too crude. Maybe the claymodelling story is disanalogous to the stories of dogs and prime ministers that I have tried to compare it with. Perhaps clay particles arranged in human or in canine form compose lumps of clay, but organic particles arranged in human or canine form don’t compose lumps of anything. Or maybe clay particles arranged statuewise compose clay statues but organic particles arranged in human form do not compose fleshy statue-type objects. That might enable us to resist the clay-modelling argument and avoid constitutionalism without going to such loony extremes as the lump ontology. The trouble with these suggestions is that they sound unprincipled. One would like to think that there was some reason why clay particles arranged in human form compose lumps or statue-type objects while organic particles arranged in that way do not. Claims like these ought to fit into some broader and more systematic picture of the ontology of material objects. Otherwise we ought to worry that they are more wishful thinking than reliable insight. And it is hard to come up with such a picture31.
  20. A more radical response to the clay-modelling puzzle is to reject both 1 and 2: there are neither lumps of clay nor clay statues. Of course, there is something there that sculptors work and has aesthetic value. Perhaps there are clay particles. Sculptors arrange some of these particles in special ways, with certain intentions and in special circumstances. We describe this situation loosely by saying such things as, “She has made a clay statue of Margaret Thatcher.” But really there are no clay objects, but only particles. Clay particles never compose anything: there is nothing that has many clay particles as parts and every part of which overlaps at least one of those particles. There is never any larger thing for clay particles to be parts of. The clay particles in our story start out stuck together in a nondescript fashion, then get arranged in a way that we describe as Thatcher-shaped, and end up arranged cubically. But nothing in the story is literally Thatcher-shaped or cubical. This would enable us to describe the clay-modelling case without committing ourselves to constitutionalism. We might call this proposal the sparse ontology.
  21. Some philosophers have trouble understanding the sparse ontology. What is the difference, they ask, between things' being lumped together and their composing a lump? Given that some clay particles cohere together and don't cohere with any other clay particles, how can it be a further question whether there is a lump of clay there? We might as well say that there are many people gathered in the street but there is no crowd, or that there is a left shoe and a matching right shoe but no pair of shoes. How could that be a serious view? It is hard to know how to respond to this.
  22. Consider the claim that any objects whatever, no matter what they are like in themselves or how they are arranged, always compose something. That is, for any things at all, there is something that has all those things as parts, and all the parts of which share a part with one or more of those things – something numerically different from any of those parts, unless there is just one of them. Call this compositional universalism. Those who don’t understand the sparse ontology appear to be assuming this principle. In fact they seem to think that it cannot intelligibly be doubted or denied: it is true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words used to state it, and in such an obvious way that anyone who understands the words ‘thing’, 'compose', and 'something' must see, on reflection, that it is true. Their view is apparently that it is a logical principle, like the principle of non-contradiction. Given that there are such things as your left leg, St Paul's Cathedral, and the planet Mars, anyone who fails to see that there is also an enormous disconnected material thing composed of those three objects is simply confused.
  23. That is not how it seems to me. I find it eminently doubtful whether there is anything made up of your left leg, St Paul's Cathedral, and the planet Mars. It is not only doubtful whether those three things compose a “genuine object” or a thing with natural boundaries or anything of the sort that we have reason to pay any mind to. It is doubtful whether they compose anything at all. Universalism looks to me like a substantive metaphysical principle. It is not at all like the principle of non-contradiction. It is more like the claim that God exists. It might be true, and then again it might not be. But if we can meaningfully ask whether just any things compose a larger thing, how could it be meaningless to ask whether clay particles lumped together compose anything?
  24. This is not going to satisfy those who have tried hard and failed to understand the sparse ontology. I can refer them to other sources (for instance32 van Inwagen 1990b: 6-12 and 1994; Merricks 2001: 12-28). And we will see in chapter 933 that what we say about composition has important implications for what we are.
  25. Even if we can understand the claim that there are no lumps or statues, though, we may find it hard to believe. The result of kneading some clay into the shape of Thatcher certainly appears to be a medium-sized clay object. At any rate it takes some doing to get people to take seriously the idea that there might be nothing there but particles. The proposal also raises difficult theoretical questions. For instance, if the particles in our story don't compose a lump of clay or anything else, when do particles compose something? What would it take for particles to compose something, if not their being lumped together? More to the point, if clay particles arranged in the form of a human being never compose anything, why suppose that organic particles arranged in human form compose something? Surely there is no ontologically significant distinction between clay particles and organic particles. If there are no lumps or statues, how could there be any people – unless people are immaterial? We will return to these matters in §9.534.
  26. Other opponents of constitutionalism accept that the statue and lump exist and have different careers, but deny that they coincide materially. Despite appearances, they say, there are no smaller things that compose both the lump and the statue. The lump has temporal parts that do not overlap with any parts of the statue, such as the cubical part of it located later than its statue-shaped part. If a statue and a lump were to have all the same parts, including temporal parts – if the god of the philosophers were to create a clay statue out of nothing and then annihilate it without changing its shape, for instance – they would be one and the same. This proposal at least provides a systematic way of avoiding material coincidence. However, it requires the contentious assumption that statues and lumps, and presumably all persisting objects, including ourselves, are made up of temporal parts. We will return to it in Chapter 535.
3.3 The replacement puzzle and the amputation puzzle
  1. The clay-modelling puzzle is just one of many considerations about the ontology of material objects that support constitutionalism. Here are two more.
  2. The replacement puzzle, like the clay-modelling puzzle, suggests that each ordinary material object coincides materially with something of a different sort (Thomson 199836). Suppose we break off an arm of our clay statue and burn it in a very hot fire, then replace it with a new arm made of different clay. Then the argument is this: There is a clay statue that persists throughout the story, and has first one arm and then another. There is also a statue-shaped lump of clay coinciding with the statue before the replacement, and another statue-shaped lump of clay coinciding with it afterwards. I say another lump because the original lump doesn’t get smaller when we destroy part of it, as the statue does, and then regain its original size when a new part is provided. No; the lump ceases to exist when the arm is destroyed. And when the new arm is attached, a new lump comes into being. Or perhaps a previously disconnected lump – one existing in two detached pieces – comes to be a connected lump – one that is all in one piece. Either way, the new lump is not the old one. Since the statue coincides first with one lump and then with another, it cannot be identical with either lump. More generally, every clay statue has a property that no lump of clay has, namely the capacity to have different clay parts, or to be made of different clay, at different times. It follows that no clay statue is identical with any lump of clay – not even a clay statue that never has any of its parts replaced. Once more we have qualitatively different material objects coinciding materially. The alternatives to this conclusion are similar to those in the clay-modelling puzzle.
  3. Then there is the ancient amputation puzzle. Consider an ordinary human organism, Peter. Presumably there is such a thing as Peter's left hand. And if there is such a thing as his left hand, there ought to be such a thing as his "left-hand complement" as well: something composed of all of Peter's particles save those that compose his left hand. Call it Pete. Pete and Peter are not the same thing: Peter is bigger. Pete would seem to be one of Peter's parts. Now imagine that Peter loses his left hand. Better, let the hand be entirely destroyed. This is surely something that Peter could survive. Suppose he does. Then he gets smaller by a hand. But what about Pete? What happens to it when Peter loses his hand? If the loss is clean and quick, Pete need not be directly affected. Only its surroundings would change. So it seems that both Peter and Pete would exist after the amputation. How would they then relate to one another? It seems that they would coincide materially: the very atoms that compose Peter would compose Pete as well. But they cannot be the same thing, for they were different things before they coincided. If these assumptions are all correct, then this is another case of material coincidence (Thomson 198337). (It will be a genuine case of constitution only if Peter and Pete differ qualitatively while coinciding; but those who accept the rest of the story are unlikely to deny this.) Again, there is no easy way of avoiding the constitutionalist conclusion. We will return to the amputation puzzle in §7.338-§7.439.
3.4 Thinking animals again
  1. The constitution view promises to combine the apparent fact that we are living material things with the conviction that we have identity conditions or essential properties different from those of human animals. It claims to have all the virtues of animalism with none of its vices. And it is part of a package that appears to solve a number of vexing metaphysical puzzles. This might make the constitution view sound like a gift from the gods.
  2. But it is too good to be true. For one thing, the constitution view shares some of the objections levelled against animalism. In §2.940 we saw that animalism was incompatible with the widely held claim that facts about mental unity determine how many of us there are at any one time. I will argue in §6.441 that the constitution view is also incompatible with that claim. (We will consider another objection to both animalism and the constitution view in §9.342.)
  3. The constitution view has troubles of its own as well. The most obvious is the thinking animal problem. The constitution view says that we are not identical with our animal bodies. As we saw in §2.343, this implies that one of three things must be the case: there are no human animals at all, or human animals cannot think in the way that we do, or each of us shares all our thoughts with another being. Which of these unsavory consequences should friends of the constitution view accept?
  4. They cannot deny that there are human animals. That such an animal constitutes you is part of their view. Someone might deny that there are animals and say that we coincide with lumps of flesh or masses of matter instead. (Though this is not strictly a version of the constitution view as I have characterized it, it is a close relative.) In that case there would be no thinking animal problem; but there would still be a thinking-lump problem. It might perhaps be easier to explain why a lump of flesh in human form could never think than to explain why a human animal couldn’t. But even so, advocates of this view face the considerable challenge of explaining why there are no human animals in a way that is compatible with their view of what we are. Why might there be no human animals? It might be because there are no material things at all: the physical world is an illusion. Or maybe there are no composite material things, but only elementary particles (§8.544). Or it might be because nothing can have different parts at different times (§7.345-§7.446). None of these claims are compatible with anything like the constitution view. Any grounds for denying the existence of animals are likely to grounds for denying the existence of any sort of “constituted” material things that we could be.
  5. So according to the constitution view there are human animals coinciding materially with us. What if those animals think in the way that we do? Then there are two beings thinking your thoughts, you and the animal. And that is too many. We saw the problems this raises in §2.647. The human animals coinciding with us ought to count as people. Human people would then come in two kinds: animal people and the non-animal people they constitute. That makes it hard to see how we could know whether we are the non-animal people or the animal people that constitute them.
  6. Baker48 seems to think that these problems dissolve once we see that the animal constitutes the person (2000: 169-179, 191-204; 2002: 42). If we state the constitution view correctly, she claims, the question of how we know we are not our animal bodies does not arise. She says that I am an animal as well as a person, and that the animal constituting me – call it A – is a person as well as an animal. But A and I are animals and people in different senses. I am an animal only derivatively, she says, insofar as an animal constitutes me. A, however, is an animal non-derivatively: it is an animal independently of its constituting or being constituted by anything. Contrariwise, A is a person only insofar as it constitutes a person, whereas I am a person non-derivatively, independently of any constitution relations I enter into. How does that help? In particular, how does it enable me to know that I am not A? Well, I can know that I am a person, Baker says, because I can think first-person thoughts, and only a person can think first-person thoughts (that is her definition of 'person'). Yet A is also a person. How do I know which person I am? Baker says that although I am a person, and A is a person, and we are numerically different, we are not two people. Whenever one thing constitutes another, she says, they are one thing. And because there are not two people there, it makes no sense to ask which one I am.
  7. I don’t know what Baker means when she says that that A and I, though numerically different, are one person. But whatever it means, I do not see how it could help me to know that I am not A. There is A, Baker says, and there is the person A constitutes – Olson – and they are numerically different. So I ought to be able to ask whether I identical with Olson or with A. If I am identical with Olson and not with A, as Baker claims, how can it be impossible to ask whether I am Olson or A? And if I can ask whether I am Olson or A, I can also ask what grounds I have for accepting one answer to this question rather than another – just the problem Baker’s account was supposed to do away with.
  8. Friends of the constitution view will want to solve the thinking-animal problem by denying that human animals can think, or that they can think in the way that we think49. But as we saw in §2.550, this is a hard thing for a materialist to maintain: if you say that some material things can think, you will find it hard to argue that biological organisms cannot. It is especially hard to argue that physically indistinguishable things in the same surroundings – and according to the constitution view you and I are indistinguishable in this way from our animal bodies – can nonetheless differ radically in their mental capacities. There appears to be no difference between you and your animal body that could account for any psychological difference.
  9. Someone might say that what prevents human animals from thinking is not any defect in their physical structure or surroundings or history, but that they belong to the wrong metaphysical kind. The kind might be biological organism: perhaps human animals cannot think because they are organisms. We, by contrast, are able to think because we are not organisms (as well as having the right microstructure, surroundings, history, and so on).
  10. Why should a thing’s being a biological organism prevent it from thinking (or from thinking in the way that we think)? Maybe organisms can’t think because they have the wrong persistence conditions. We considered this rather unlikely view in §2.551. Even if it were true, though, it would not yet explain why we can think and human animals can’t. That is because it doesn’t explain why we are not animals ourselves. Of course, it is part of the constitution view that we are not animals. But even if we coincide materially with animals numerically different from ourselves, the question remains: what makes us non-animals? We are physically identical with human animals. We have the same developmental and evolutionary history as those animals have (we weren’t cooked up in the lab by mad scientists). How could things like that – beings that no biologist could ever distinguish from animals – not be animals?
  11. Perhaps we are not animals because we lack the identity conditions of organisms: maybe our identity over time, but not that of organisms, consists in some sort of psychological continuity. But this raises a further question: what could give us different identity conditions from those of human animals? How could material things with the same physical properties (or at any rate the same microstructure) in the same surroundings differ in the sort of thing they can survive? What is it about human animals that enables them to survive in a persistent vegetative state (for instance), when we – beings otherwise exactly like them – cannot survive it?
  12. I have asked why we can think but the animals coinciding with us cannot, what makes us non-organisms despite being physically indiscernible from organisms, and what could give us different identity conditions from the animals coinciding with us. We might also ask what could make one object a statue and another object, physically indiscernible from it and with the same surroundings, a mere statue-shaped lump. These are all instances of a more general question, which we might call the indiscernibility problem: how can putting the same parts together in the same way in the same circumstances give you qualitatively different wholes? If the same atoms can compose two things at once, what could make those two things qualitatively different? What could give them different mental properties, or different persistence conditions, or different modal properties? If atoms really could compose more than one object at once – if numerically different objects could coincide materially – should we not expect those objects to be qualitatively identical?
  13. Constitutionalists evidently do not expect this. They are not surprised that two objects that are otherwise indiscernible should differ systematically in their mental or modal properties. Why not? Presumably it is because they take these differences to be primitive or brute: not explainable in terms of other differences. There is no saying why you would go along with your transplanted cerebrum and your animal body would not, or why you can think but the animal can’t, because there is no other difference between you and the animal that could explain it. A human animal’s inability to think is a primitive and basic feature of it. It just can’t, and that’s all there is to be said. Asking why a human animal cannot think is like asking why an electron is negatively charged: there is no more basic level of properties underlying it, in terms of which it could be explained. Or maybe animals cannot think because they have the wrong persistence conditions to think (as Sydney Shoemaker argues), and their persistence conditions are brute. Each pair of coinciding objects must have some brute difference that explains the other differences between them.
  14. Constitutionalists will point out that things must have some brute properties or other: a thing cannot have every property it has by virtue of its having some other property. So why shouldn’t a thing’s persistence conditions and mental properties be brute?
  15. Not many philosophers would agree that mental properties are brute. That would mean that there is no explanation of why some beings are conscious or intelligent and others aren’t. At any rate there would be no explanation in many cases. It may be that having a certain sort of brain is necessary for being intelligent or conscious. But only some of the beings with that sort of brain would be intelligent and conscious, and there would be no saying why those beings with that sort of brain that are intelligent and conscious are intelligent or conscious, and why those that are not intelligent of conscious are not. No amount of information about a being’s brain structure, history, or surroundings would suffice to explain why it is conscious or intelligent. It would not even suffice to explain why a thing is likely to be conscious or intelligent, in the way that someone’s being dealt three aces explains why she is likely to win the poker game. This would make mental properties inherently mysterious.
  16. Constitutionalists may want to say that things’ mental properties are not primitive, but only their modal properties – their persistence conditions, for instance, and other essential properties – and use the difference in the modal properties of coinciding objects to explain their other differences. But it will not be easy to say how the modal properties of human animals prevent them from having mental properties.
  17. And there seems to be something fishy in the claim that things’ modal properties are primitive and independent of their non-modal properties. Suppose someone said that every person located in the northern hemisphere coincides materially with a being that is essentially in the northern hemisphere: an “essential northerner”. (Perhaps Antipodeans coincide with essential southerners; perhaps not.) If you were to cross the equator from the north, the essential northerner coinciding with you would necessarily perish. Now it might occur to someone to ask why that being cannot cross the equator. You can cross the equator. And your essential northerner is otherwise just like you. What stops him from crossing? This seems to me to be a legitimate question – a question we should expect to have an answer. But if the modal properties that coinciding objects don’t share are primitive, as constitutionalists are apparently committed to saying, it is not a legitimate question. That your essential northerner cannot exist outside the northern hemisphere would be a brute property of him, not explainable in terms of his having any other properties. Why can’t he get across the equator? He just can’t. Not even God could say why. That strikes me as an absurd thing to say.
  18. Constitutionalists may say that it is absurd because essential northerners are absurd: it is absurd to suppose that any material object is essentially located in the northern hemisphere. And the existence of such things in no way follows from the claim that human animals coincide with beings that are essentially able to think in a certain way. That is fair enough – but then we shall want to know why human animals coincide with essential thinkers but not with essential northerners. What’s the difference between the two cases? What makes one absurd and the other respectable? This is the topic of the next section52.
3.5 When does constitution occur?
  1. Let me mention two further worries about the constitution view. They may appear trifling compared with the thinking-animal problem. But many philosophers say that there is no such problem, or that it can be solved, or that it is troubling but outweighed by the constitution view's advantages; so these further worries may be important. In any case they are interesting in their own right.
  2. The first has to do with when one thing constitutes another. Constitutionalists say that certain qualitative properties have the following feature: necessarily, when an object acquires one of them, a new object comes into being which coincides materially with the first and has that property essentially. So when a sculptor models a lump of clay into the shape of Thatcher, the lump comes to coincide with a new object – a statue – that has that shape essentially. The lump could have any shape you like, but the statue – that particular statue – could not exist without having that shape. (Perhaps it is only an approximate shape.) Or again: when in the course of its development a human organism acquires certain a mental property (the capacity for self-awareness or for first-person thought or what you), it comes to coincide with a new being- -a person – that has that property essentially. Because most constitutionalists say that in these cases the original object constitutes the new object, we might call them constitution-inducing properties.
  3. There is a complication. Constitutionalists deny that constituting objects always share the properties of the things they constitute. For instance, human organisms that come to constitute people never become self-aware themselves (or at least not in the way that the people are self-aware); otherwise human animals and human people would hardly be worth distinguishing. Rather, the organism comes to constitute a being having the capacity for self-awareness essentially when it acquires some other property: perhaps a property, the having of which suffices for a thing to be self-aware if it belongs to the right kind or has the right identity conditions or the like. This other property might be the neural substrate of self-awareness, or the conjunction of the right neural substrate and appropriate surroundings53. And of course some properties that constituted objects are said to have essentially are properties that nothing could acquire: having certain persistence conditions, for instance. (Nothing can start out having one set of persistence conditions and later exchange them for a new set, incompatible with the first.) If a thing's acquiring a property P suffices for it to come to constitute a new object that has a property Q essentially, let us say that P and Q are constitutional correlates. So a property P is constitution-inducing if and only if, necessarily, whenever an object acquires P, it comes to coincide with a new object that has a constitutional correlate of P essentially. (This allows that a property might be a constitutional correlate of itself.)
  4. A general question now arises: What properties are constitution-inducing? What properties are such that when a thing acquires one of them, it comes to constitute a new object that has that property or a constitutional correlate of it essentially? In other words, under what circumstances does constitution occur? What alterations in a previously existing material thing call a new material thing into being? I take it that this question must have an answer. At any rate it must have an answer if constitutionalism is true.
  5. I am not asking for a definition of constitution – an account of what it would be for one thing to constitute another. That would not tell us when constitution occurs. Suppose we agree that, by definition, x constitutes y if and only if x and y coincide materially and it is possible for y to cease to exist while x endures and retains the same parts, but not possible for x to cease to exist while y endures with the same parts. Clearly we could still disagree about when these conditions obtain: you might take many properties to be constitution-inducing while I say that few are, or none. We could be like people who agree about what absolute moral rights would be but disagree about which such rights there are.
  6. There are three broad sorts of answers to this question. One is that no properties are constitution-inducing: that’s what opponents of constitutionalism say. Another is that all properties are constitution-inducing: any alteration to any material object, no matter how trivial, necessarily results in its coming to constitute a new object that has the property thereby acquired, or a constitutional correlate of it, essentially. Third, it may be that some properties are constitution-inducing and others are not.
  7. Call the claim that all properties are constitution-inducing the generous view54. It has the important advantage of being principled. If some properties are constitution-inducing and others aren’t, it seems fair to ask why the ones that are are, and why the others aren’t – just as if some people are rich and others aren’t, we can ask why the rich ones are rich and the others aren’t. The generous view can tell us why a given property is constitution-inducing: because all properties are necessarily constitution-inducing.
  8. But the generous view is hard to believe. For one thing, every persisting material object has properties that change continuously: at every moment you acquire, among other things, a new shape and a new distance from the moon. So the generous view implies that you come to constitute a new being at every moment. During the time it takes you to blink your eyes, you pass through an uncountable infinity of shapes, and each of those minute alterations brings forth a new being, coinciding with you, that has that shape essentially.
  9. Now this sort of ontological extravagance is not unique to the generous view: the ontology of temporal parts has a similar consequence. But the generous view is infinitely more extravagant than the ontology of temporal parts. Suppose you stand up, thereby coming to constitute a being, S, that is essentially standing. And suppose that as you are in the process of standing up, you also begin to frown, thereby coming to constitute a being, F, that is essentially frowning. Are S and F the same object, or different? (Suppose, if you like, that S and F go out of existence at the same time.) Do the things that have their posture essentially also have their facial expression essentially? We could ask the same questions about a thing’s mass, age, distance from the moon, pH, net electric charge, and so on. Any material object acquires a vast number of new properties at any moment: perhaps an infinite number. How many new objects does it thereby come to constitute? And how are the properties a thing acquires (or their constitutional correlates) distributed essentially across the objects it then comes to constitute?
  10. As far as I can see, the only principled way of answering this question is to be generous once more (Bennett 1984: 35455): when you stand and frown at once, you coincide with a being that essentially stands and contingently frowns, with a second being that contingently stands and essentially frowns, and with a third being that essentially stands and essentially frowns. More generally, for every non-empty subset of the set of qualitative properties you have at a given time, there is a being coinciding with you that has the members of that subset (or constitutional correlates of them) essentially and has the other properties you have at that time (or constitutional correlates of them) contingently. So if the number of properties you have at a given moment is n, the number of material things you coincide with at that moment will be a bit less than 2n. That’s a lot.
  11. Worse yet, suppose you begin to think about Vienna. The generous view implies that you thereby come to constitute a being different from yourself that thinks about Vienna essentially (you don’t think about Vienna essentially). It follows that whenever you think about Vienna, you are one of at least two beings thinking about Vienna (far more than two if the suggestion of the previous paragraph is right; but never mind that). You ought to wonder which one you are: are you the one who was absorbed with things other than Vienna a moment ago, or the one that thinks about Vienna throughout the whole of its brief career? How could you ever know? This problem arises even if constitutionalists can explain why the animals that constitute us are unable to think in the way that we do: it has nothing to do with the mental properties of animals.
  12. It is not surprising that most constitutionalists want to say that only some properties are constitution-inducing. But which ones? You might think that all and only intrinsic properties are constitution-inducing. But this is hardly better than the generous view. Many mental properties appear to be intrinsic; so it would seem to follow that when you come to be conscious after a night asleep, you come to coincide with a being that is essentially conscious. What’s more, some constitutionalists say that constitution-inducing properties can be extrinsic (Baker 199756).
  13. Baker proposes that a thing x constitutes something y just when “y has whole classes of causal properties that x would not have had if x had not constituted anything (Baker 2000: 4157).” If we use an anvil as a doorstop, she says, it holds open the door merely by virtue of properties it would have even if it didn’t constitute anything. It acquires no new classes of causal properties. A person, by contrast, has many properties that a mere organism would not have if it didn’t constitute a person, such as the capacity to think about the future. That, she says, explains why certain organisms constitute essential people, but anvils never constitute essential doorstops.
  14. Baker concedes that this is not a satisfactory account of when constitution occurs, but she thinks it is a helpful guide. As far as I can see it is no help at all. Does the human organism now sitting in your chair constitute something? According to Baker’s proposal it does if there is something now coinciding with it that has certain causal properties that the animal wouldn’t now have if it didn’t constitute anything. Well, what causal properties would the animal now have if it didn’t constitute anything? One answer is that it would have precisely the causal properties that you now have, including your mental properties. Another is that the animal would lack many of the mental properties you now have unless it constituted something that had certain mental properties essentially. How can we decide between these two answers? Only, it seems, by finding out whether the animal constitutes something. Those who think it doesn’t will take the animal to have all the causal properties that you have; those who think the animal constitutes an essential thinker will take it to lack some of your causal properties. But whether the animal constitutes something is just what we wanted to find out. Those who have no idea when constitution occurs will be none the wiser for all Baker’s proposal tells them. The same goes for other putative cases of constitution.
  15. You might think that Baker’s proposal gives at least a necessary condition for constitution, even if it is no good as a sufficient condition. That is, even if it tells us nothing about when constitution does occur, it might tell us something about when it doesn’t – ruling out the generous view that all properties are constitution-inducing, if nothing else. It might imply that an anvil doesn’t come to constitute an essential doorstop when we use it to prop open a door, because it thereby acquires no new classes of causal properties.
  16. But I cannot see that it helps even here. Whether the anvil constitutes an essential doorstop depends on what causal properties the anvil would have if it didn’t constitute anything. Baker says that an anvil used as a doorstop has the same causal properties whether it constitutes anything or not. But why suppose that? Someone might think that putting an anvil in front of an open door necessarily causes it to constitute an essential doorstop, and infer from this that if the anvil didn’t constitute anything it wouldn’t keep the door open. Baker’s proposal would give her no reason to change her mind. Those who deny that anvils ever constitute essential doorstops will find Baker’s proposal equally consistent with their own view. Those who have no idea whether this is a case of constitution and want to find out will get no help from Baker’s proposal.
  17. Of course, it might be silly to suppose that putting an anvil in front of a door would cause it to constitute an essential doorstop, with causal powers that the anvil lacks. But then some philosophers find it silly to suppose that the normal development of a human organism causes it to constitute an essential thinker, with causal powers that the organism lacks. Baker’s proposal does nothing to help resolve these disputes. If essential doorstops are silly and essential thinkers are not, we should like to know why this is so, and Baker’s proposal doesn’t say. It implies nothing at all about when constitution occurs.
  18. I have never seen a serious answer to the question of which properties are constitution-inducing, apart from ‘all’ and ‘none’. Does it matter? Every philosophical claim raises questions that no one knows how to answer. Is this a problem for constitutionalism, or merely an interesting topic for further research?
  19. I think it is a problem. For one thing, if we have no idea what properties, in general, are constitution-inducing and no idea how to find out, it ought to undermine our confidence in the claim that any particular property is constitution-inducing – all the more so given that constitutionalists disagree widely among themselves about these matters. That would cast doubt on constitutionalism generally, and on the constitution view of ourselves in particular.
  20. More seriously, it is hard to combine the constitution view with any acceptable answer to this question. Most friends of the constitution view say that a human animal comes to constitute a person when it acquires a certain mental capacity (or its constitutional correlate). Suppose it is the capacity for first-person thought: when an animal acquires it, it comes to constitute a person that has that capacity essentially. This has the implausible consequence that we were never foetuses, and that human beings in a persistent vegetative state are not, and do not constitute, the people by whose names we continue to call them. But never mind that. A human animal acquires all sorts of mental capacities (or their constitutional correlates) in the course of its development from a foetus into an adult. For instance, it acquires the capacity to have bodily sensations. It also acquires the capacity to have beliefs and desires, the capacity to think about the future, the capacity to do arithmetic, and many more. Friends of the constitution view say that just one of these capacities is constitution-inducing. (Otherwise each of us would coincide with a different thinking being for each constitution-inducing mental capacity.) They say that a being can acquire the capacity to have sensations without thereby coming to constitute anything that has that capacity essentially, but no being can acquire the capacity to think in the first person without coming to constitute anything that has that capacity essentially. What is it about first-person thought that makes it, alone among mental properties, constitution-inducing?
  21. If there is to be any answer to this question, it will involve the claim that the capacity to think in the first person is somehow uniquely special among mental capacities. But there doesn’t seem to be anything uniquely special about it. Constitutionalists may point out that the capacity for first-person thought is a prerequisite for a wide variety of other mental capacities, such as the capacity to plan for the future. But many other mental capacities are equally special: the capacity to think at all, for instance, is a prerequisite for an even wider variety of mental capacities. The claim that the capacity for first-person thought, but no other mental property, is constitution-inducing seems arbitrary and unprincipled. It isn’t just that we don’t know what makes it constitution-inducing, but that no such account seems possible.
  22. Well, maybe it isn’t the capacity for first-person thought that is constitution-inducing, but rather the capacity to think at all. (This seems to be Shoemaker’s view.) That might sound less arbitrary. But is it? We have all sorts of capacities, some mental and some not. Why should that one in particular be constitution-inducing? Why not the capacity for sense-experience? Or the capacity to move? Or the capacity to breathe? I cannot see any way of answering these questions. As far as I can see, the constitution view is inconsistent with any principled account of what properties are constitution-inducing – short of the generous view, anyway.
  23. Someone might wonder whether there has to be any principled account of what properties are constitution-inducing. There must be some answer to that question if constitutionalism is true, but why suppose that the answer must be intellectually satisfying and not simply arbitrary? Could it not be that the capacity for first-person thought is constitution-inducing and no other capacity is and there is no reason why? Well, maybe. But if the facts about which properties are constitution-inducing are arbitrary, it is hard to see how anyone could ever know them.
3.6 What determines our boundaries?
  1. Here is the second worry. The constitution view says that I coincide materially with a certain animal. Its parts are my parts and my parts are its. We share our spatial boundaries. This may be only contingently true – maybe I could come to coincide with something partly or wholly inorganic – but it is the usual situation. Why should this be so? Why is my boundary the boundary of this animal? What makes all and only the animal’s parts my parts? What is it about my feet, for instance, that makes them, but not my shoes, or your feet, parts of me?
  2. I am not asking for a causal or historical explanation of how my boundaries came to lie where they do, in the way that we might ask how Texas came to be a part of the United States. Never mind history. I want to know what it is about the way I relate to my feet now that makes them parts of me now. This is analogous to asking what current geopolitical facts make it the case that Texas is a part of the US, rather than, say, a part of Mexico or an independent state. We could not understand how historical events affect a thing's current boundaries unless we understood what sort of facts fix things' boundaries in the first place58.
  3. I take it that this question must have an answer. Our boundaries may be indefinite – there may be things that are neither definitely parts of me nor definitely not parts of me – but even so we must have boundaries. And where they lie is no accident. According to the constitution view, they ordinarily coincide precisely with those of a particular animal; and moreover in normal circumstances they continue to coincide with those of a human animal for the whole of our lives. This fact deserves an explanation.
  4. If we were animals, what fixes our boundaries would be whatever fixes the boundaries of an animal. And we know what that is: an animal extends as far as its biological life extends (more or less: see §2.259). My feet are parts of this organism because they are caught up in its life; my shoes are not parts of it because they are not caught up in its life: they don’t respond in the right way to the organism’s metabolic activities. If I am not an animal, though, the mere fact that something is a part of this animal cannot make it a part of me. Nor can the fact that something is caught up in a certain animal’s life, by itself, make it a part of me.
  5. What might determine where our boundaries lie if the constitution view were true? It is not easy to say. Locke suggested that we extend spatially as far as our "consciousness" extends. Those particles, he said, that are "vitally united to this same thinking conscious self, so that we feel when they are touch'd, and are affected by, and conscious of good or harm that happens to them, are a part of our selves" (1975: 33660). The idea is that my feet are parts of me because I can feel them, or more generally because changes in them have an immediate effect on the nature of my experience. Of course, I cannot feel any particular atom, and no single atom is such that changes in it has an immediate effect on my experience, yet on Locke’s proposal many atoms are parts of me. But an atom can be a part of a larger thing that I can feel, and any part of a part of me is itself a part of me. So we could say that our parts are those things that we can feel in this way, and the parts of those things. Most friends of the constitution view think that psychological facts fix our temporal boundaries – when we begin and end. This may lead them to think for similar reasons that psychological facts fix our spatial boundaries as well, just as Locke’s proposal has it.
  6. But a moment’s reflection shows that this will not do. It implies that a limb that was completely numb would not be a part of you. An accident that left you numb and paralyzed from the neck down would literally reduce you to a head (or to something constituted by a head). An event that left you entirely numb, depriving you of all sensory input, would leave you with no parts at all. Since you could not exist without having any parts (even yourself, your “improper” part), this means that you could not survive in such a state, even for a moment. I take that to be absurd. For that matter, Locke’s proposal implies that even in ordinary circumstances our boundaries are not the boundaries of a human animal. The reason is that you can't feel the whole of your animal body. You can't feel the blood flowing through your aorta, for instance. On Locke's proposal, neither your blood cells nor the atoms composing them are parts of you: you are smaller than a human animal. It follows that no animal constitutes you. So Locke’s proposal is actually incompatible with the constitution view. Locke’s proposal may seem like a straw man. There is probably a better account of what determines our boundaries that is compatible with the constitution view. But I have no idea what it might be.
  7. You may suspect that there is really no problem here. It follows from most definitions of constitution that whenever one thing constitutes another, the two things share their boundaries and their parts (or at any rate there are things that compose each of them). Thus, given that we are constituted by human animals, as the constitution view says, our boundaries will be the boundaries of those animals. Those people who come to be constituted by things other than organisms will share their boundaries with whatever it is that constitutes them then. Friends of the constitution view might therefore seem to have a perfectly good account of what determines our boundaries: they are the boundaries of whatever it is that constitutes us.
  8. Our being constituted by animals would indeed imply that our boundaries are those of our animal bodies. But rather than answering the question of what determines our boundaries, this proposal merely relocates it. The question is now what makes it the case that animals constitute us. Why not things a bit larger or smaller than animals? Granted, it seems to be human animals that constitute us if anything does, and not something bigger or smaller. But that appearance is nothing more than the fact that we appear to extend all the way out to our skin and no further. It does nothing to explain why we are constituted by things that extend all the way out to our skin and no further, rather than by things with a greater or lesser extent. This is a question that friends of the constitution view need to answer. At any rate they are committed to its having an answer. And it will be no easier for them to answer than the original question of what determines our boundaries.
  9. This problem might not seem unique to the constitution view. Maybe it is a good question why animals constitute us rather than bigger or smaller things. But don’t other accounts of what we are face a similar question? Take animalism. What could make it the case that we are animals, rather than things bigger or smaller than animals? Don’t animalists need to answer this question? And won’t their answer suit the constitution view equally well? Suppose animalists can say why it is that we are animals and not bigger or smaller things. Wouldn’t that also explain why it is that we are constituted by animals and not by bigger or smaller things, if indeed that is the case?
  10. It is true that both animalists and constitutionalists face similar questions about what makes it the case that we are animals and constitutionalists about what makes it the case that animals constitute us. We will consider how animalists might answer their question in §9.361. But the constitutionalists’ question will be harder to answer than the animalists’ question. There are two things animalists can say about why we should be animals rather than bigger or smaller things: they can deny that those bigger and smaller things can think; or they can deny that such things exist. (A third option would be to accept that such things exist and can think, and appeal to the “personal-pronoun revisionism” discussed in §2.662 to account for our ability to know that we are not those bigger or smaller things. I take it that neither animalists nor constitutionalists will be happy with this.)
  11. What might prevent something bigger or smaller than a human animal from thinking? If anything, we should expect it to be the fact that it is not an organism. That only an organism could think is sometimes said to belong to the very idea of thinking (see §4.263). But whatever merits this may have as an explanation of why you are an animal rather than something bigger or smaller than an animal, it cannot explain why you are constituted by an animal rather than by something larger or smaller than an animal. In fact it is incompatible with the constitution view, which says that non-organisms do think.
  12. The second possible reason for supposing that we are animals rather than things larger or smaller than animals is that there simply are no such larger or smaller things. The only material thing that is even a candidate for thinking your thoughts – the only one that includes the neural machinery that makes your thought possible – is the animal. You are not your left-hand complement, for instance, because there is no such thing; those of your particles not located in your left hand do not compose anything. There are fewer material objects in the world than some philosophers have supposed. The animal is the only thing there that could be you.
  13. Of course, if there is nothing bigger or smaller than the animal that could be you, there is also nothing bigger or smaller than the animal that could constitute you; so this story would also serve the constitutionalist as an account of what determines our boundaries. But no constitutionalist would touch it. Even if this sort of sparse ontology of material objects is consistent with the letter of constitutionalism, it goes completely against its spirit. One of constitutionalism’s main attractions is that it provides a supply of material things rich enough to make true almost any metaphysical view about material things. Are you inclined to think that clay statues and lumps of clay, organisms and masses of matter, and people and organisms all exist, yet are numerically different, owing to their different essential properties? Constitutionalism will give you those objects. It is designed precisely to squeeze more things than you would have thought possible into the same place. It is an ontological shoehorn, the metaphysical equivalent of high-rise building. Once we start economizing with material objects, and especially if we have to economize on such a scale as to deny the existence of any parts of human beings big enough to include brains, constitutionalism loses its appeal.
  14. We can illustrate this conflict by recalling the metaphysical puzzles about material objects that we considered earlier in this chapter. A sparse ontology of material objects can solve those puzzles by denying the existence of one or more of the entities whose apparent coincidence was puzzling – the statue, the lump, the person’s hand complement, and so on. That solution has a high intuitive cost: the sparse ontology is hard to believe. (See §7.464 and §9.565 for more on the sparse ontology.) Constitutionalism was supposed to solve those problems without that cost. It has a cost of its own, of course: something must be done about the thinking-animal problem, not to mention the problem of when constitution occurs; but you might still prefer it to the sparse ontology. If constitutionalism requires a sparse ontology as well, this benefit is lost: there is no point in paying twice for the same thing, especially if the price is high. That would be a good reason to consider accepting the sparse ontology without constitutionalism.
  15. So advocates of the constitution view cannot say what animalists say about what determines our boundaries. They need to give another answer; or at least they are committed to there being another answer. But again, I have no idea what answer they could give. This seems to be a serious problem.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Constitution")

Footnote 5:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 6:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 7:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 8: Footnote 17:
  • These conditions rule out our being identical to animals, though not our being constituted by them, if constitution makes sense.
  • It is Olson’s aim in this Chapter to demonstrate that it does not, though he puts the case for the Constitution View first.
  • Note that the CV doesn’t claim that animals can’t think, only that they don’t have a First Person Perspective essentially (and non-derivatively).
Footnote 18:
  • I agree with Olson that we are (identical to) Human Animals, and that this should be the default position that others have to argue against. It ought not to be the responsibility for the animalist to argue for this position, though he will need to answer objections.
Footnote 19:
  • Indeed, as Olson points out, physical things exclude one another from the same space. He agrees that this isn’t what the holder of the CV wishes to dispute. But the holder of the CV – while agreeing that these two supposed co-residents of the space are non-identical – doesn’t claim that they are as non-identical as to call the exclusion claim into question. They share the same matter.
Footnote 20: Footnote 21:
  • While this is true, it implies that there are two different things there. But this isn’t quite right. There’s too much ‘borrowing’ going on. Baker calls it a ‘unity’ relation, just short of identity.
Footnote 22:
  • The technical reason is this: “Four-dimensionalists” say that two things can be made of the same matter at once, but they don’t mean it in the sense that is relevant here. They mean only that two material things can share a temporal part. They deny that two things can coincide materially in the sense defined below. We will return to this point in §5.3 and §7.4.
  • But … do 4-dimensionalists really deny Constitution? Maybe they just have no need for it, as their own theory solves all the problems (doesn’t it?).
Footnote 23:
  • The term ‘the xs’ is a plural variable, standing to the singular variable ‘x’ as the plural name ‘the Marx Brothers’ stands to the singular name ‘Groucho’, and as the plural pronoun ‘they’ stands to the singular pronoun ‘it’. Here I follow van Inwagen 1990a: 22-27. It might be better to define the phrase ‘the xs compose y at a time t’ rather than ‘the xs compose y’, as the claim we are exploring is that things can compose two different objects at the same time. I have not done this because four-dimensionalists agree that atoms (say) can compose two different objects at the same time in the sense that the thing the temporal parts of those atoms located at that time compose can be a temporal part of two different objects that diverge elsewhere in spacetime. This sort of “coincidence”, which consists only in sharing temporal parts, is not the idea that concerns us in this chapter.
  • See "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Material Beings", Chapter 2 ("Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Special Composition Question").
  • I’m not sure why Olson launches into a discussion of composition (see my Note on Mereology) when this is not the same as Constitution. He agrees that elsewhere.
Footnote 24:
  • So, is the idea that a load of atoms compose both a bunch of bricks and also a castle, and that the bricks and the castle are collocated?
Footnote 25: Footnote 26: Footnote 27: Footnote 28: Footnote 29:
  • Zimmerman (2003) argues against this proposal. But he is no constitutionalist; he endorses the “lump ontology” mentioned below.
  • See "Zimmerman (Dean) - Material People".
Footnote 30: Footnote 31: Footnote 32: Footnote 36: Footnote 37: Footnote 48: Footnote 49: Footnote 52: Footnote 53:
  • I assume here that properties are abundant: that for more or less any description of a thing, there is a property that something has if and only if it satisfies that description. I therefore beg the indulgence of those who think that properties are sparse – that there are only “natural” properties, or only those properties that figure in ultimate basic physics, for instance. They may want to imagine my ‘property’ replaced by ‘description’ or ‘condition’. I don’t think anything in my discussion turns on this point.
Footnote 54: Footnote 55: Footnote 56: Footnote 57: Footnote 58:
  • I speak indiscriminately here of what determines my boundaries and of what makes something a part of me. For the reasons noted in §1.1, these are not the same question, but the difference is not important here.
Footnote 60:


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Brains"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 4 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
  • This chapter considers the view that we are literally brains. It argues that the view is best supported by the claim that brains are the primary subjects of mental properties, giving a “thinking-brain problem” analogous to the thinking-animal problem that supports animalism1.
  • The brain view is shown to have implausible consequences about our identity through time, and to presuppose that something is a part of a thinking being if and only if it is directly involved in that being's mental processes. It is then argued that the notion of direct involvement is too interest-relative to give this principle any useful content, and that the principle is in any case unfounded.
  • Sections
    1. The brain view2
    2. The thinking-brain problem3
    3. The brain view and our identity over time4
    4. Thinking-subject minimalism5
    5. Direct involvement6
    6. Homunculism7

Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File8.

Write-up9 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Brains

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 4, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Brains", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online10 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book11.
  • The text differs slightly from the book.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there12.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.

Full Text
  1. The brain view13
  2. The thinking-brain problem14
  3. The brain view and our identity over time15
  4. Thinking-subject minimalism16
  5. Direct involvement17
  6. Homunculism18
4.1 The brain view
  1. If we are neither animals nor material things constituted by animals, we might be parts of animals. This chapter is devoted to the view that we are spatial parts of animals; the next asks whether we are temporal parts. The only spatial parts of animals that I can think of any reason to suppose we might be are brains, or something like brains – parts of brains or perhaps entire central nervous systems. Call the view that we are something like brains the brain view.
  2. The brain view says that we are identical with brains, not that we “are” brains in some looser sense. It is not the view that our brains are important to our being in a way that none of our other parts are. Nor is it that our brains constitute us, or that we are temporal parts of brains (views I will briefly discuss in §4.319). The brain view is that we are literally brains. So it implies that you are about four inches tall and weigh less than three pounds. You are located entirely within your cranium and made up mostly of soft, yellowish-pink tissue. In normal circumstances we never strictly see ourselves or each other. This might sound like something out of a comic book. Some readers, I’m sure, are already thinking of jokes. Is it really a serious view?
  3. One could defend the brain view by pointing out that even if you are a brain, it may still be true to say, in ordinary circumstances, that you are five or six feet tall, that you weigh more or less what the scales say when you step on them, and that you see yourself when you look in a mirror. These things might be true because your animal body has those properties. A brain can be six feet tall in the sense of having a six-foot-tall body. And that sense may be all we mean when we say, in ordinary contexts, that some of us are six feet tall. If so, the ordinary belief that some of us are six feet tall is perfectly compatible with the brain view. Those who believe that we are immaterial and have no physical properties at all have been saying this sort of thing for centuries: an immaterial thing can “be six feet tall” in the same sense as a brain can.
  4. Whether linguistic hypotheses of this sort make the brain view any easier to believe is debatable. It may only combine an absurd view about what we are with an implausible view about what we mean. When we say that Haroun is six feet tall, we don’t seem to mean merely that he relates in a certain way to something or other that has the property of being six feet tall. We seem to mean that Haroun himself has that property. And there doesn’t seem to be any sense in which Haroun is four inches tall.
  5. In any case, the brain view is the sort of thing that only a philosopher would think of, and only at the end of a long chain of argument. That may be why it is hard to find anyone who seriously advocates it20. But even if no one thinks that we are brains, the view raises important issues that bear on other accounts of what we are. So we cannot avoid discussing it.
  6. Why suppose that we are brains? Well, it would support the conviction that you could survive the loss of your fingers, legs, abdominal organs, and so on, but not the loss of your brain – that you could be pared down to a naked brain (or a part of a brain), but no further. (I don’t say that this conviction is true; but it is widely held.) Of course, you couldn’t survive for very long as a naked brain – at any rate not without life-support machinery far more advanced than anything now in existence. But it may seem that you couldn’t survive even for a moment without a brain. If you are your brain, the reason for this would be simple: destroying your brain would literally destroy you, whereas cutting away your limbs and other organs would only change your surroundings, albeit in a drastic way.
  7. Likewise, the brain view fits nicely with the conviction that you would go along with your transplanted brain. According to the brain view, to transplant your brain is literally to transplant you: to cut you out of your head, move you across the room, and then re-house you in a new head. If you were any material thing other than your brain (or a part of it), the view that transplanting your brain would transplant you would appear to have the awkward implication that the surgeons would move two brain-sized things across the room – you and your brain – raising the awkward question of what the relation would be, in mid-transplant, between those two objects. (Friends of the constitution view have an answer to this question; but we have seen that it has its faults.) The brain view has the virtue of offering an entirely straightforward account of what happens in brain transplants.
  8. Better yet, it offers a solution to the thinking-animal problem (Persson 1999: 52121). Anyone who believes that we are not animals needs to say something about those human animals that appear to think our thoughts. Why don’t they count as people? And what reason could we have to suppose that we are not those animals? Friends of the brain view can answer that in the strictest sense human animals don’t think our thoughts: they think only in the derivative sense of having brains that think. The existence of unthinking animals, or of animals that think only in a loose sense, is no threat to the claim that you and I are not animals. To my mind, this line of thought offers the best argument for the brain view. More importantly, perhaps, it poses a problem for anyone who believes that we are not brains: what grounds could you have for supposing that you are something other than your thinking brain? Call it the thinking-brain problem.
4.2 The thinking-brain problem
  1. The brain is our organ of thought. We think with our brains, and not with our lungs or kidneys or any other parts of our bodies. The brain produces thought, much as the liver produces bile. So it seems, anyway. This suggests that the brain thinks. Just as the heart’s function is to pump our blood, the brain’s function is to think. (As before, let us take “thought” and “thinking” as broadly as possible, to include not only active cogitation but mental activity and states generally.) Philosophers of mind often say that if any material thing thinks, it is the brain: they ask whether a material thing could be conscious by asking whether a brain could be conscious. They ask whether mental states are physical states by asking whether they are brain states. But what could a brain state be, if not a state of a brain? And if a mental state is a state of something, that something ought to be the subject of that state, or at any rate a subject of it – that is, a thinking or conscious being. What more could it take for a thing to be conscious than for it to be in conscious states?
  2. But if the brain thinks, that suggests that anything larger than a brain – a human animal, a thing constituted by a human animal, or what have you – could be said to think only in the derivative sense of having a part that thinks. Brains, by contrast, would think in the strictest sense. They would have the property thinking; larger things could at best have the property having a thinking part. But having a thinking part doesn’t seem to be a way of thinking. The solar system, if there is such a thing, has many people as thinking parts. Yet clearly it doesn’t think. Not in any interesting sense, anyway. Maybe a human organism that thinks by virtue of having a thinking brain as a part bears a more intimate relation to the property of thinking than the solar system does by virtue of having a thinking person as a part, and this difference explains why we say that human organisms think and the solar system doesn’t. Even so, if it is the brain that thinks, it looks as if nothing larger than a brain could think in the strictest and most straightforward sense. Anything larger than a brain could think only a derivative sense – in the sense of having a special sort of part that thinks in the strictest sense. But isn’t it obvious that I think my thoughts in the strictest sense? Surely it couldn’t turn out that strictly speaking it is something other than me that thinks my thoughts, while I myself think only in some loose, second-rate sense. It follows that I could not be anything other than my brain. If the true thinkers of our thoughts – the beings that bear our mental properties in the most robust sense – are brains, then we must conclude, however reluctantly, that we are brains.
  3. We can summarize this reasoning like this:
    1. There is such a thing as my brain.
    2. My brain thinks my thoughts in the strictest sense.
    3. If my brain thinks my thoughts in the strictest sense, then anything else that thinks my thoughts does so only in the derivative sense of having a part that thinks in the strictest sense.
    4. If anything thinks my thoughts in the strictest sense, I do.
    It follows from these four premises that I am my brain. Those who think that we are not brains are committed to denying one of them. Let us consider the prospects for resisting the argument.
  4. Start with the fourth premise. Could it be that in the strictest sense I don’t think? Surely not. If I know anything at all, I know that I think – not merely that it is correct to say in ordinary, non-philosophical contexts that I think, but that I think in the strictest possible sense. At any rate I think my thoughts if anything does. It could hardly be the case that something does think my thoughts – some one thing – but I am not it. As Chisholm once said in another context:
      There is no reason whatever for supposing that I hope for rain only in virtue of the fact that some other thing hopes for rain – some stand-in that, strictly and philosophically, is not identical with me….If there are thus two things that now hope for rain, the one doing it on its own and the other such that its hoping is done for it by the thing that now happens to constitute it, then I am the former thing and not the latter thing. (1976: 10422)
  5. That is how it seems to me. But I needn’t insist on this point. Those who say that you and I – the beings we refer to with our personal pronouns – don’t think in the strictest sense disagree with me only about words. As I said in §1.423, if the beings that think our thoughts are different from the beings our personal pronouns and proper names denote, the important matter is the nature of the beings that think our thoughts.
  6. What about the first premise, that there is such a thing as my brain? This might seem hard to deny, unless we are idealists and deny the existence of material things generally. But some philosophers concede that there are particles "arranged cerebrally" within my skull, yet deny that those particles compose anything. There is nothing, they say, that has all those particles as parts, and all the parts of which overlap one or more of those particles. We encountered this sort of sparse ontology of material objects in the previous chapter, and we will return to it in §6.424 and §9.525.
  7. The third premise was that if my brain thinks, then anything else that thinks my thoughts does so only in the derivative sense of having a part that thinks. Though this looks right to me, I wouldn’t defend it to the death. It is not generally true that whenever an object has a part that is F, that object itself is F only in the sense of having an F part. If my foot is injured, then I am injured, and not, it seems, merely in a loose and derivative sense. It seems that I am injured in the same sense as my foot is: I really do have the property being injured, and not merely the property having an injured part (though I have that property too). Thinking might be like that: perhaps both my brain and I think in the strictest possible sense. If so, then the fact that my brain thinks provides no reason to suppose that I am a brain rather than, say, an organism, and the argument for the brain view fails.
  8. Even if this is right, though, it would offer little comfort to those who think that we are not brains. If I am something other than my brain, yet my brain thinks in the same strict sense as I do, then I am one of at least two beings thinking my thoughts. That makes it hard to see how I could have any reason to suppose that I am the non-brain that thinks my thoughts rather than the brain that thinks them. And we can hardly assert that we are not brains if we have no reason to suppose that this is the case. So even if the thinking-brain problem doesn’t show that we are brains, it may show that we have no reason to suppose that we’re not, and that would be trouble enough for anyone who rejects the brain view. We will return to this matter in §9.326.
  9. Those who deny that we are brains are most likely to say that our brains don’t think at all, contrary to premise 2. We use our brains to think, they will say, just as we use our eyes to see, but our brains no more think than our eyes see. Our brains do something necessary but insufficient for us to think. We think not by having thinking brains, but by having brains that do something other than thinking. Our brains may have neural structures that in some sense underlie mental properties, but they themselves lack those mental properties. We might call what the brain does “subthinking”, as opposed to genuine thinking.
  10. This attractive thought is surprisingly hard to defend. It is plain enough why our eyes don't see: the existence of open eyes in good working order in the presence of well-lit visible objects is not enough for seeing to take place. What the eyes do is only a small part of the activity of seeing. You need more than just eyes in order to see: you need something like a brain as well. But you don't seem to need anything more than a working brain in order to think. It is a philosophical commonplace that a brain removed from someone’s head and kept alive in a vat could think. (It may of course be false, but it is no less commonly held for all that.) Some doubt whether a brain that had always been in a vat could think, as it is unclear what could give its states any content – what could make them thoughts about Vienna, say, rather than about something else or about nothing at all – but this wouldn’t prevent a brain that was removed from someone’s head yesterday from thinking. And if a brain in a vat can think, why not a brain in a head?
  11. Some say that thinking is a biological property that only an organism could have. This is the opposite of Shoemaker’s claim (§2.527) that it belongs to the nature of mental properties that biological organisms cannot have them. If this is right, then our brains cannot think because they are not organisms. Now maybe a detached brain, kept alive in a vat, would actually be a biological organism: maybe you could make a human organism smaller by removing all of it except its brain, much as you can make a human organism smaller by amputating a finger (van Inwagen 1990a28: 172-181). That would make the suggestion that thinking can be a property only of organisms compatible with the claim that a brain in a vat could think. But the brain view is not that we are detached brains in vats, but that we are undetached brains in heads, and they are not organisms.
  12. If it were absolutely impossible for anything but a biological organism to think, it would be big news. It would rule out the possibility of artificial intelligence, or at any rate inorganic artificial intelligence. The only way to create artificial intelligence would be to create an artificial biological organism that was intelligent. Gods, angels, and immaterial thinking substances would be impossible. For that matter, the view that only organisms could think would rule out every account of what we are apart from animalism and the view that we don’t exist at all. That would make it a good deal easier to work out what we are! Until we see an impressive argument for this bold claim, we had best be on our guard.
  13. Others say that it belongs to the very idea of thinking that no thinker can be a proper part of another thinker. Thinking, in other words, is maximal29. Given that I think, and that my brain is a part of me, it follows that my brain cannot think – though a naked brain that wasn’t a part of a larger thinker might be able to think. A thing that was otherwise ideally suited to be a thinker might be unable to think merely because it had the wrong neighbors. I don’t myself find this idea at all plausible. I find it hard to believe that an embodied brain should be prevented from thinking by its fleshy surroundings, and that it would blossom instantly into a thinker if only the flesh were removed. In any case, the maximality of thought would not explain why our brains cannot think. It implies that if a whole human being can think, then its brain cannot. But it also implies that if the brain can think, the human being cannot. And by itself it provides no support for one starting point over the other.
  14. It may be that we don’t ordinarily call what brains do ‘thinking’. At any rate we commonly apply the word ‘thinking’ to things the size of human animals and we don’t (it seems) commonly apply it to brains. And someone might wonder whether it is really possible for us to be mistaken about this. Surely it couldn’t turn out that all the things we call ‘cats’ were really dogs and all the things we call ‘dogs’ were really cats. We can occasionally mistake a dog for a cat, but we couldn’t be thoroughly and systematically mistaken about which things are cats (assuming, at least, that there really are material things we call ‘cats’). If none of the furry domestic animals that purr and chase mice were cats, what would give the word ‘cat’ its meaning? This might suggest that we could not be thoroughly and systematically mistaken about which things are thinkers either. Don’t we mean by ‘thinking’ whatever it is that things the size of human animals do, and not whatever it is that brains do? What brains do may be very like thinking, but the way we speak shows that it does not fall within the extension of the word ‘thinking’ or the concept it expresses. Therefore, the argument would go, brains don’t think.
  15. But the concept of thinking, or the meaning of the word ‘thinking’, does not appear to have built into it any restriction on the size or shape of the things it applies to. The hypothesis that brains think and things the size of human animals don’t think does not appear to conflict with the meaning of ‘thinking’ in the way that the hypothesis that all the things we call ‘cats’ are really dogs and all the things we call ‘dogs’ are really cats appears to conflict with the meaning of ‘cat’. Many people have believed that the thinkers of our thoughts are immaterial souls rather than things the size of human animals. That view has its faults, but it doesn’t appear to be internally inconsistent on account of the meaning of the word ‘thinking’. It isn’t like saying that wholly unconscious beings might think. The same appears to go for the hypothesis that brains think. Nor can anyone argue that if things the size of human animals don’t think, we lose our grip on the meaning of the word ‘think’. We can say a good deal about what thinking involves – for instance that it has to do with inner representational states mediating between sensory stimulation and behavior – without saying anything about the intrinsic nature of the beings that engage in it. That, indeed, is the main insight of the functionalist theory of mind.
  16. Someone may doubt whether there is any hard fact of the matter as to whether brains think and human animals (or things the size of animals) merely have thinking brains as parts, or whether animals think and brains merely have neural properties that underlie thinking. Brains, the idea goes, have a property that is a good candidate for being called ‘thinking’, and animals have another property that is an equally good candidate for being called ‘thinking’, and that’s all there is to it. To ask whether the brain property or the animal property is really thinking, or whether both are, is to ask an unanswerable question.
  17. I don’t think this idea is forced on us, though it is certainly a possible view. It would imply that it is indeterminate which things think our thoughts: whether it is brains, or things the size of human animals, or perhaps things of intermediate size – heads, say. Given that we think our thoughts, it would follow that it is indeterminate which things we are. It would not be definitely true that we are brains, but not definitely false either; and likewise it would be neither definitely true nor definitely false that we are animals, or things the size of animals. It would therefore be indeterminate how big I am: whether I am six feet tall or small enough to fit into a hatbox. And it would be indeterminate whether anyone has ever seen me. We might call this rather untidy account of what we are the indeterminate-size view.
  18. The indeterminate-size view would appear to share most of the disadvantages of the brain view: troubles for the view that we are brains will tend equally to be troubles for the view that we are not definitely not brains. (We will come to these troubles presently.) So we gain little if we try to resist the claim that our brains think by arguing that it is indeterminate whether brains or whole organisms think.
  19. These reasons for supposing that our brains cannot think, or that they cannot think in the way that we can, are disappointing30. And the other ways of solving the thinking-brain problem aren’t very nice either. This is bad news for those who suppose that we are not brains, and good news for those, if there are any, who suppose that we are. For all that, I believe we can resist the claim that the true thinkers are brains, and thus solve the thinking-brain problem. First, though, I will consider objections to the brain view itself.
4.3 The brain view and our identity over time
  1. What is the case against the brain view? We have already noted its implication that we are far smaller than we thought and that we never really see anyone. It also appears to have repugnant implications about our identity over time. For example, it would make it impossible for anyone to have different brains at different times: you cannot exchange your old brain for a new one if you are your brain. If Shoemaker’s brain-state transfer machine were to copy the contents of your brain onto another brain while erasing the contents of the original brain (§1.731), then according to the brain view you would remain the original brain. The new brain (or the person whose brain it is) would of course believe that it was you, but it would be mistaken.
  2. The brain view would seem to make it impossible for us to become wholly inorganic. Many philosophers find it fairly obvious that if your parts were gradually replaced with inorganic prostheses that duplicated the function of the organic parts they replaced, so that the resulting being always continued to think as you did, you would gradually come to have more and more inorganic parts and fewer and fewer organic ones until you were entirely inorganic (Unger 1990: 122, Baker 2000: 10932). But it seems unlikely that any brain could become entirely inorganic. An organ that is now made up of living cells – that very thing – could not come to be made up entirely of metal and silicon.
  3. Our brains also appear to have different histories from our own. Physiologists tell us that our brains come into being early in our gestation, before arms and legs appear, and long before we are capable of having any mental properties. If they are right, then according to the brain view that is when we begin. That is, we begin well after conception, but long before we acquire any mental capacities.
  4. Or consider Einstein’s brain. A well-documented urban legend has it that Einstein’s brain is kept in a jar in Kansas, in the possession of the pathologist who did the autopsy after his death. Suppose the legend is true. It says that Einstein’s brain is now in a jar in Kansas. And the phrase ‘Einstein’s brain’ as it occurs in the legend appears to refer to the thing that was once the brain in Einstein’s head. If so, and if Einstein is the thing that was once (as we say) the brain in Einstein’s head, it follows that the thing in the jar in Kansas is Einstein himself.
  5. No one is going to be happy with all of this. The persistence of my brain does not appear to be either necessary or sufficient for me to persist. Now the derivation of these unwelcome consequences of the brain view relies on assumptions about what it takes for a brain to persist: that you cannot move a brain from one place to another merely by transmitting information, for instance, that a brain cannot become wholly inorganic, and that a brain may continue to exist after the death of the organism of which it was once a part. And although these assumptions look right to me, they are not beyond question.
  6. Perhaps a brain could become wholly inorganic. Perhaps it might one day be possible to point to a gadget made entirely of metal and silicon and say truly, “That machine was once made entirely of living tissue”, or, “That machine developed from a single cell.”
  7. Or maybe the thing in the jar in Kansas isn’t really Einstein’s brain. It was never in Einstein’s head. Strictly speaking it is merely a sort of fossil relic of the organ that filled the great man’s cranium: it is made of much of the same matter as that organ was when Einstein died, and has inherited many of its properties, much as a mineralized skeleton has many of the properties that a certain animal had when it died. It may be correct to describe this situation loosely by saying, as the legend does, that the thing is the jar “is Einstein’s brain”, just as the museum curator might call a fossil skeleton a tyrannosaurus. But for all that it may be no more strictly accurate to say that the thing in the jar was once in Einstein’s head than it would be to say that the skeleton in the museum was a fearsome predator 100 million years ago.
  8. Someone might even propose that the brain-state transfer machine doesn’t merely copy the psychological information from one brain onto another brain, but somehow moves a brain from one brain to another. Perhaps, despite appearances, there are really three brains in the story: the brain that the machine moves across the room, the brain left behind after the machine has done its work, and the brain onto which the first brain’s mental contents get copied. We might call them the travelling brain, the donor brain, and the recipient brain, respectively. The transfer procedure would presumably bring the donor brain into being (otherwise there would have been two brains in the same place before the transfer, the travelling brain and the donor brain – leaving us wondering why the machine moved one of them but not the other). No brain would first have and later lack the donor’s mental states. And the recipient brain, onto which the travelling brain’s mental contents are copied, would presumably cease thereby to exist, else there would be two brains in the same place after the transfer, the travelling brain and the recipient brain.
  9. Interesting though these suggestions are, I find them hard to believe. No sort of psychological continuity appears to be necessary and sufficient for a brain to persist, for the same reason as no sort of psychological continuity appears to be necessary and sufficient for an organism to persist (§2.733). If brains really did persist by virtue of psychological continuity, however, it would be unsurprising if the same were true of human animals, thus rebutting one of the main objections to animalism.
  10. A better response to these worries about identity over time (or at least to some of them) is to say that the relation between a person and her brain is something more subtle than numerical identity. Some say that each of us is not strictly a brain, but rather a functioning brain, or a brain insofar as it is in certain states – states of the sort that make someone capable of thought and consciousness34. Because we are functioning brains – brains in the right states – we could not come to be non-functioning brains, brains in the wrong states. So the brain in the jar in Kansas is not Einstein. It is Einstein’s brain, but not his functioning brain. And you and I were never rudimentary embryonic brains incapable of consciousness, even though our brains were. The suggestion has to be that a functioning brain is something numerically different from a brain, so that when a brain stops functioning in the relevant way it may persist in a nonfunctional state, but the functioning brain goes out of existence altogether. If your functioning brain were your brain, or if ‘functioning brain’ were simply what we call a brain when it is functioning, then the view that we are functioning brains would be no different from the view that we are brains, and would have the same consequences about our persistence.
  11. But what sort of thing is a functioning brain? How do functioning brains relate to brains – plain, ordinary brains that may or may not be functioning? (What sort of thing is a sleeping dog, and how does it relate to an ordinary dog that may or may not be asleep?) You might suggest that the functioning brain is something the brain constitutes, in the sense of §3.135, just when it functions in the appropriate way. Or perhaps a functioning brain is a temporal part of a brain: a part composed of those temporal parts of a brain that function appropriately. It is hard to see what else the claim that we are functioning brains could amount to, if it is to block the brain view’s unwelcome consequences about our identity over time. Someone who took this line might also say that in special circumstances one of us might be constituted by different brains at different times, or by a brain at one time and by an inorganic gadget at another time. Or the view might be that one of us could be composed of temporal parts of two different brains, or of earlier temporal parts of a brain and later temporal parts of something inorganic (see §5.736).
  12. But the view that we are things constituted by brains, or temporal parts of brains, is not the view that we are brains. It is not the brain view – though of course it resembles the brain view in obvious ways. These views may have an advantage over the brain view in that they agree better than the brain view does with what most of us are inclined to believe about our identity over time. But they also inherit the disadvantages of constitutionalism or the ontology of temporal parts. Moreover, they appear to face the same thinking-brain problem that arises for any other view according to which we are not brains: they make it hard to see how we can know that we are not the brains thinking our thoughts. They have no clear advantage over the view that we are constituted by or are temporal parts of whole organisms.
  13. Those who say that we are brains will have to say some surprising things about our identity over time – though perhaps no more surprising than what they have to say about our size.
4.4 Thinking-subject minimalism
  1. To my mind, the most serious problem for the brain view has nothing to do with its implications about our size or our identity over time. The real trouble is that it is unprincipled and that there is no good reason to believe it.
  2. If we are brains, it can only be because the brain is our organ of thought, and therefore the thing – the only thing – that thinks our thoughts in the strictest sense. (We could hardly be unthinking brains.) The reason why no one ever supposed that we might be livers or stomachs is that no one ever took the liver or the stomach to be our organ of thought. But what makes the brain our organ of thought? That is, why should the things that think our thoughts in the strictest sense be brains, and not, say, entire organisms?
  3. Presumably the reason is that the parts of a thinker must all be in some sense directly involved in its thinking. Things larger than brains cannot think, except in the derivative sense of having a thinking part, because they have parts not directly involved in thinking. Yet not just any object, all the parts of which are directly involved in a being’s thinking, is a genuine thinker. No individual brain cell thinks, even if all its parts are directly involved in thinking. That’s because it doesn’t produce thought on its own: for any cell that is directly involved in my mental activity, many other cells are involved in it in an equally direct way.
  4. So the brain view appears to be based on the principle is that something is a part of a thinker – a genuine thinker, something that thinks in the strictest sense – if and only if it is directly involved in that thinker’s thought, or mental life generally:
      If x thinks in the strictest sense at a time t, then y is a part, at t, of x if and only if y is directly involved in x’s thinking at t.
    Call this thinking-subject minimalism. It is hard to see how the brain view could be true unless something like this is right. Otherwise it would be completely arbitrary to say that we are brains.
  5. Thinking-subject minimalism is not very plausible. We seem to have parts not directly involved in our thinking: fingers, for instance. Suppose a certain part of your brain became inactive, so that it was no longer directly involved in your mental goings-on. Minimalism implies that this would make you a bit smaller and lighter – but losing a finger wouldn’t.
  6. Still, it might have theoretical virtues. Consider the fact that there appear to be many candidates, of varying sizes, for being me: beings that seem to have all the equipment they need to think, and within which my mental activity takes place. There is my brain, and various parts of my brain, such as my cerebral hemispheres. There are also many candidates larger than my brain: my head, my upper half, this entire human organism, and so on. For that matter, we might ask why I am not something bigger still, which has this organism as a proper part. If there really are all these beings, what could prevent them all from thinking my thoughts? And if they do all think my thoughts, how could I ever know which one I am? How could I ever know how big I am – whether I am the size of half a brain or the size of a planet? Thinking subject minimalism might seem to solve this problem, by ruling out most of the candidates for being me on the grounds that they are either too big or too small to be genuine subjects of my thinking: too big because they have parts not directly involved in my thinking, or too small because not all the things directly involved in my thinking are parts of them. Then I could work out what I am by discovering which things are directly involved in my mental states and activities37.
  7. So minimalism might tell us which of the many things that look like thinkers of our thoughts really do think them, thereby telling us which things we are. It would also appear to tell us what determines our boundaries, and what makes things parts of us – something we wanted an account of what we are to provide. Animalism tells us that we extend as far as our biological lives extend, because that is what determines the boundaries of a living organism (§2.238). Minimalism seems to tell us that we extend as far as our mental states and processes extend, because that is what determines the boundaries of a thinking being. Not every view about what we are tells us what fixes our boundaries: we noted in §3.639 that the constitution view doesn’t.
  8. I have serious doubts about this story, however. Thinking-subject minimalism does not in fact tell us what beings think our thoughts. Nor does it tell us how big we are, or what determines our boundaries – even supposing that we know which particles are directly involved in which thoughts. Suppose for the sake of argument that all and only the parts of my brain are directly involved in my mental states and activities. Or rather, to avoid assuming the point at issue, suppose that all and only the parts of my brain are directly involved in those mental states and activities I think of as mine, or those that any part of this organism is directly involved in. Suppose further that every mental state must have a subject. Would minimalism imply, in that case, that my brain (or at any rate something the size of my brain) is the subject of my thoughts, and therefore what I am?
  9. No. Minimalism would not even imply that any thinking being is the size of my brain, let alone that I am. Suppose that one part of my brain is directly involved in some of those mental states and activities I think of as mine while another part, perhaps overlapping the first, is directly involved in the rest of them. Call them part one and part two, and call the mental states and activities they are directly involved in the part-one thoughts and the part-two thoughts, respectively. And suppose that every part of my brain overlaps part one or part two. (This story is not meant to be fanciful: it doesn’t require me to suffer from any sort of mental disunity.) Now it may be that both part one and part two are parts of me, in which case both the part-one thoughts and the part-two thoughts will be my thoughts, just as we should expect. But minimalism is also consistent with the view that the part-one thoughts belong to part one, the part-two thoughts belong to part two, and no being is the subject of both the part-one and the part-two thoughts. For all minimalism says, there may be just one thinker here – my entire brain – or there may be two – part one and part two. Nor does it rule out the possibility that the thoughts I think of as mine are divided among more than two thinkers. Minimalism will tell us the boundaries of a thinker only if we already know which thoughts belong to that thinker (as well as which particles are directly involved in those thoughts). But it doesn’t tell us which thinkers there are or what thoughts belong to a given thinker. And so it doesn’t tell us what our boundaries are. It doesn’t tell me whether I am my brain, or part one, or part two, or something else.
  10. Now we could rectify this by combining thinking-subject minimalism with a principle that assigns thoughts to thinkers: a principle that would tell us, for instance, whether the part-one thoughts and the part-two thoughts all belong to the same thinker or whether the part-one thoughts belong to one thinker and the part-two thoughts belong to another. That is, we need an account of when mental states or properties belong to the same thinker and when they belong to different ones.
  11. The only such account that I know of is the psychological individuation principle of §2.940. This was the idea that mental states belong to the same thinker if and only if they are causally unified in the right way: if and only if they are disposed to interact with one another, and with no other mental states, in the way that is characteristic of mental states. Your desires tend to interact with your beliefs to produce action: roughly, your desire for something tends to cause you to act in ways that you believe will satisfy that desire, unless you have stronger competing desires. Your desires don’t interact in that way with my beliefs. With any luck it will turn out that all and only the mental states realized in your brain are unified in this way. The psychological individuation principle will then imply that the mental states realized there, but no proper subset of them, are the thoughts of a single thinker; and that thinker will of course be you (who else?). It will rule out the possibility that some of the mental states realized in your brain might belong to one thinker while others belong to another thinker. Putting this together with thinking-subject minimalism and our assumption that all and only parts of your brain are directly involved in the mental states realized in your animal body, we get the conclusion that you are your brain (or at any rate something the size of your brain). We will see in §6.441, however, that the psychological individuation principle fits badly with the brain view: it seems to imply that we are bundles of mental states, and not material things at all.
4.5 Direct involvement
  1. Whether or not thinking-subject minimalism can tell us where our boundaries lie, there are grounds for suspicion about the principle itself. One worry is whether the principle has any real content. The very idea of “direct involvement in a being’s thinking” is suspiciously elusive.
  2. One way to see this is to try applying the principle. What should we expect the true thinkers of our thoughts to be, according to minimalism? What thing is it that is composed of all the things directly involved in my thinking? (Let us assume that all the mental states I think of as mine really are mine, and are not divided among several thinkers.) The brain view takes for granted that it is nothing larger than my brain: nothing outside my brain is directly involved in my thinking. This is questionable (Schechtman 199742). Take visual experience: aren’t your eyes directly involved in your visual experience? You can’t have visual experience without eyes, or at least something like eyes. But if your eyes are directly involved in your visual experience, then according to minimalism they are parts of you and you are larger than your brain.
  3. Even if nothing outside the brain is directly involved in my thinking, I am unlikely to be my brain. According to thinking-subject minimalism, brains will be too big to be genuine thinkers for the same reason as whole organisms are too big. The thing anatomy books call “the brain” has many parts that appear to be no more directly involved in producing thought than the heart is. Blood vessels, for instance: if the thing that pumps the blood to the brain isn’t directly involved in thinking, how can the vessels that distribute the blood within the brain be any different? Minimalism appears to provide no reason at all to suppose that we are brains. If we are anything smaller than whole organisms, we must be parts of brains.
  4. But which parts? What parts of my brain are directly involved in my thinking? Its nerve cells, surely? Yet even that looks doubtful. No one knows exactly how nerve cells produce thought and experience, but it appears to have something to do with electrical and chemical signals that they store and communicate to other nerve cells. And a good deal of what goes on within a nerve cell appears to be no more directly involved in this storage and transmission of information than the activities of the heart and other vital organs are. Many parts of a nerve cell are involved in acquiring nutrients or in expelling waste, or in maintenance and repair, or in maintaining the cell’s boundary. They don’t seem to be directly involved in whatever it is that gives rise to thought. Minimalism seems to imply that not even the whole of any nerve cell could be a part of a thinker.
  5. This ought to make minimalists uneasy. If neither the whole of the brain nor even the whole of any nerve cell within the brain is directly involved in thinking, what is directly involved? This unease can only grow if we think about how to distinguish in a principled way between direct involvement in a being’s thinking and indirect involvement. The point has nothing to do with thinking in particular. Imagine a factory that makes knives – an old-fashioned factory where the work is done mainly by hand, with no robots. All the factory workers are involved in some way in the manufacture of knives. Some deliver the steel; others beat it with hammers, sharpen the blades, stoke the fires, repair the tools, sweep the floors, run the canteen, keep the accounts; and so on. Which workers are directly involved in making knives, and which only indirectly? I don’t think we can say. There may be some sense in the idea that those who actually work the steel are more directly involved in the making of knives than those who sweep the floors. But is there really an absolute distinction – even an imprecise one – between those who are directly involved in making knives and those who are only indirectly involved? We could of course draw such a distinction for legal purposes – in order to work out insurance costs, say. But wouldn’t any such distinction be artificial?
  6. Or think of walking. Which parts of a human being – which atoms – are directly involved in his walking? Those in his legs, surely. But are all the atoms in his legs directly involved in his walking? Suppose he has excess water in his legs owing to poor circulation, which hinders his walking. Are the atoms making up the excess water directly involved in his walking? (And what could determine which molecules are “excess”, and which belong there?) What about his arms, or spinal cord, or heart? Is their involvement in his walking direct or indirect? Again, although we may, perhaps, be able to say which parts of a human being are more directly involved in his walking than others, there seems to be no principled way of saying which are directly involved and which are not. This is not due to ignorance of the mechanics of walking: we should be just as baffled if we knew all that. Nor is the problem that the boundary between the parts of a human being that are directly involved in his walking and those only indirectly involved or not involved at all is indefinite, so that there are borderline cases that we cannot confidently classify either as “directly involved” or as “not directly involved”. Asking which parts are directly involved and which aren’t is like asking which rivers are long and which are not long. I see no reason to suppose that direct involvement in a being’s thinking is any different from direct involvement in someone’s walking or from direct involvement in making knives. Any decision about which are directly involved in its thinking is bound to be arbitrary.
  7. I don’t mean to say that there is no truth at all in the claim that the brain, and not the liver or the stomach, is the organ of thought. Many parts of the brain are probably more directly involved in thinking than any other parts of the organism, just as those who beat the metal are more directly involved in making knives than those who sweep the factory floor. And anatomists distinguish an organ called the brain from the rest of the organism because what they call the brain contrasts noticeably with its surroundings (though its boundaries are not so neat as the anatomy books suggest). That is why we call the brain the organ of thought. But this is only a loose description. A great deal goes on within the brain besides thinking, and a great deal that goes on outside the brain contributes vitally to thinking. To say that the brain, or some part of the brain, is what does our thinking is no more strictly accurate than saying that the people who beat the metal are the ones who make the knives.
  8. If this is right, thinking-subject minimalism has very little meaning. Saying that all the parts of a genuine thinker must be directly involved in its thinking is like saying that all the parts of a genuine walker must be directly involved in its walking. Because there is no saying, even roughly, which things are directly involved in thinking, there is no saying even roughly which things, according to minimalism, are the parts of a thinker. Or if there is a non-arbitrary way of saying which things are involved in a human being’s thinking, it is likely to be that they are all and only the parts of the organism. The organism has a non-arbitrary boundary, and it would appear to be the largest thing whose behavior we can explain in terms of its thinking. Though there may be a real sense in which thinking is something an organism does, there seems to be no real sense in which thinking is something a brain does43.
4.6 Homunculism
  1. The view that we are brains is based on the idea that the parts of a genuine thinker are just those that are directly involved in its mental activity: thinking-subject minimalism. I have argued that there is no principled way of saying, even approximately, which things are directly involved in a being’s thinking and which are not. This leaves minimalism with no content, and the brain view without support.
  2. I have another worry about minimalism. It arises even if we can say which things are directly involved in mental activity and which are not. Imagine that we know what direct involvement in mental activity is. Now: why suppose that the parts of a thinking being must be just those things that are directly involved in its mental activity? Why can’t a thinker – something that thinks in the strictest sense – have parts that aren’t directly involved in its thinking? In other words, why accept thinking-subject minimalism?
  3. Minimalism is unsatisfying in isolation. If it is true, it ought to be true because it is an instance of some more general principle about the relation between a thing’s activities and its parts. It ought to be true because any being engaged in any sort of activity (in the strictest sense, not merely in the sense of having a part that engages in that activity) is composed entirely of things directly involved in that activity. We shouldn’t expect this to apply only to mental activity. Thinking-subject minimalism ought to be true because something like this is true:
      If x engages (in the strictest sense) in states or activities of kind K at time t, then y is a part, at t, of x if and only if y is directly involved in x’s K states or activities at t.
    We might call this general activity minimalism.
  4. What general activity minimalism means depends on what counts as a sort or kind of activity, or on what types of activity the principle applies to. If mental activity in general is such a kind, then general activity minimalism entails thinking-subject minimalism: it entails that whatever engages in mental activity generally is composed of things directly involved in that activity. That would support the brain view. On the other hand, the principle might apply to specific types of mental activity, such as seeing or remembering or philosophizing. It might entail that whatever sees must be made up entirely of things directly involved in its seeing. That is, general activity minimalism might entail not the “general” thinking-subject minimalism we have been discussing up to now, but what we might call specific thinking-subject minimalism:
      If x engages in mental activity of any specific kind at t, then y is a part, at t, of x if and only if y is directly involved in x’s mental activity of that kind at t.
    General activity minimalism cannot entail both thinking-subject minimalism and specific thinking-subject minimalism, for they are inconsistent (unless general activity minimalism is itself inconsistent, anyway).
  5. If thinking-subject minimalism supports the brain view, specific thinking-subject minimalism has implications that make the brain view look tame. If the brain and nothing outside it is directly involved in our mental activity, then different parts of the brain are directly involved in different sorts of mental activity. One part of the brain is directly involved in your visual perception; another part is directly involved when you try to remember someone’s name; and so on. Specific minimalism appears to imply that the true subject of your current visual perception is the largest part of your brain that is now directly involved in your seeing: your current vision module, we might call it. And the true subject of your current philosophical thinking would be the largest part of your brain that is now directly involved in your philosophical thinking: your philosophy module. (Here we have to pretend that it is possible to say what part of your brain is directly involved in your seeing or your philosophizing. But if we could say what part of a human organism is directly involved in mental activity generally, this ought to be possible.)
  6. If all of this makes sense, it is probably a safe bet that your vision module is not the same as your philosophy module. They may overlap, but they won’t coincide exactly. It follows that no genuine philosopher – no being that does philosophy in the strictest sense – is a genuine “seer”. One being now sees the book before you. Another being understands it. The one that sees the book does not understand a word of it, and the one that understands it sees nothing. Nothing both sees and does philosophy – not in the strictest sense, anyway. All true philosophers are blind. Reading, which involves both seeing and understanding, is an activity that nothing does, except in the derivative sense of having one part that sees and another part that understands. It is always a cooperative activity, like playing a duet.
  7. More generally, given what we know about the division of labor in the brain, specific minimalism would make it unlikely that any being ever engages in more than one type of psychological task. Some see, some hear, some remember, some reason; but nothing does all these things, or even any two of them. For that matter, no one being is likely to engage in both short-term and long-term memory, or to reason about both geography and history. What we take to be a single person with general mental abilities is in reality a vast colony of numerically different specialists, each of which performs only a single sort of mental task. Call this view homunculism.
  8. It is hard to see how homunculism could be true. Suppose I run a finger over the arm of my chair. I feel its rough texture and hear the scratchy sound it makes. In order to do this, I must both feel and hear. But homunculism implies that nothing both feels and hears. I should have thought it was utterly obvious that I do both feel and hear. For that matter, homunculism implies that nothing both hears and is reflectively aware that it hears: is unlikely, anyway, that the atoms directly involved in hearing are all and only the directly involved in being aware that one is hearing. Homunculism looks incompatible with the most basic sort of self-knowledge (Chisholm 1981: 87-8844).
  9. You might suggest that the being that thinks, “I both feel and hear”, needn’t itself feel or hear, but could be aware of another being’s feeling and a third being’s hearing as if they were his own. Then it might appear to me that I feel and hear even if I neither feel nor hear in reality. This would mean that a sensation or other mental state might appear to me for all the world to be mine even though it wasn’t. I could be aware of a searing pain down my left side that seemed to me just as if it were my own pain, even though in fact it was not mine but someone else’s. I might be aware of both a searing pain down my left side and a searing pain down my right side. The pains might be indistinguishable to me. For all I could ever know “from the inside”, the pain in my left side might be mine while the pain in my right side was someone else’s; or it could be the other way round; or it could be that neither was mine. I could never know, by introspection, which mental states were mine and which belonged to other beings. That, surely, is absurd.
  10. Or consider what sort of beings you and I might be if homunculism were true. There would be many candidates, so to speak, for being me. There would be the being that does my philosophical thinking, or at any rate the philosophical thinking I take to be mine. (Or maybe different beings would do different kinds of philosophical thinking.) There would be the being that composes my written sentences, and the being that tastes my food. For every sort of mental activity that I in some sense engage in, there would be a different being – the genuine subject of that activity – that is a candidate for being me. But what thing should I be?
  11. I might be one of the candidates. Which one? Perhaps the one asking the question: if I know anything, do I not know that I am now wondering what I am? It would follow, given homunculism, that I am not the author of this book, for the atoms now directly involved in my wondering what I am are unlikely to be precisely the atoms directly involved in my writing. Now according to homunculism this book is unlikely to have any one author; it is almost certainly a collaborative effort. But if I am now wondering what I am, then I am probably not any of this book’s authors. It is doubtful even whether I wrote this book in the sense of having one of its authors as a part: who’s to say whether any of the authors within my brain is a part of the being now wondering what I am? More generally, few of the mental states I think of as mine would really be mine. Most of them would belong to beings that are not even parts of me.
  12. Or perhaps I am not definitely any of the candidates; rather, when I say ‘I’ or ‘Olson’ I refer ambiguously to each of them. In that case it is presumably neither definitely true nor definitely false that I am the author (or an author) of this book, for although some of the referents of my ‘I’ were involved in writing it, many more were not. Nor will it ever be definitely true that I am feeling hungry, or thinking about Vienna, or in any other mental state.
  13. Or I might be the thing composed of all the candidates. In that case it might be definitely true that I wrote this book, at least in the sense that all its authors are parts of me. But it would follow from this that I am probably not the true subject of any of my mental states or activities: I should reason, perceive, and remember only in the sense of having a part that reasons, a part that perceives, and a part that remembers. This would deprive the brain view of any attraction it may have had. There is no point in supposing that we are brains that think only in the sense of having thinking parts. If we have to accept that we think only in a derivative sense, we may as well say that we are whole organisms.
  14. Homunculism is a hard view to like. Suppose it is false. Where does that leave the brain view? Well, the brain view assumes that whatever engages in mental activity generally is composed of just those things that are directly involved in its mental activity. But again, why suppose that? Why not suppose instead that whatever engages in some specific sort of mental activity, such as seeing, is composed of just those things directly involved in that specific activity? That leads to homunculism. Does anything support the brain view that does not equally support homunculism? (The other arguments for the brain view that we considered in §4.145 would support homunculism as much as they support the brain view.) In other words, is there any reason to suppose that thinking-subject minimalism is true rather than specific thinking-subject minimalism?
  15. Call an activity such that whatever engages in it in the strictest sense must be composed of just those things directly involved in its engaging in that activity a minimalistic activity. Thinking-subject minimalism says that thinking or mentality in general is minimalistic. Specific minimalism says that specific types of thinking, such as remembering, are minimalistic. (Given how the brain works, thinking in general and remembering will not both be minimalistic.) Which is it? Is thinking in general minimalistic, or are specific types of thinking minimalistic? Or neither? What determines which activities are minimalistic and which are not? I have never seen an answer to these questions. Without such an answer, though, it is hard to see how anyone could be warranted in taking thinking in general to be minimalistic. And because the brain view depends on that claim, it too is unwarranted.
  16. Someone might use the psychological individuation principle (§2.946) to argue that thinking in general is minimalistic while specific types of thinking are not. The principle says that particular mental states belong to the same subject if and only if they are causally unified with each other, and with no other states, in a certain way. Your seeing and your philosophizing are clearly unified in that way; so according to the principle they must belong to the same thinker. But there couldn’t be a being that was the subject of your seeing alone – a being that none of the other mental states we attribute to you belonged to – for although its mental states would be unified with each other in the right way, they would be unified in that way with many other states as well. That would be an argument against specific thinking-subject minimalism and homunculism, but not against general thinking-subject minimalism and the brain view. Howoever, for reasons we will come to in §6.447, the psychological individuation principle appears to be incompatible with our being brains.
  17. To sum up: The main reason to suppose that we are brains is the idea that our brains are the true thinkers of our thoughts. That in turn is based on the claim that every part of a genuine thinker must be somehow directly involved in its thinking. But there appears to be no such thing as direct involvement in a being’s thinking. And even if there is, there is no evident reason to stop at thinking: why suppose that every part of a genuine thinker must be directly involved in its thinking, rather than that every part of a genuine seer must be directly involved in its seeing? Whatever supports the brain view appears equally to support the absurd idea that genuine thinkers are specialists capable of performing only a single mental task. So the brain is unprincipled as well as implausible.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Brains")

Footnote 9:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 10:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 11:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 12: Footnote 20: Footnote 21: Footnote 22: Footnote 28: Footnote 29:
  • Burke 2003: 112-113. More precisely, Burke’s view is that if x thinks, then no proper part of x whose particles would come to compose x if the rest of x’s particles were annihilated can think. The complication is designed to make the maximality of thought compatible with the possibility of a thinker’s being composed of many smaller thinkers in the way that a human organism is composed of cells. I will ignore it in the sequel.
  • See "Burke (Michael) - Is My Head a Person?".
Footnote 30:
  • Burke 2003 gives further reasons, which I find equally unpersuasive. Logical behaviorists might argue that brains don’t think because they have no observable behavior; but I doubt whether there are any logical behaviorists nowadays.
  • See "Burke (Michael) - Is My Head a Person?".
Footnote 32: Footnote 34: Footnote 37: Footnote 42:
  • Sadly, I don’t have free access to this paper.
  • The abstract is ‘It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that the mind is located in the brain. Although there have been some challenges to this view, it has remained mainstream outside of a few specialized discussions, and plays a prominent role in a wide variety of philosophical arguments. It is further assumed that the source of this view is empirical. I argue it is not. Empirical discoveries show conclusively that the brain is the central organ of mental life, but do not show that it is the mind's location. The data are just as compatible with a view where mentality is a human capacity on the model of circulation or respiration, with the brain playing the same kind of role as the heart or lungs. The standard conception of the brain as the locus of mind stems, I claim, from the imposition of a Cartesian conception of the self on a materialist ontology. Recognizing that the empirical data do not justify such a move casts doubt on the foundations of a number of philosophical discussions and raises new questions about the nature of the psychological subject.’.
Footnote 43:
  • TT Note: The book has a long footnote here.
Footnote 44:


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Temporal Parts"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 5 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File11.

Write-up12 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Temporal Parts

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 5, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Temporal Parts", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online13 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book14.
  • The text differs slightly from the book.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there15.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
Full Text
  1. Four-dimensional hunks of matter16
  2. Temporary intrinsics17
  3. Lumps and statues18
  4. The problem of modal incompatibility19
  5. Puzzles of personal identity20
  6. Thinking animals and other worries21
  7. Thinking stages22
  8. The stage view23
5.1 Four-dimensional hunks of matter
  1. Having considered the view that we are spatial parts of human animals, let us turn now to the idea that we are temporal parts of animals. The idea that animals have temporal parts is not easy to understand. The notion of a temporal part is inherently confusing. Even professional philosophers frequently get it wrong. For numerous reasons it is foreign to our ordinary ways of thinking. Learning to convert ordinary thoughts about persisting things into the ontology of temporal parts is a bit like learning a foreign language – only harder, because the dictionaries and grammar books are incomplete. I will try to explain what it means to say that we are temporal parts of animals, and to explore some of its consequences. Despite my efforts to do this in non-technical terms, however, I fear that some of what I am going to say will sound like Greek24.
  2. You and I are extended in space. (We appear to be, anyway, though a few philosophers disagree. Suppose we are.) We seem to be extended in space by having different parts – spatial parts – located in different places. For instance, you are now both above and below the seat of your chair: partly above it and partly below. That is because you have a part, or several parts, that are above the seat of your chair – wholly above it – and another part, or several parts, that are entirely below it. You fill up space by having parts spread out across it. Whether you have a different part for every bit of space you partly fill may be contentious (it is what van Inwagen (198125) has called the doctrine of arbitrary undetached parts); but it seems clear that you have a great many spatial parts.
  3. We also persist through time. (We appear to, anyway. Suppose we do.) Some philosophers think that we relate to time in much the same way as we relate to space. You have a location in time, just as you have a location in space. And just as you are extended in space, you are also extended in time: most of us extend for a bit less than two meters in space and for a bit less than a century in time. You are extended in time by having temporal parts spread out across time. Just as you are in different places by having different spatial parts located entirely in those places, the idea goes, you are at different times by having different temporal parts entirely located at those times. If you exist both in 2000 and in 2010, that is because you are partly in 2000 and partly in 2010. In other words, you have a temporal part located in 2000 – located wholly during that year – and another temporal part entirely located in 2010. Whether you have a different temporal part for every bit of time you partly fill may be contentious; in any case you have a great many temporal parts. Moreover, every part of you shares a part with one or more of your temporal parts: you are composed of temporal parts.
  4. We all know what spatial parts are. They are just ordinary parts of spatial objects. If we know what ‘part’ means, we know that hands (if there are such things as hands) are parts of human beings. But what are temporal parts? A temporal part of a thing is supposed to be a part of it that incorporates “all of that thing” for as long as the part exists. A temporal part of you is spatially just as big as you are, and located just where you are, while it exists. More precisely, a temporal part of you is a part of you that overlaps all of your parts that exist when that part exists (where overlapping means sharing a part). If something is a temporal part of you, then any part of you that doesn’t overlap that thing will exist only at times when that thing doesn’t exist. So:
      x is a temporal part of y =df x is a part of y, and every part of y that does not overlap x exists only at times when x does not exist.
    Your nose may be a part of you, but it is not a temporal part, for it doesn’t overlap all of your parts that exist when it does. You have parts that exist when your nose does without overlapping it: your feet, for instance. Your nose doesn’t incorporate all of you while it exists: it’s too small to be a temporal part of you. But suppose there is such a thing as your first half. It would be just like you, apart from lasting half as long. It would walk and talk and study philosophy. It would take up all of you for as long as it existed. Any part of you that didn’t overlap it – your final hour, say, or a certain wisp of grey hair – would exist only at times when your first half didn’t exist. Suppose, if you can, that this thing would be a part of you. Then it would be a temporal part of you26.
  5. We ordinarily think of events, such as games – particular matches that occur at particular times and places – as being made up of briefer events or phases, and these seem to be temporal parts of those longer events. A baseball game takes up time by having different parts located at different times. It starts at six and is still going on at ten past seven insofar as one part of it – the first inning, say – starts at six, and another part of it – the third inning – is going on at ten past seven. And each inning takes up “all of the game” while it is going on: any part of the game that doesn’t overlap its third inning exists, or occurs, only when the third inning is not going on.
  6. It also seems that any temporary property we attribute to the game at a particular time is a property that some temporal part of the game occurring at that time has without temporal qualification: the game is dull between six and twenty past because the first inning is dull – not dull at that time, but just plain dull – and exciting at ten past seven because the third inning is exciting. We will return to this important point in the next section.
  7. Perhaps there is a long-running event consisting of everything you ever do and all that ever happens within your boundaries: your career or history. Its temporal parts or phases include your birth, your first day at school, your adolescence, and your reading of this book. The view I want to consider is that you have temporal parts just as your history does. Most of those who take this view say that there is a temporal part of you coinciding with every portion of your history: a part for every time, instantaneous or extended, continuous or discrete, when you exist. So you have an infant-sized temporal part that extends from your birth until your first birthday, a part that extends from the midpoint of your history until your demise, a part that exists throughout June and August 2010 and at no other times, and many more. In fact you and your career may be so similar, on this view, as to be same thing: you might be your history (Quine 1960: 17127).
  8. This view is often put by saying that we are "four-dimensional objects", because it says that we are extended in one dimension of time as well as the three dimensions of space (if that is how many spatial dimensions there are). Others put it by saying that we are "space-time worms", because space-time diagrams are typically drawn in a way that makes a person's spatial extent small compared with her temporal extent: six feet looks small on most diagrams compared with 80 years. These descriptions can be misleading. The view that we are space-time worms does not imply that units of time can be converted into units of space – so many seconds to the meter – so that we are literally longer in time than we are in space. We’re not really worm-shaped. And the claim that we are “four-dimensional” by being extended in time is not strictly the same as the view that we are composed of temporal parts, for it may be that we are extended in time and yet lack temporal parts (Mellor 1998: 8628). More generally, the name ‘four-dimensionalism’ has been given to a wide variety of views that have nothing to do with temporal parts. It might be better to call the view that all persisting objects are composed of many temporal parts simply ‘the ontology of temporal parts’. However, I will sometimes follow custom and call it four-dimensionalism. I will call the view that we in particular are composed of many temporal parts the temporal-parts view.
  9. Supposing that we exist and are located in time, there are two broad alternatives to the temporal-parts view. One is that we don’t persist at all: what we think of as a single persisting person is really just one momentary person followed immediately by a similar but numerically different momentary person, followed by another, and so on. If we follow the jargon and call momentary temporal parts of things stages, the view is that we are stages rather than worms. We will come to that view in §5.829. The other alternative is that we persist through time but have no temporal parts. (Or at least no proper temporal parts – no temporal parts other than ourselves. The definition of ‘temporal part’ appears to make everything located in time a temporal part of itself.) We don’t fill up time by having temporal parts spread out across it. There is no such thing as your first half.
  10. By itself, the temporal-parts view says little about what we are: only that we are persisting concrete objects composed of temporal parts. It leaves entirely open what sort of four-dimensional objects we are. For instance it is compatible with our being bundles of mental states or even immaterial substances. But most advocates of the temporal-parts view say that we are material objects – "four-dimensional hunks of matter", as Heller (199030) puts it. We might be animals, or brains; but the more common view is that we are proper temporal parts of animals (see §5.631). Most of what I will say about the temporal-parts view applies equally to all of these variants.
  11. Those who think that we have temporal parts usually accept four-dimensionalism generally: they think that all persisting things are composed of temporal parts. Most say that nothing could persist without having temporal parts: for a thing to exist at different times is just for it to have different temporal parts located at those times. A number of important arguments support the ontology of temporal parts (usefully surveyed in Sider 2001b32). Two of them are of particular interest for the question of what we are, and are the subjects of the next two sections.
5.2 Temporary intrinsics
  1. The most common argument for four-dimensionalism is that it offers the best solution to something called the problem of temporary intrinsics or problem of change (Lewis 1986: 202- 204, Sider 2001: 92-9833). Intrinsic properties are roughly those a thing has by virtue of the way it is in itself: those it would share with any duplicate of itself. (This is not a satisfactory definition. Intrinsicness is notoriously hard to define. But it will do for present purposes.) Extrinsic properties – those that are not intrinsic – are those a thing has by virtue of the way it relates to things outside itself. Shape is an intrinsic property; being an uncle and being north of the equator are extrinsic. The argument is highly abstract, but it is essential to understanding the ontology of temporal parts (Olson 2006c34).
  2. I am now sitting down: I have a bent shape. An hour ago I was standing: I was straight, and not bent. So I am bent, and yet not bent: somehow I both have and lack the intrinsic property of being bent. The same goes whenever something has any intrinsic property temporarily. For that matter, it goes for temporary extrinsic properties: I am now an uncle; five years ago I wasn't; so somehow I both am and am not an uncle. Now it is plain enough that nothing can literally be both bent and not bent. Logic ensures that nothing can both have and lack the same property, or have both that property and its complement. Yet I clearly relate in some way to both the property of being bent and the property of being not bent. What way is it? The problem of temporary intrinsics is to answer this question.
  3. The answer might seem obvious. I am bent now, and not bent an hour ago. For a thing to be bent is for it to be bent at some particular time. If someone is bent, we can always ask when he is bent; and there will always be an answer, even if it is that he always was and always will be bent. A persisting thing has its properties at particular times, and if something has incompatible properties such as bentness and straightness it must have them each at a different time. That, as Aristotle said, is what time is for. the obviousness of this reply might even lead us to wonder whether there is really any problem of temporary intrinsics to be solved. Temporary properties seem problematic, the idea would go, only if we infer from my being bent at some particular time that I am just plain bent, without any temporal qualification at all, and if we likewise infer from my not being bent at some time that I am just plain not bent. But why should that follow? No one ever thought that deleting temporal qualifications was a valid mode of inference, like deleting double negations. And if we don’t commit that fallacy, where is the problem of change?
  4. But four-dimensionalists are not satisfied with this reply. Even if it is right that to be bent is to be bent at a particular time, they say, we need to explain what it is for something to be bent at a time, as opposed to being just plain bent. How does the temporal qualification – my being bent now – block the inference to my being bent simpliciter? If my relation to the properties of bentness and straightness is not simply having, how do I relate to them?
  5. The earlier thought that things don’t just have temporary properties like bentness, but have them at times might suggest that the temporal qualification is built into the having relation. So having or instantiating is a three-place relation involving an object, a property, and a time (or a four-place relation involving two objects, a two-place relation, and a time, or the like). Some things may have some properties without temporal qualification – maybe the number 7 is odd simpliciter – but that is another story.
  6. Four-dimensionalists object that this makes intrinsic properties extrinsic. The proposal is that being bent involves a relation not only to a property, but also to a time. For a thing to be bent, it says, is for it to relate in a certain way to something outside it – a time. Whether a thing is bent or straight depends on how it relates to times, just as whether someone is an uncle depends on how he relates to other people. It follows, the complaint goes, that nothing could be bent in itself: “In itself, considered apart from its relations to other things,” Lewis complains, a thing would have “no shape at all” (1986: 20435). Shape would therefore not be an intrinsic property. More generally, no property could be both temporary and intrinsic, for a property could be had temporarily only if that having were relative to a time in a way that would make the property extrinsic. But surely we know that shape is both temporary and intrinsic.
  7. Whatever the merits of this reasoning may be, it has an important consequence: things must have their intrinsic properties timelessly, and not relative to times. Whatever has bentness must be just plain bent, without temporal qualification; otherwise its being bent would involve a relation to a time, making bentness extrinsic. That, the idea goes, is part of the nature of intrinsicness.
  8. Four-dimensionalists solve the problem of temporary intrinsics in a way that respects this consequence. They say that things have different properties at different times by having different temporal parts, located at those times, that have the properties without temporal qualification. I am bent now insofar as the temporal part of me located at this instant – or at any rate some temporal part of me that exists now and only when I am bent – is just plain bent. That part is not temporarily bent, or bent now, or even bent at every time when it exists. It is bent simpliciter, timelessly bent, just as 7 is timelessly odd. Its being bent involves no relation to a time whatever. That makes bentness an intrinsic property, as we always knew it was. Likewise, I am straight, and not bent, at some other time insofar as a temporal part of me located at that other time is timelessly straight. Moreover, I have those parts without temporal qualification. I don’t have a straight temporal part at one time and lack one at another, for having a straight temporal part and not having one are no more compatible than being bent and being straight, and just as intrinsic. (My straight temporal part and my bent temporal part are located at different times; but they are not parts of me at different times.)
  9. This means that I don’t simply have either the property of being bent or the property of being straight. How then do I relate to those properties? Am I bent, or am I straight? The answer is neither: I simply have a bent temporal part and a straight temporal part. (Compare the spatial analog: Am I hand-shaped, or am I foot-shaped? Neither: I simply have a handshaped part and a foot-shaped part.) My relation to the property of bentness is that of having a part that has that property simpliciter. My relation to the property of straightness is that of having another part that has that property simpliciter.
  10. So according to four-dimensionalism, when we say that a thing has different intrinsic properties at different times we are speaking loosely. The strict truth of the matter is that the thing has different temporal parts, located at those times, that have those properties without temporal qualification. In the strictest sense I don’t have the properties of bentness or straightness at all. My properties are not being bent or being straight, but rather having a bent part and having a straight part. If I had bentness and straightness (or being bent and not being bent), I should have to have them relative to times, which four-dimensionalists say would make them objectionably extrinsic. Nothing can strictly have both bentness and straightness, since they are incompatible; and nothing can have either property relative to a time, since they are intrinsic; thus, whatever has bentness must be bent and not straight simpliciter. So the things that are bent or straight are brief temporal parts of me, rather than I myself. I can have the intrinsic properties having a bent part and having a straight part, though, for unlike bentness and straightness they are compatible. I can have them without temporal qualification.
  11. The argument for four-dimensionalism, then, is this: There are intrinsic properties, such as bentness and straightness, that each of us in some sense has. Because these properties are intrinsic, we cannot have them relative to times, but must relate to them in some timeless way. But we cannot simply have them timelessly, for they are incompatible: nothing can be both bent and not bent. Therefore I am bent now only in the sense of having (timelessly) a temporal part located now that is bent simpliciter, and I was straight an hour ago insofar as I have another temporal part located then that is straight simpliciter. It follows that I have at least two temporal parts. Moreover, the fact that my intrinsic properties are continuously changing – the way my atoms are arranged, for instance, is changing continuously, owing to their constant motion – implies that I have a different temporal part for every moment when I exist. And what goes for me goes for concrete objects generally.
  12. Ironically, this argument has the very consequence it accuses the opposing view of having, namely that no property could be both temporary and intrinsic. If, per impossibile, something did first have and then lack an intrinsic property such as bentness, then according to the argument that thing would both have and lack bentness, for bentness, being intrinsic, can only be had or lacked without temporal qualification. According to four-dimensionalism, no intrinsic properties are temporary. Our momentary temporal parts have properties such as bentness, and we have properties such as having bent parts; but nothing has those properties temporarily. (This presumably goes for extrinsic properties as well: I am an uncle now insofar as I have a temporal part located now that is an uncle without temporal qualification. No one will suppose that I bear a timeless, two-place instantiation relation to intrinsic properties and a three-place instantiation relation involving a time to extrinsic properties.)
  13. For this reason and others, four-dimensionalists disagree about the persuasive force of the argument from temporary intrinsics. That is, they disagree about how much better their own solution to the problem of change is than the alternative view that things have temporary properties relative to times36. Even so, they nearly all agree that their solution is true: that persisting, changing objects don’t strictly have temporary intrinsic properties, but instead have short-lived temporal parts that have intrinsic properties timelessly. This seems to belong to the very idea of a temporal part. We will see the importance of this in §5.737.
5.3 Lumps and statues
  1. Four-dimensionalism has important theoretical virtues. One of them is its capacity to solve problems about the identities of material objects in a different way from constitutionalism (see Sider 2001b: Ch. 538 for a detailed discussion).
  2. Recall the clay-modelling puzzle (§3.239). A shapeless lump of clay is modelled first into a statue and then into a cube. We want to say that the same lump of clay is first shapeless, then statue-shaped, then cubical, but that the statue is never shapeless or cubical. If this is so, then the statue and the lump must be two different things. Constitutionalists say that the statue and the lump are numerically different even though they coincide materially, making the statue physically indistinguishable from the lump at every time when the statue exists. But we expect physically indistinguishable material things to be indistinguishable in all their intrinsic properties. So their view makes it a mystery how the two objects could differ in their intrinsic properties (§3.440). For instance, what could give them different persistence conditions?
  3. Four-dimensionalists say that the statue is a temporal part of the lump: the largest such part that is statue-shaped. (Suppose the lump is made into a statue only once.) We can illustrate this with a space-time diagram, where the vertical axis represents space and the horizontal axis time: Figure 5.141.
  4. The statue is made at t1and squashed at t2. The whole “worm” is the lump, and the shaded part in the middle is the statue. The lump is composed of earlier temporal parts that have a nondescript shape, later temporal parts that are cubical, and intermediate temporal parts shaped like Thatcher (as it may be); it is these last that compose the statue. So the lump and the statue don't coincide materially, in the sense of there being things that compose both of them: the lump has temporal parts – timelessly has them – that are not parts of the statue, and which do not even overlap any parts of the statue. That is what makes the two objects qualitatively different. We can explain the qualitative differences between the statue and the lump in terms of the differences in their parts: the lump is different from the statue because it, but not the statue, has temporal parts that are not statue-shaped. The lump and the statue are no more alike than a baseball game and its third inning are alike.
  5. In the replacement puzzle (§3.342) we burn a clay statue's arm to ashes and replace it with a new arm made of different clay (where this is the only change of parts in the statue’s career). We want to say that the statue persists through this change, while the lump of clay is destroyed and replaced by a new lump. Constitutionalists say that the statue coincides materially first with one lump and then with another. Four-dimensionalists say that the statue is (timelessly) composed of temporal parts of two different lumps.
  6. In Figure 5.243 the first lump, L1, occupies the forward-slashed space-time region; the second lump, L2, occupies the back-slashed region. If we suppose again that the statue is made at t1and squashed at t2, it occupies the horizontal region located between those times. The earlier part of the statue, on this view, is a temporal part of L1; the later part of the statue is a temporal part of L2. The statue is not identical with either lump; but neither is it composed of the same parts as either lump. Neither lump coincides materially with the statue. Again, the qualitative difference between the statue and the two lumps is explained by their having qualitatively different temporal parts. (The four-dimensionalist’s solution to the amputation puzzle is similar; we will come to it in §7.444.)
5.4 The problem of modal incompatibility
  1. The four-dimensionalists’s story about lumps and statues may sound agreeable, particularly in comparison with constitutionalism. So it may seem to support the claim that persisting objects, including ourselves, are composed of temporal parts. There is, however, something about this story that we might find deeply puzzling.
  2. Suppose we ask why the statue ceases to exist when we squash it, but the lump doesn’t. According to the story there is no physical difference between the statue and the lump when we squash them, for they share all their temporal parts while they both exist. How, then, can objects that are physically identical at a time, and treated in the same way, behave so differently at that time? Isn’t this the very objection we made to constitutionalism? Four-dimensionalists say that we are to explain the qualitative difference between statue and lump in terms of their having qualitatively different temporal parts. That seems to imply that the statue perishes and the lump carries on in the clay-modelling story because the lump has certain temporal parts located after the squashing and the lump hasn’t. But that is no explanation at all. It is like saying that Descartes ceased to exist in 1650 because his career doesn’t extend beyond that year.
  3. If squashing a clay statue really does, necessarily, destroy the statue without destroying the lump it is made of, we expect the reason to be that lumps have something statues lack, namely a power or capacity to survive squashing. Otherwise it would be a mystery why clay statues always perish when squashed, yet lumps of clay never do. If lumps and statues didn’t differ in this way, we should expect them to behave more or less alike when squashed, and we should be unable to say confidently of any statue that if it were squashed it would perish. But such a difference in capacities appears to be incompatible with the ontology of temporal parts.
  4. We can make the problem more vivid by imagining a case where a lump and a statue always coincide. Imagine a lump of clay that comes into being shaped like Thatcher and retains that shape throughout its career without losing any parts. In that case the lump and the statue will share all their parts, temporal and otherwise (at any rate there will be things that compose both the statue and the lump). They will coincide materially. Four-dimensionalists say that in this case the lump is the statue; otherwise they would face the troubles of constitutionalism. Yet the lore of lumps and statues tells us that any lump of clay could survive being squashed, even if it never is. Otherwise their differing behavior under pressure, so to speak, would be a mystery. If this is right, then four-dimensionalism is committed to these three claims:
    … 1. The lump (in our story) could survive squashing.
    … 2. The statue could not survive squashing.
    … 3. The lump = the statue.
    And these claims look inconsistent. If the lump is the statue, how could it – that one thing – be able to survive squashing, yet also unable to survive it?
  5. The same problem arises in the case of people and animals. Most philosophers, including four-dimensionalists, want to say that if your cerebrum were removed from your head and kept “alive” and functioning in a vat, while the rest of you were destroyed, you would survive as a detached cerebrum. (This seems to follow from the conviction that you would go along with your cerebrum if that organ were transplanted.) But no human animal could survive if its cerebrum were preserved and the rest of it destroyed. That seems to give human people and human animals different modal properties: different persistence conditions.
  6. This may not look like a problem if your cerebrum actually is removed and kept alive. In that case you are not an animal; you are, rather (according to the temporal-parts view) composed of the pre-operation temporal parts of an animal and the post-operation temporal parts of a cerebrum. But of course that isn’t going to happen. Your career will coincide exactly with the career of an animal, so that every temporal part of that animal is a part of you and vice versa. You and the animal coincide materially. In that case four-dimensionalists will say that you are that animal. How, then, could it be the case that you, but not the animal, could survive as a detached cerebrum? Friends of the temporal-parts view will want to say things like these:
    … 4. You could survive as a detached cerebrum.
    … 5. No animal could survive as a detached cerebrum.
    … 6. You are an animal.
    And these claims are no more consistent than the others.
  7. Now many four-dimensionalists say that we are not animals, even though there are no cerebrum transplants. Suppose that having certain mental properties is necessary for being a person; and call a more-or-less momentary temporal part of an organism that has those properties a person-stage45. Then it may be natural to suppose that a person must be something made up entirely of person-stages. (We will come to the question of which person-stages would go to make up a person in a moment.) But because every human animal starts out as an embryo with no mental properties at all, no human animal is composed entirely of person-stages. Alternatively, you might think that the stages of a person must all be in some way psychologically continuous with one another; but the embryonic stages of a human animal are not psychologically continuous with anything. Either way, it follows that human people, and therefore ourselves, are not animals, but at best proper temporal parts of animals: parts that include no unthinking embryonic stages.
  8. But it makes no difference here whether we are animals or temporal parts of animals, for if the persistence conditions of animals have nothing to do with psychology, neither do those of their temporal parts. So the view that we are temporal parts of animals appears to imply this:
    … 4. You could survive as a detached cerebrum.
    … 7. No temporal part of an animal could survive as a detached cerebrum.
    … 8. You are a temporal part of an animal.
    And these again look inconsistent.
  9. The general problem these cases illustrate is that things the temporal-parts view says are identical appear to have incompatible modal or dispositional properties – properties that appear to figure in the explanation of why those things cease to exist when they do. Because you are a person, you could survive as a detached cerebrum; but because you are an animal or a temporal part of an animal, you couldn't. Call this the problem of modal incompatibility.
  10. Some four-dimensionalists take a tough line here: Quine, for instance, denies that there are any modal properties at all (1960: 19946), and Heller says that all material objects have their spatio-temporal boundaries essentially (1980: 5347). Either view would make at least one proposition of each triad false, or at any rate not true.
  11. But most four-dimensionalists want to accept the modal convictions that feature in the first two claims of each triad. They try to solve the problem by saying that the appearance of inconsistency is an illusion. You could survive as a detached cerebrum, they say, and the animal or animal part that you are could not survive it; yet these claims are consistent. The reason is that the modal predicate 'could survive as a detached cerebrum' expresses a different property in 5 and 7 from the one it expresses in 4. When we say that you could survive as a detached cerebrum, we mean that you qua person could survive it. When we say that no animal could survive as a detached cerebrum, we mean that no animal qua animal could survive it. So it would be more perspicuous to write 4 and 5 like this:
    … 4*. You, qua person, could survive as a detached cerebrum.
    … 5*. No animal, qua animal, could survive as a detached cerebrum.
    This does not express a modal difference between you and your animal body. Both you and that animal have the property of possibly surviving as a detached cerebrum qua person, and you both lack the property of possibly surviving as a detached cerebrum qua animal. 4* and 5* are therefore consistent with the claim that you are an animal. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for the other cases.
  12. This means that that there are no absolute, unqualified modal properties of the form being possibly F or being necessarily G, but only qualified or kind-relative modal properties of the form being possibly F qua person and being necessarily G qua animal. If there were such a property as possibly surviving as a detached cerebrum – not possibly surviving it qua this or qua that, but just plain possibly surviving it – then we should want to say that you have that property, and that no animal or temporal part of an animal has it, thus raising the problem of modal incompatibility all over again.
  13. So what are these qualified modal properties? What do the qualifications ‘qua person’ and ‘qua animal’ mean? Many views are possible, but the most familiar is counterpart theory (Lewis 1968, 1971, 1986: 248-263, Gibbard 1975). The ordinary view of modal properties is that for a thing to be possibly F is for it to be F at some possible world. Counterpart theory says that for a thing to be possibly F is not for it to be F at a world, but for a “counterpart” of it at a world to be F at that world48. A counterpart of you at a world is a thing at that world that is at least as much like you as anything else at that world, and enough like you that we are willing to treat it as a modal stand-in for you. (The thing most like you at a certain world might be a chimpanzee. If we are not willing to consider how things would be if you were a chimpanzee – if our response to your question, "What if I were a chimpanzee?" were always, "You couldn't be a chimpanzee" – then there would be no counterpart of you in that world.)
  14. So far this is no help. If you have a counterpart at a world that survives as a detached cerebrum, and no animal (or temporal part of an animal) has such a counterpart, then you cannot be an animal (or a temporal part of an animal). But things can be similar in different ways: something might resemble you in origin and physical composition, say, but not in psychology and behavior. And because the counterpart relation is based on similarity, whether a thing is a counterpart of you may depend on what respects of similarity are relevant in the context. So there appear to be as many different potential counterpart relations as there are respects of similarity. If we say that you are possibly F – that is, that at some world there is a counterpart of you that is F – we don't say anything determinate until we specify a particular counterpart relation – that is, a particular respect of similarity. And it needn't be the same one each time: a modal predicate can express different counterpart relations in different contexts.
  15. So when we say that you could survive as a detached cerebrum, we might mean that you have a personal counterpart at some world – someone who resembles you in "personal" respects – who survives as a detached cerebrum at that world. Now whatever else a personal counterpart of something might be, it ought to be a person. Suppose a person is by definition a being composed of person-stages, each of which is psychologically continuous, in some appropriate way that is open to debate, with every other and with nothing else: a maximal psychological continuer for short49. Then any being that fails to go along with its transplanted cerebrum is not a maximal psychological continuer, and therefore not a person, and so not a personal counterpart of you or of anyone else. Thus, every personal counterpart of you whose cerebrum is removed and kept alive will go along with that organ. Presumably there are, at some possible worlds, personal counterparts of you whose cerebrums are removed and who go along with those organs. (At any rate this is so on the ontology of temporal parts.) And the personal pronoun in the sentence ‘You could survive as a detached cerebrum’ makes the personal counterpart relation the relevant one. That makes it true to say that you could survive as a detached cerebrum.
  16. When we say that no animal could survive as a detached cerebrum, on the other hand, we might mean that no animal has an animal counterpart at any world – something that resembles it in "animal" respects – that survives as a detached cerebrum at that world. An animal counterpart of something must presumably be an animal itself. An animal, according to four-dimensionalism, is a thing composed of animal stages related to one another and to nothing else in a certain biological way that I won’t attempt to specify. And because a detached-cerebrum stage is not an animal stage, nothing made up partly of detached-cerebrum stages is an animal. Thus, no animal, and no animal counterpart of anything, survives as a detached cerebrum at any possible world. So nothing has an animal counterpart that survives as a detached cerebrum. The word 'animal' in the original sentence makes the animal counterpart relation the relevant one. That is why it is true to say that no animal could survive as a detached cerebrum.
  17. So the claim that you could survive as a detached cerebrum but no animal (or temporal part of an animal) could survive it, understood counterpart-theoretically, is compatible with your being an animal (or a temporal part of an animal). Similar remarks apply in other cases: the claim that any lump could survive crushing but no statue could, understood counterpart-theoretically, is compatible with the claim that some statues are lumps.
  18. Whether counterpart theory is the right account of modal properties is disputed, and I will not enter into this dispute here. The point is that friends of the temporal-parts view must either reject the modal claims about people and animals that we have discussed, or else understand them counterpart-theoretically (or in some other way according to which modal predicates express different properties depending on their context). Some philosophers find this a sufficient reason to reject the ontology of temporal parts (van Inwagen 1990a50).
  19. Even if we accept counterpart theory, however – or for that matter if we follow Quine and deny that there are any modal properties at all – the question remains: why do statues but not lumps cease to exist when squashed? Four-dimensionalists deny that there is any modal or dispositional difference between a statue and its coincident lump: the lump, they say, hasn’t got a certain capacity to survive that the statue lacks. So things’ modal properties play no role in explaining why they cease to exist when they do. What does it explain it, then? What accounts for the striking difference in the actual behavior of lumps and statues when we squash them?
  20. Four-dimensionalists reply that there is no explanation: the question is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of persisting objects. For every period of time when a lump of clay exists, they say, there is a temporal part of the lump located exactly then. It follows from this that there is a temporal part of our imaginary lump that extends from the time when it is made Thatcher-shaped to the time when it gets squashed. That is the thing we call the statue of Thatcher. Why does that object cease to exist when it gets squashed? What stops it from carrying on for a bit longer and simply changing its shape? The four-dimensionalist’s answer is that nothing stops it. That is simply where its temporal boundary lies. To ask why it comes to an end when it does is like asking why a given period of time comes to an end when it does. Why does the 20th century come to an end at the end of 1999? What stops it from going on for a bit longer? The question is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of periods of time. The only answer we can give is that we wouldn’t call a period of time that extended beyond 1999 the 20th century. But that is an answer to a different question: a question not about why a particular thing ceases to exist when it does, but about why we talk the way we do. It is the same with the lump and the statue. There are temporal parts of the lump that extend beyond the time when we squash it. But we don’t call those things statues. And that is all the answer we can give to the question of why the statue doesn’t continue to exist after we squash it. (That does not mean, however, that nothing could have lasted longer than it did. Descartes could have lived longer, for there are personal counterparts of him that do live longer.)
  21. This is one of the aspects of the temporal-parts ontology that is most foreign to our ordinary thinking. Foreign or not, however, four-dimensionalism is a powerful theory of the nature of persisting objects.
5.5 Puzzles of personal identity
  1. We have seen that the ontology of temporal parts offers an important solution to metaphysical puzzles about the persistence of material things, including ourselves. And we saw that this solution comes at the cost of requiring modal predicates to be inconstant: it implies that in a sense you could survive as a detached cerebrum, but in another perfectly good sense you couldn’t possibly exist in that state. The view that we are composed of temporal parts – the temporal-parts view – has further important implications about our identity over time.
  2. Recall the “brain-state transfer” machine of §1.751, which records the psychological information encoded in your brain (thereby erasing that organ) and copies it onto another brain (thereby erasing that organ’s previous contents). Some philosophers believe that this process would literally move you from one human organism to another. But we may wonder what sort of thing could move from one animal to another in this way. What sort of thing could be sent as a message by telegraph? Not a material thing, surely.
  3. On the ontology of temporal parts, however, a material thing can move, in a sense, from one human animal to another via brain-state transfer. Perhaps no material thing would move from one place to another in the sense of passing through all the points in between; but there would be a material thing that was first in the one place and later in the other. There would be a material thing made up of the temporal parts of the “donor” animal located before the adventure and those of the “recipient” animal located afterwards. That thing would be rational and intelligent in the same way as you are – supposing, at least, that you are material – for it would share your rational, intelligent stages. So the machine would bring it about that a rational, intelligent being is first in one place, associated with one human organism, and later in another place, associated with another organism. Those who believe that we can move from one animal to another via brain-state transfer will say that this being would be you. Thus, the temporal parts view is compatible with the claim that you could swap animal bodies via brain-state transfer.
  4. But the temporal-parts view is also compatible with the claim that you couldn’t swap bodies via brain-state transfer. The animal that ends up with your mental contents in the story does not inherit them from you in anything like the usual way. If you did swap bodies, your mental capacities would not be continuously physically realized. This suggests that you would have a gap in your career: you would cease to exist while the machine does its work, then come into being once more when the work is finished. (Suppose the machine that records the psychological information from the first brain then prints it on sheets of paper; much later the information is typed by hand into a second machine, which then reconfigures the second brain to match the first one. In what form could you exist after the first brain is erased but before the second brain is reconfigured? What sort of thing could you be then?) And you might deny that any material thing could exist intermittently. The temporal-parts view can accommodate this conviction.
  5. The ontology of temporal parts provides three main candidates for being you in this case. First there is the one that stays behind: the human animal whose mental contents are erased when the machine does its work and then lives on as a sort of human vegetable. Second, there is the one that ceases to exist: the temporal part of the first animal that extends from its beginning (or from the point where it first acquires mental capacities of the right sort) until its mental contents are erased. Finally, there is the one that gets transferred: the thing composed of the pre-transfer stages of the first animal and the post-transfer stages of the second (or at least those stages of them that have the right mental properties). On the usual ontology of temporal parts, these three beings all exist. The question of what happens to you in the brain-state-transfer cases is the question of which of them is you.
  6. Friends of the temporal-parts view say that this depends on which of them counts as a person, for you are the only person in the story. Now all three candidates are rational, intelligent, and self-conscious, at least for a time, and the ordinary view is that being rational, intelligent, and self-conscious suffices for being a person. (Don’t we call a rational, intelligent, self-conscious being a someone and not a mere something?) But friends of the temporal-parts view deny this. Otherwise there would be far too many people in the world: not only would all three candidates in the brain-state-transfer story count as people, but so would most of your temporal parts. (Remember that on the ontology of temporal parts a being is intelligent at a time by virtue of having a temporal part located then that is intelligent without temporal qualification.) A person, they say, must consist of stages that are not only rational, intelligent, and self-conscious, but which also relate to one another in the right way.
  7. There is room for disagreement about what this way is: whether it is non-branching, continuously physically realized psychological continuity, non-branching psychological continuity of any sort, some wholly non-psychological relation, or what have you. This is the old debate about personal identity over time – the persistence question of §1.652 – transposed into the ontology of temporal parts. Those who say that personal identity over time consists in non-branching, continuously physically realized psychological continuity will call the candidate that ceases to exist when the machine does its work the person. Those who say that any sort of psychological continuity suffices will call the one that gets transferred the person, while those who think it is something wholly non-psychological will probably say that the candidate that stays behind is the person.
  8. Who is right? They might all be right. According to four-dimensionalism all three candidates exist, and all three satisfy some reasonable definition of the word ‘person’. Those who appear to disagree about which candidate is the person may only be using the word ‘person’ in different senses. More generally, those who appear to disagree about what it takes for a person to persist through time may all be right. They may not disagree at all. They may only be talking about different beings – about “people” in different senses of the word. There are people in the sense of beings composed of person-stages related to one another, and to nothing else, by non-branching, continuously physically realized psychological continuity – “conservative people”, we might call them – people in the sense of beings composed of person-stages related to one another by psychological continuity of any sort – “liberal people” – and so on. Different accounts of personal identity over time are accounts of the identity over time of different sorts of people. Friends of the conservative psychological-continuity view have given the right account of the persistence of conservative people; those who prefer the liberal psychological-continuity view have given the right account of the persistence of liberal people. For that matter, those who say that our identity is animal identity have given the right account of the persistence of “animal people”. Any proposed account of what it takes for us to persist through time will presumably be the right account of the persistence of some sort of beings that are plausible candidates for being people. Or almost any account. The view that you persist if and only if your immaterial soul continues to exist will not be the right account of the persistence of anything unless there are immaterial souls, and four-dimensionalism in no way implies that there are.
  9. This would vindicate the common view that the facts about personal identity over time are in some sense up to us to decide: they are up to us to decide insofar as it is up to us which sort of “people” to talk about (Olson 1997b, Sider 2001a53). No other view of what we are (with the possible exception of the bundle view, some versions of which incorporate the ontology of temporal parts) has this consequence. Whether this speaks in favor of the temporal-parts view or against it will be a matter for debate.
  10. Here is one more point about our identity over time. The temporal-parts view is the only account of what we are that is consistent with the attractive idea that some sort of psychological continuity suffices for us to persist. It seems possible for a person to be psychologically continuous, by anyone’s lights, with two future people: let each of your cerebral hemispheres be transplanted into a different head. It is easy to believe that you could survive if one hemisphere were destroyed and the other were transplanted, so that the operation produced only one being psychologically continuous with you. But it seems impossible for both offshoots to be you, for there are two of them and only one of you, and two things cannot be numerically identical with one thing. (Suppose one of the offshoots had a beard and the other didn’t. If both were you, you would both have a beard and not have a beard at the same time, which most of us regard as a contradiction.) And the claim that just one of the two offshoots would be you would make it a mystery which one it was, and why. This leads many philosophers to say that you could survive a single transplant but not a double transplant: if two beings each got half your brain, that would be the end of you. It follows that psychological continuity is not sufficient for you to persist: you may perish even though a later person is psychologically continuous with you. Only "non-branching" psychological continuity suffices. But it is hard to believe that you could fail to survive the transplant operation merely because it produced two beings psychologically continuous with you rather than one.
  11. Friends of the temporal-parts view are able to say that you can survive the double transplant (Lewis 197654). You survive, so to speak, as both offshoots. That is because in fission cases there are, in effect, two of you all along, who share their pre-operative temporal parts but not their post-operative parts. One of them starts when you do and then goes along with your left cerebral hemisphere in the operation; the other has the same beginning, but goes along with your right hemisphere. But they do not coincide materially; they merely overlap, like two railway lines that diverge after having a section of track in common. Thus, as long as someone is psychologically continuous with you in the right way, you survive. It doesn't matter if more than one is.
  12. This has the surprising consequence that if there is fission in your future, there are two people sitting there and thinking your thoughts even now – though they look for all the world, even to themselves, like one. In order to know whether they are two or one – or more generally, to know how many people there are at any one time – we need to know what the future holds. (This is not a case of backwards causation, however. The fission operation doesn’t cause it to be the case that there are two people there earlier. It simply makes it the case, in a non-causal way, that the pre-fission stages are parts of two people rather than one.)
  13. The story the temporal-parts view tells about fission is surprising in other ways too. You might want to know which person you are. Suppose the one who gets your left hemisphere – "Lefty" – will be in pain after the operation, while the one who gets your right hemisphere, "Righty", will be comfortable. Will you be in pain? The temporal-parts view suggests that when we say 'you', we refer to that person whose stage we are addressing. If that stage is a part of more than one person, as the pre-operative stages in the fission story are, we refer ambiguously to both. So if there is fission in your future, we refer at once to two different people when we say 'you' (supposing we refer at all, anyway). Our sentence 'You will be in pain' says two things at once, one true and one false. It is like saying that the planet between the earth and the sun is cloudy. One of you will be in pain, the other not. But we cannot say that either of those people is you. To say that you are Lefty is at most half right, since only one of you, as it were, is Lefty; the same goes for the claim that you are Righty. Nor can we say that either person is not you. So we can know what happens to all of the people in the story, and yet not know what will happen to you. The question we so urgently want answered – will you be in pain? – is unanswerable, based as it is on the false presupposition that the pronoun ‘you’ refers to only one being, or at any rate that all of the beings it refers to share the same fate55.
  14. Friends of the temporal-parts view will point out that we say similar things about analogous spatial cases, such as railway lines that share their tracks at one place and diverge at another. How many lines there are here depends on what is the case elsewhere. And simple questions such as whether this line goes to Tulsa may have no straightforward answer because the expression ‘this line’ refers ambiguously to two lines, one of which goes to Tulsa and one of which doesn’t. The logic of the case, we might say, is impeccable. But that may not make the story any easier to believe. It may only be a reason to deny that fission is like spatial branching – that is, to deny that we have temporal parts.
  15. And although the proposed view implies that psychological continuity is sufficient for our identity over time in the sense that you persist if someone in the future is psychologically continuous with you, it implies that psychological continuity is not sufficient for our identity over time in another sense: not every future being who is mentally continuous with you is you (Parfit 1976; see also Lewis 198356). Lefty is not psychologically continuous, before the operation, with Righty as he is afterwards. You can be psychologically continuous with someone other than yourself.
5.6 Thinking animals and other worries
  1. We saw that the constitution view faces a problem about those human animals that think our thoughts and perform our actions but which, according to those views, are not ourselves. A similar problem arises for the temporal-parts view. Most four-dimensionalists say that we are not animals, but maximal psychological continuers: beings composed of person-stages, each of which is in some way psychologically continuous with each of the others and with no other stages (§5.457). Since all human animals have embryonic stages that are not in any way psychologically continuous with anything (and some have senile stages not psychologically continuous with anything), this means that we are at best temporal parts of animals. Yet four-dimensionalists cannot deny that the animals we are parts of think. They say that for a persisting thing to think at a time is for it to have a temporal part located at that time that thinks; and since your thinking stages are all temporal parts of a human animal, the animal thinks just as you do. So according to the temporal-parts view you share your thoughts with an animal numerically different from yourself. And you ought to wonder, it seems, how you could ever know that you are not the animal.
  2. Four-dimensionalists could avoid the consequence that our bodies are thinking animals other than ourselves by saying that we are animals. That would mean giving up the idea that any sort of psychological continuity is necessary for us to persist. (They could still say that it is sufficient for us to persist by appealing to counterpart theory.) But it wouldn’t help, for on their view your current stage is a temporal part of a thinking maximal psychological continuer as well as a temporal part of a thinking animal. So you would still face the problem of how you could know whether you are the animal or the maximal psychological continuer. That is why most animalists deny the existence of maximal psychological continuers, and thus reject four-dimensionalism generally.
  3. In fact four-dimensionalism implies that there are all sorts of beings now thinking your thoughts. Your current stage is a temporal part not only of a maximal psychological continuer and an animal, but also of the first or second half of that animal. And it is a part of a vast number of gerrymandered and badly behaved objects: the thing made up of the temporal parts of your animal body located before midnight tomorrow and the temporal parts of Kilimanjaro located thereafter, for instance, and the thing made up of the temporal parts of the moon located before last Friday, the temporal parts of my left ear located after tomorrow, and the temporal parts of your animal body located in between. All of these objects, by virtue of sharing your current thinking stage, now think in the same sense as you do. So there are far more beings sitting in your chair and thinking about philosophy than we thought58.
  4. How could you ever know which of these beings you are? It is bad enough not knowing whether you are the animal or the maximal psychological continuer. Now it seems you ought to wonder whether you might be the first or second half of the animal, or one of the countless gerrymandered objects that share your current stage. What grounds could you possibly have for accepting any of these alternatives? If you really had no idea which thinker you are, you would have no idea what your future holds. The fact that there will be a human person tomorrow who is psychologically continuous with you as you are today would be no reason at all for you to believe that you will be a human person tomorrow. As far as your evidence in the matter would go, you could just as well be an enormous volcano tomorrow.
  5. Faced with this absurd prospect, friends of the temporal-parts view appear to have little other choice than to embrace personal-pronoun revisionism, the linguistic hypothesis discussed in §2.759. The idea is that your current temporal part is a part of only one person. There is room for disagreement about just what counts as a person, but any reasonable definition of 'person' will imply that there is just one being of that sort now thinking your thoughts: just one maximal psychological continuer, for instance.
  6. Or at least this is nearly true. The usual temporal-parts ontology implies that for every person (in any ordinary sense of the term), there is another being just like it but a nanosecond longer or shorter – a being entirely indiscernible from the first by any practical means, and just as good a candidate for being a person. So in reality there is not one person there, but a large class of more or less indiscernible and mostly overlapping people. This is a version of what Unger (198060) calls the problem of the many. It means that it is probably indeterminate which of those beings you are. This is of course rather implausible. Four-dimensionalists point out that we should “count those people as one” for ordinary purposes: when all the people in a certain situation overlap and differ from one another only trivially, those of us who are not engaged in metaphysics describe this by saying that there is just one person there (Lewis 1976, 199361). And perhaps it shouldn’t worry us too much if we cannot know which of these beings you are, or if all ordinary ways of referring to you are ways of referring to all of them ambiguously, since we can’t tell them apart anyway. For that matter, the problem of the many is not obviously unique to the temporal-parts view: anyone who thinks that we are material things will have to say something about those beings, if there are such, that are just like ourselves but larger or smaller by a single particle.
  7. But the important point here has nothing to do with the problem of the many. It has to do not with the surplus of good candidates for being you, but with the surplus of bad candidates: the human animal (if you are a maximal psychological continuer), the animal’s first or second half, and all the arbitrary and gerrymandered objects that share your current stage but diverge wildly at other times. Pronoun revisionism says, first, that these beings are not people. Second, personal pronouns, first-person thoughts, and other “personal” referring expressions denote only people. Third: as a competent speaker of English, you know that your first-person thoughts and utterances must refer to a person if they refer at all. So if you know what it is to be a person, you can work out (subject to the caveat about “the many”) which of the beings that share your current stage you are.
  8. This proposal has the repugnant consequence that the vast majority of rational, intelligent speakers are not people. And they cannot refer to themselves in the first person – not, anyway, in the language they actually speak. Their language also prevents them from having first-person thoughts about themselves. That is a strange sort of disability. If the ontology of temporal parts is true, however, and if most of what we say in ordinary life about ourselves and others is right – if it really is true to say that you will be a human person tomorrow and that you were never a satellite of the earth – then it seems that some such linguistic hypothesis must be correct. We may not like it much; but then the alternatives might not be very nice either.
5.7 Thinking stages
  1. I come now to what is perhaps the most serious objection to the temporal-parts view. Recall the problem of temporary intrinsics (§5.262): how can a persisting thing have incompatible properties, such as sitting and standing? Four-dimensionalists say that for a thing to sit at a time is for it to have a temporal part located at that time that has the property of sitting without temporal qualification. I sit now only insofar as my current stage sits. Assuming that I persist, I don’t strictly have the property of sitting at all, but rather the property of having a sitting part. And what goes for sitting goes for temporary properties generally63. Given that persisting things change continuously, it seems that the things that strictly have ordinary properties must literally be momentary: only a momentary being could have a shape without temporal qualification, and any material thing with ordinary properties has a shape.
  2. This means that although certain momentary temporal parts of me have such familiar properties as sitting, sleeping, writing, weighing 150 pounds, and being conscious, I myself have none of those properties. I don’t have the property of sitting, or of sleeping, or of writing. Strictly speaking I have no shape or weight. I have no mental properties, or at any rate none such as being conscious or thinking about Vienna. I have no temporary properties of any sort. If I did, I should have them relative to times, and four-dimensionalists agree that things do not have properties relative to times. I am not even perceived, except perhaps by Berkeley’s God. My stages may be perceived, but if I had the property of being perceived I should also have the property of not being perceived, for being perceived is a temporary property. This is all rather troubling. The temporal-parts view implies that the familiar objects that think and act and are seen and heard are our stages, not ourselves. We ourselves are unobservable theoretical entities.
  3. Four-dimensionalists will reply that we still have these familiar properties in a certain sense. We often attribute to an object the properties of its parts: we say that someone is sunburned when in the strictest sense only a part of her nose is sunburned, or that the day was wet when really only most of the afternoon was. And these descriptions are perfectly correct. So even though I don’t bear a property such as sitting in the strict sense in which my current stage bears it, I nonetheless relate to that property in a way that makes it true to say that I am sitting. That is, I have that property in what Butler (197564) might have called “a loose and popular sense”. The temporal-parts view does not deny that I sit or think in any sense. It is compatible with the way we ascribe ordinary properties to ourselves in ordinary situations.
  4. Of course, more needs to be said, for it isn’t generally right to attribute to an object the properties of its parts. My left foot is a part of me. It weighs about three pounds and is entirely unconscious. Yet it would be absurd to describe this fact by saying that I am foot-shaped, weigh three pounds, and am unconscious. Why is it right to say that I sit by virtue of having a sitting temporal part but wrong to say that I am foot-shaped by virtue of having a foot-shaped spatial part?
  5. Four-dimensionalists will presumably concede that I have the properties of being foot-shaped and being unconscious in the same way as I have the properties of sitting and thinking: my relation to all those properties is the same. They will explain why we say that I am sitting but not that I am foot-shaped by appealing to our interests and expectations. Those interests and expectations make it useful, in ordinary circumstances, to describe me as sitting or thinking when my current temporal part has the property of sitting or thinking, whereas it would not be useful – in fact it would be positively misleading – to describe me as foot-shaped or unconscious, even though I have parts with those properties too. There may be possible circumstances in which it would be right to attribute to me the shape or the mental properties of my left foot, but as things are it isn’t. Just why this should be so is a nice question, but I don’t doubt that it has an answer.
  6. This is all fine and good, but it misses the point. Let us grant that nothing the temporal parts view says conflicts with the way we ascribe ordinary properties to ourselves in ordinary situations. Suppose it is true to say, when we are not doing metaphysics, that we sit and think and are conscious, even if the real bearers of those properties are not ourselves but brief temporal parts of us. Still, don’t we have a deep conviction that we are among the real bearers of such properties as thinking and being conscious? Doesn’t it seem evident not only that you and I think and are conscious in some sense or other, but that we think and are conscious in the strictest possible sense? Of all the things we know about ourselves, isn’t this the most certain? Surely we cannot suppose that we think only in virtue of the fact that some other thing thinks for us. As Chisholm said, if there are two beings thinking these thoughts, one thinking them on its own and the other having its thinking done for it by the first, then I am the first thing and not the second.
  7. Someone is bound to reply that this “thinking-stage problem” is no different in principle from the thinking-brain problem. Nearly everyone believes that we are animals, or at any rate material things the size of animals (things constituted by animals, perhaps). And it follows from this belief (the reply goes) that we think only in the sense of having spatial parts – brains – that think in the strictest sense. So if there is a problem here, it has nothing to do with the temporal-parts view in particular. It is one that nearly everyone shares. Moreover, no one worries about the thinking-brain problem. So why worry about the thinking-stage problem?
  8. Now I think we ought to worry about the thinking-brain problem. I worried about it at some length in the previous chapter. If it really were true that only our brains think in the strictest sense, then in my view we ought to conclude that we are brains.
  9. In fact the thinking-stage problem is more serious than the thinking-brain problem. There are three possible ways of solving the thinking-brain problem. (I don’t regard saying that we “think” only in the sense of having thinking brains as parts to be a solution.) One is to deny that there are such things as brains. An analogous solution to the thinking-stage problem would say that there are no such things as person-stages, which is incompatible with the temporal-parts view. The second and most popular is to deny that only our brains think in the strictest sense. An analogous solution to the thinking-stage problem would be to deny that our stages think in the strictest sense. That too is incompatible with the temporal-parts view. So two of the three possible solutions to the thinking-brain problem are unavailable in the case of the thinking-stage problem. The third is to say that we are brains. Four-dimensionalists could say, analogously, that we are stages. That would solve the problem, though at a considerable cost: that we are momentary stages is no easier to believe than that we are brains. It is, however, an important variant of the temporal-parts view, and deserves a section of its own.
5.8 The stage view
  1. According to the temporal-parts view it is stages that think and act strictly speaking; yet we are not stages. That is hard to believe. It is also hard to believe that the things that bark and wag their tails and chase postmen are not dogs, but mere parts of dogs, dog-stages. One way to avoid this is to reject the ontology of temporal parts altogether. But another is to say that people and dogs are stages. Call this the stage view.
  2. If there is any reason to suppose that we are momentary things that do not strictly persist, this is it. There are powerful arguments in support of the ontology of temporal parts, and anyone who holds that view must either say that we are stages or deny that we think or talk or have any other temporary property in the strictest sense. The stage view has other virtues too. It avoids the thinking-animal problem by implying that our animal bodies don’t think in the strictest sense. The only true thinker of my current thoughts, it says, is my current stage, which is me. It also gives us the right number of objects existing at any one time (setting aside the problem of the many): it implies that there is just one person sitting here now, even if there is fission in my future, just as we thought – whereas on the temporal-parts view there are at least two (Sider 2001b: 188-19065).
  3. But although the stage view has important advantages over the temporal-parts view, it is rather hard to believe. Most obviously, it implies that we don’t persist through time. This means that you are not the person who began reading this sentence. That was someone else – someone very similar to you, of course, and strongly causally connected to you, but a numerically different being all the same. We are all far younger than we thought. We were never children. We have no past and no future. For that matter, we can’t move, or change. What appears to be a persisting, changing person (or dog or what have you) is in reality only a series of static momentary beings.
  4. Defenders of the stage view – and it has its defenders (Sider 1996, 2001b: 188-208; Hawley 200166) – are surprisingly easy about this. They respond, as one might have come to expect by now, by insisting that their view is compatible with everything we ordinarily say and believe and care about. Even if the stage view is true, they say, certain past and future stages relate to me in ways that lead us, for reasons to do with our interests, to call them by my name. Sider calls such stages “temporal counterparts” of me (personal temporal counterparts, to be more precise). He says that the ordinary belief that I was once a boy is true because I – the current momentary bearer of my name – have as a personal temporal counterpart an earlier boy-stage, which is compatible with the stage view.
  5. This means that when we say that I was once a boy, we are not asserting or implying that anything persists through time. We are not asserting the numerical identity of any earlier thing with any later thing. When we say such things we are only speaking as if something persisted because that is a convenient way to talk. (You can imagine how inconvenient it would be if we had to call every new momentary object by a different name.) We are doing what Hume called “feigning a continu’d being” (1978: 20867). Saying that I was once a boy is rather like saying that the Prime Minister is a man today but was a woman twenty years ago. When we say this we don’t ordinarily mean to imply that anyone has changed sex. We’re not saying that something that is a man today and something that was a woman twenty years ago are one and the same. Rather, we are saying that a man who exists today and a woman who existed twenty years ago relate in some other way: that the woman then held and the man now holds the office of Prime Minister. If we are using the language of identity over time here, we are using it loosely.
  6. When a currently existing stage relates to earlier stages in a way that leads us to speak of them as if they were one – that is, when they are temporal counterparts – we might describe this by saying that the current stage has persisted in the same sort of loose sense. Although the stage view denies that people and dogs really persist – that they persist “in the strict philosophical sense of the word”, as Butler would say – it is compatible with their “persisting” in the loose and popular sense in which the Prime Minister has persisted for some two centuries. Stage theorists claim that this “loose and popular persistence” is the only sort of persistence that most of us think or care about. Our ordinary, non-metaphysical thought and talk about identity over time is concerned only with the having of earlier and later temporal counterparts. It is facts about temporal counterparts, not facts about ourselves at other times, that make our ordinary statements and beliefs about our persistence true or false. Our practical attitudes are likewise based not on strict identity, but on the personal temporal-counterpart relation: we hold people responsible for the actions of their earlier temporal counterparts, and each of us has a special, selfish concern for the well-being of her later temporal counterparts (we encountered a view like this in §2.868). So according to the stage view we do persist, in the only sense that matters. Whether things persist in the strict philosophical sense, stage theorists say, is of interest only to metaphysicians. Thus, only a metaphysician will object to the stage view on the grounds that it rules out our persisting through time. To anyone else this is a mere technical detail.
  7. This story is not easy to believe. The stage view certainly appears to conflict with things we ordinarily believe and say. When we say, in ordinary contexts, that I was once a boy, we seem to be asserting that I myself once had the property of being a boy, and not that I relate in a certain way to some other being that had that property. Even if the story were true, though, it would not entirely silence the complaint. The fact that most of us find the stage view more or less incredible shows that it contradicts something that most of us believe. I, for one, believe that I persist in the strict philosophical sense, and not merely that certain past beings are temporal counterparts of me, even if the existence of such beings makes it correct for ordinary, non-metaphysical purposes to describe me loosely as having existed in the past. I don’t believe that this conviction of mine is eccentric, or that it came about only as a result of my philosophical training. It may be that it is a metaphysical conviction, and that our ordinary, non-philosophical beliefs do not imply it. But it is no less widely or deeply held for all that.
  8. In any case, the stage view has further troubling consequences. For one, it is incompatible with any plausible view of what it takes for us to persist through time – that is, of personal identity over time. It conflicts, for instance, with the view that our identity over time consists in some sort of psychological continuity. In fact it implies that no sort of continuity at all, psychological or otherwise, suffices for us to persist. Of course, it may still suffice for us to persist in a loose and popular sense: the fact that some future person inherits her mental and physical properties from you in some appropriate way might make her a personal temporal counterpart of you. But it does not suffice for her to be you.
  9. Someone might find this consequence not merely implausible, but incoherent. No momentary being, you might think, could count as a person: anyone who believes, or seems to believe, that people never persist through time has just not got the concept of a person, just as someone who believed, or seemed to believe, that cats are fuzzy toys would not have the concept of a cat. But if it belongs to the concept of a person that people ordinarily persist in the strict philosophical sense, then people cannot be stages. If it also belongs to the concept of a person that people have the property of thinking, then the ontology of temporal parts in general is inconsistent with the existence of people.
  10. If the stage view is compatible with the existence of people, however, it gives us far too many people. You might have thought that this book has only one author. (That's what it says on the cover.) Not so, according to the stage view: even if only one philosopher was at work on it at any one time, a vast number of momentary philosophers successively took over the job – though none stayed at it long enough to write even a single word.
  11. Finally, the stage view implies that none of the people who exist are the ones we know and love. Consider Socrates. What stage is he? According to the stage view, plenty of stages successively bore the name 'Socrates'. But nothing could make it the case that just one of those stages, rather than another, was Socrates. We couldn't discover that Socrates – the teacher of Plato and the wisest man in Athens – existed for only an instant during the evening of the 6th of August, 417 BC. No stage could be Socrates. If Socrates can only be a stage, then there can be no such thing as Socrates. The same goes for the rest of us. What stage could I be? You might say that I am the current bearer of my name: the current "Olson-stage". (Set aside the inconvenient fact that we cannot refer uniquely to any one momentary stage.) But why should I be that stage? Choosing it would be just as arbitrary as choosing a moment during an August evening as the instant when Socrates existed.
  12. There are many clever things that stage theorists can say in response to these complaints. They can say, for instance, that because all the authors of this book are personal temporal counterparts of one another, there is a perfectly good sense in which only one person wrote it. And they can say that because there are many successive bearers, of the right sort, of the name ‘Socrates’, it is true to say that Socrates existed, even if none of those things is Socrates. That is, they can reply to these complaints in much the same way as they reply to the objection that the stage theory violates our conviction that we persist through time. And the objections can be sharpened, as before, in a way that makes them immune to those replies, if perhaps less forceful.
  13. Whatever the outcome of this debate may be, four-dimensionalists must choose between the temporal-parts view, according to which we persist but don’t strictly think or act, and the stage view, according to which we think and act but don’t strictly persist. It would be nice if we could avoid this dilemma.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Temporal Parts")

Footnote 12:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 13:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 14:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 15: Footnote 24: Footnote 25: Footnote 26: Footnote 27: Footnote 28: Footnote 30:
  • See:-
Footnote 32: Footnote 33: Footnote 34: Footnote 35: Footnote 36:
  • There is more than one alternative to the four-dimensionalist’s account of change, but the one I have sketched here seems the most plausible. Haslanger 2003 is a useful guide to this messy debate.
  • See "Haslanger (Sally) - Persistence Through Time".
Footnote 38: Footnotes 41, 43: See the book for the Figures!

Footnote 45:
  • This assumes that a more-or-less momentary object can have the sorts of mental properties characteristic of people: self-consciousness, for instance. And that may be doubtful. Four-dimensionalists generally say that a momentary thing can have mental properties if it has the right causal antecedents (Sider 2001b: 197-8.). What something does for a moment might count as thinking in part because of what other beings do at earlier (and perhaps later) times, in something like the way that an event counts as the turning point in a war because of what happens earlier and later. Given what we said earlier about temporary intrinsics, four-dimensionalism appears to require this. It implies that thinking is an extrinsic property. The subject of momentary thinkers will come up again at the end of §7.4.
  • See "Sider (Ted) - Four-dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time" (Chapter 5: "Sider (Ted) - In Favour of Four-Dimensionalism, Part 2: The Best Unified Theory of the Paradoxes of Coincidence", Section 8 ‘The Stage View’).
Footnote 46: Footnote 47: Footnote 48: Footnote 49:
  • This has the interesting implication that personhood is an extrinsic property: whether a thing made up of appropriately connected person-stages is a person depends on whether it connects in that way to any other person-stages. If personhood were intrinsic, the temporal-parts view would have the absurd consequence that every connected temporal part of a person is a person.
Footnote 50: Footnote 53: Footnote 54: Footnote 55: Footnote 56: Footnote 58:
  • At any rate all four-dimensionalists that I know of believe in these objects. They accept universal composition for momentary stages: for any momentary temporal parts of any objects whatever, there is an object that those things compose. One might be able to accept an ontology of temporal parts without holding this: perhaps one could say that only some momentary stages compose something, while others don’t. But that would prevent one from saying many of the things four-dimensionalists want to say: see for instance §5.4 and Sider 2001: 120-139.
  • See "Sider (Ted) - Four-dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time" (Chapter 4: "Sider (Ted) - In Favour of Four-Dimensionalism, Part 1", Section 9 ‘The argument from vagueness’).
Footnote 60: Footnote 61: Footnote 63:
  • The property of being 43 years old might seem to be an exception: I don’t have it now by having a temporal part located now that is 43 years old. Most four-dimensionalists will deny that there is any such property. Otherwise things would have to have it relative to times, and four-dimensionalists generally hold that all things have all their properties without temporal qualification. They will say that the sentence ‘Olson is 43 years old’, uttered at a time t, expresses a true proposition if and only if Olson is born 43 years before t. So I don’t temporarily have the property being 43 years old; I timelessly have the property being born 43 years before t.
Footnote 64: Footnote 65: Footnote 66: Footnote 67:


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Bundles"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 6 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File13.

Write-up14 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Bundles

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 6, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Bundles", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online15 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book16.
  • The text differs slightly from the book.
  • The electronic version of the Chapter was paged backwards, though I have repaired it in the text below.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there17.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
Full Text
  1. Bundle theories18
  2. Traditional arguments for the bundle view19
  3. Personal identity and the bundle view20
  4. Can thoughts think?21
  5. Thinking animals once more22
  6. Bundles of universals23
  7. The program view24
6.1 Bundle theories
  1. We have now considered a number of views according to which we are material things: organisms, things coinciding materially with organisms, and spatial and temporal parts of organisms. I cannot think of any other promising materialistic view of what we are. So let us turn to views according to which we are not material.
  2. One such view is that we are composed of mental states or events: particular beliefs, desires, sensations, emotions, and so on. In particular, each of us is composed of all and only his own mental states or events. Our parts may include both occurrent states or events – things actively going on within the mind, such as your current philosophical cogitations – and non-occurrent states and dispositions lying dormant, such as your memories of last summer and your taste in furniture. Or our parts may be particular mental qualities or “tropes”. But none of our parts are material things. We are not made of matter. Though our bodies may be made of matter, the parts of our bodies are not parts of us. Call this the bundle view.
  3. We need to distinguish the bundle view from other claims that sound similar. One is that our parts include both mental states and a material body that is not itself composed of mental states. Because this suggestion has no obvious attraction over the bundle view, and most of what I will say about the bundle view applies equally to it, I won’t discuss it separately.
  4. More importantly, a number of claims besides the one that concerns us have been called “bundle theories”. First, there is supposed to be something called the bundle theory of the mind: the view that the mind is nothing but a bundle of mental states. What this means depends on the meaning of the word ‘mind’. If 'mind' means 'thinking being', then we are minds (since we are thinking beings), and the view that our minds are bundles is the view that we are bundles. But those who assert that minds are bundles are sometimes merely making a claim about the nature of our mental lives, namely that they are not unified in the way that certain philosophers have thought. This is not a view about what we are. In fact it looks consistent with any view about we are.
  5. Another bundle theory says that all concrete objects, and not just ourselves, are composed of particular states or qualities. This “global” bundle theory is not the same as the bundle view. Someone could hold either view without holding the other: someone could say that we are bundles but that unthinking objects such as trees are not, but rather traditional substances; or someone might think that all concrete objects are bundles but deny that we exist. I will argue in §6.525, though, that friends of the bundle view are better off with a global bundle theory.
  6. A third sort of bundle theory says that concrete objects are composed not of particular states or qualities, but of universals. The view is roughly that Kilimanjaro (say) is composed of a certain height, a certain shape, a certain geological structure, and so on – not a particular height, shape, and geological structure that necessarily belong to that mountain alone, but the very same height, shape, and so on that other mountains might share. Applied to ourselves, the view would be that we are composed of psychological universals. We will consider this view in §6.626.
  7. Then there is the view that we are "logical constructions" out of mental states. Ayer once wrote, "We know that a self, if it is not to be treated as a metaphysical entity, must be held to be a logical construction out of sense-experiences" (1946: 12527). (By “a metaphysical entity” Ayer meant an immaterial substance, and he thought had shown talk of immaterial substances to be meaningless.) What does it mean to say that we are logical constructions? The phrase 'logical construction' is a tricky one. To say that Fs are logical constructions out of Gs sometimes means that Fs are sets, in the mathematical sense, built up out of Gs. But Ayer did not think that you and I were sets. (The idea that we might literally be abstract objects that have their members essentially is hard to take seriously.) As Ayer used the term, a logical construction is not a kind of thing at all. We cannot say that, among the things that there are, some are logical constructions and some are not. That would be like saying that among the things that there are, some are real and some are unreal – no one thinks that there are leprechauns, and that they belong to a kind called “unreal objects”. When Ayer said that we are logical constructions out of sense-experiences, he meant that all statements that appear to be about ourselves, or about thinking beings generally, could be translated without loss of meaning into statements that make no reference to thinking beings, but only to sense-experiences (1946: 6328). When we say, “Paul heard a noise,” what we are saying is equivalent to some longer and more complicated statement that refers to or quantifies over nothing but mental states.
  8. This is not the view that we are composed of experiences. (Ayer is explicit about this: 1946: 127f.; see also Pike 196729.) The logical-construction view does not say that we have thoughts as parts. In fact it says nothing at all about our metaphysical nature. It is not a metaphysical claim at all, but rather a claim about meaning – specifically the meaning of "person talk". In fact it is unclear what it could mean, on the logical-construction view, to ask what we are. If all so-called talk of people is equivalent in meaning to talk of things other than people, what could it mean to ask what sort of things people are?
  9. If the logical-construction view suggests any metaphysical view, it is that there are really no people, but only things other than people – the mental states or what have you that figure in Ayer’s translations of person talk and which presumably account for the appearance of there being people. If there were people – if our thoughts had subjects – then surely our talk of people would refer to or quantify over them, and thus would not be synonymous with statements that refer to or quantify only over mental states. But this is to put a metaphysical gloss on an anti-metaphysical view. On the logical-construction view, the statement “there are no people” can mean only that there are no mental states (or whatever it is out of which people are "logically constructed") of the appropriate sort – which of course logical constructivists deny. To ask about the metaphysical nature of people, they say, is to misunderstand the meaning of person-talk. It is like asking about the metaphysical nature of sakes: to wonder whether there is such a thing as Kolya’s sake, and if so what sort of entity it might be, is to misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘sake’. ‘Kolya’s sake’ is not an expression that purports to refer to anything. Ayer is saying that neither is ‘Kolya’. To use another analogy, asking what the logical-construction view says about the metaphysical nature of people is like asking what logical behaviorism says about the metaphysical nature of mental states, or what phenomenalism says about the metaphysical nature of physical objects.
  10. Most of this book rests on the assumption that the logical-construction view is false. I could say a good deal about why I think it is false, but this is not the place for it. In any case it is not an account of what we are. The bundle view I want to consider says that we are bundles of mental states and events.
  11. Because we think, it follows that bundles of mental states think: the subject of my thoughts is something composed of those very thoughts. Now it is hard to understand how a bundle of mental states could think (see §6.530 below), and someone might suggest instead that we are bundles that don’t think. I can see no attraction in this “unthinking-bundle view”. No one who takes us to be unthinking bundles will suppose that other things think our thoughts. That is, no one will suppose that we don’t think our thoughts, but other beings – things that are not even parts of us- -do think them. The unthinking-bundle view could be true only if nothing thinks our thoughts: that is, if thoughts occur, but have no subjects or thinkers. But if nothing thinks our thoughts, does it not follow that we don’t exist? First-person singular statements, such as that I am now awake, refer to their subject, the being that makes them and whose thoughts they express. If there is no such subject, they don’t refer at all. And if the word ‘I’ never refers to anything, then there is no such thing as I, just as if the word ‘Atlantis’ never refers to anything there is no such thing as Atlantis. (Assuming, anyway, as the unthinking-bundle view does, that ‘I’ is a referring expression in the sense of §1.431.)
  12. Might someone suppose instead that we exist but don’t think? That our personal pronouns refer to unthinking beings? That would be strange. But it would be even stranger to suppose that they refer to bundles of thoughts. If personal pronouns and proper names referred to something, but never to thinking beings, what unthinking beings would they refer to? Maybe some things would be better candidates for their reference than others. Given that we say such things as “Thatcher is a human being” and “Thatcher is sitting down”, it would be absurd to say that ‘Thatcher’ referred to a bicycle or a tree. If anything, we might expect it to refer to a human organism – one that according to the unthinking-bundle view is for some reason unable to think. That’s the sort of thing it appears to refer to. But why suppose that it refers to a bundle of thoughts?
  13. In any case, the unthinking-bundle view is not really an answer to our question. Although it answers the question, What do our personal pronouns and proper names refer to?, it does not answer the question, What sort of beings think our thoughts and perform our actions? Indeed, it assumes that these two questions have different answers. And I said in §1.432 that the second question was to have priority over the first should the two diverge. The interesting idea behind the unthinking-bundle view, as I see it, is that nothing thinks our thoughts. We will come to that suggestion in due course.
  14. Let us return now to the bundle view that concerns us, the claim that we are composed of mental states. This is not a complete account of what we are. Though it implies that we are concrete particulars, that we are not substances, and that our parts are particular mental states, it does not say which or what sorts of mental states are parts of us and why, or which properties are essential to us, or whether we persist through time. We will come to these questions shortly. Still, the idea that we are made up entirely of thoughts tells us a good deal about what we are, enough to rule out many rival accounts. It stands in stark contrast with the other views we have considered. That is is enough to work with.
  15. The bundle view is counterintuitive for some of the same reasons as the brain view is. It implies that we never strictly see ourselves or each other, and that we are wholly invisible and intangible: you can no more touch a bundle of thoughts than you can touch a dream. So it is perhaps unsurprising that it has few defenders. Hume proposed that each of us is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions" (1978: 25233) – though even he found it hard to believe. Quinton says that each of us is "a series of mental states connected by continuity of character and memory" (1962: 398; see also 1973: 97-10534), and I have already mentioned Rovane's claim that a person is "a set of intentional episodes" (1998: 172; see also Campbell forthcoming35). I suspect, however, that the bundle view has a large underground following. I will argue that a number of popular views about personal identity support it. First, though, I will briefly review some traditional arguments for the bundle view.
6.2 Traditional arguments for the bundle view
  1. The bundle view was once considered the obvious alternative to our being simple immaterial substances (by Hume and Quinton, for instance). Arguments against substance dualism were taken to support the bundle view. Nowadays we know better.
  2. Others argued for the bundle view (and for the global bundle theory more generally) on the grounds that the very idea of a substance is incoherent. This reasoning usually began with a certain picture of what substances are supposed to be, something like this:
      To perceive an object is to perceive its qualities: shape, size, motion, and so on. Some philosophers suppose that there must be more to a thing than just its qualities: there must also be something that stands under and supports them. They posit something called a substance to play this role. Their view is that an ordinary thing like a cat is made up not only of the furriness, the feline shape, and the sinuous movements that we perceive, but also of a substance in which those qualities inhere. Yet even those who say this admit that we never perceive the substance itself. How could we? The substance is by definition something apart from its qualities, and therefore incapable of characterization. It is not furry or feline or moving. It has no qualities at all; it only supports the qualities we observe. And the mere fact that the substance supports certain qualities tells us no more about how it is in itself than the fact that something supports certain books tells us how it is in itself. It is a mere “something, we know not what”. A substance is therefore a mysterious theoretical entity: a metaphysical abstraction of the most dubious sort.
    We might tendentiously call this the Lockean picture of substance (Campbell 1990: 4-1136 is a recent example). If this is what substances are, sensible philosophers will have nothing to do with them. What could we be, then, if not substances? Bundles of qualities, presumably. There is little else that we could be, on the Lockean picture. We needn't be bundles of mental qualities only: we might be made up partly of brute physical qualities as well. But some sort of bundle view will be almost inevitable.
  3. The core of the Lockean picture is the idea that what is furry or shaped or moving in the strictest sense is not a substance, but a particular quality or trope. That leaves the substance with nothing to do but fix the qualities in place: it stands to them much as a lump of soft clay stands to colored feathers stuck into it. So the qualities the substance supports do not characterize it, but merely clothe it. If there is anything the cat’s qualities characterize, it is the bundle of those qualities.
  4. I reject this picture root and branch. The idea of a thing uncharacterized by any qualities makes no sense to me. But I don’t agree that the thing the qualities characterize – the thing that is furry or moving – is itself a quality, or a bundle of qualities. What I understand by 'substance' bears little resemblance to this absurd picture of a bare particular clothed in qualities. As I see it, a substance is not a metaphysical abstraction, but an ordinary thing: the cat that is furry and moving. The cat is not a compound made up of qualities and the substratum that supports them. Nor is it made up of qualities alone. It is made up of other substances: cells, molecules, and atoms. What makes it a substance is not that it is “something apart from its qualities”, but that it is not itself a state or a quality of something else. It is not qualities that we perceive, but substances.
  5. A substance is not "incapable of characterization": to characterize something is precisely to say what qualities it has. That is at any rate the anti-Lockean picture I was taught. It provides nothing like a complete theory of substances, and leaves plenty of hard questions unanswered. But I see nothing wrong with it. In particular, I see no reason to accept the Lockean picture, or the traditional arguments for the bundle view that presuppose it.
6.3 Personal identity and the bundle view
  1. To my mind, the most serious argument for the bundle view (the bundle view of ourselves, not the global bundle theory) has to do with personal identity. Since the time of Locke, philosophical orthodoxy has assumed that personal identity is grounded in psychological facts. No account of what we are fits better with this assumption than the bundle view.
  2. Consider the view that you could move from one human animal to another via Shoemaker’s "brain-state transfer" procedure. No substance, material or otherwise, thereby moves from one animal to another (the ontology of temporal parts aside, anyway). What does move? If Shoemaker's description of the process is correct, it transfers the particular mental states realized in the first animal's brain to the second animal's brain. And if it is possible to move you by moving nothing but mental states, the natural conclusion is that you are composed of mental states (Campbell forthcoming37).
  3. More generally, many philosophers think that our identity through time consists entirely in facts about mental states or events. What is necessary and sufficient for a person x existing at one time to be identical with something y existing at another time, they say, is for the mental states x is in at the first time to stand in certain relations – causal ones, perhaps – to the mental states y is in at the second time. In fact the very question of personal identity over time is sometimes stated as what is necessary and sufficient for mental states or events occurring at different times to belong to the history of a single person (Grice 1941; see also Perry 1975c: 7- 1238). Now what sort of thing could have its persistence determined entirely by facts about relations among mental states? Well, something composed of mental states could. It is doubtful whether any concrete object made up entirely of things other than mental states could survive or perish just by virtue of relations among mental states. The obvious conclusion is the bundle view. (Or perhaps the view that we are made up partly of mental states and partly of something else. Again, I take this to be an uninteresting variant of the bundle view.)
  4. Or one could argue for the bundle view from considerations about what determines how many of us there are at any one time. We might wonder whether the result of cutting the neural connections between the cerebral hemispheres would be two people in one body, or whether there might be several people “inhabiting” a single human organism at once in an extreme case of multiple personality. A deeper question is what sort of facts would settle the matter. What would make it the case that there were two people sharing a single human animal? Or is it possible at all? For that matter, what makes it the case that there is just one person associated with an ordinary human animal, and not two or more? Many philosophers say that the answer lies in psychological facts: just as (they say) facts about psychological continuity over time determine whether we have one person or two in “diachronic” cases, facts about psychological unity at any one time determine how many of us there are in “synchronic” cases. They say that simultaneous mental states belong to the same subject if and only if they are in some sense unified. The reason why the mental states of an ordinary human animal are all the thoughts of a single person is that they are unified in the right way. But if they were sufficiently disunified, they might be the thoughts of two different people.
  5. There are different accounts of what this unity amounts to. Kant thought that what made something a mental state of a particular being, and hence a mental state at all, was that being's ability to combine or synthesize it with its other mental states – to unite those states, as he put it, "in one self-consciousness" (1929: B13439). More recent accounts exploit the fact that many mental states are disposed to interact in special ways with other mental states. It is characteristic of desires, for instance, to interact with beliefs to produce action: roughly, your desire for something tends to cause you to act in ways that you believe will satisfy it, unless you have stronger competing desires. That seems to be part of what it is for something to be a desire – and also part of the nature of belief. The claim that the entire nature of all mental states consists in such facts about their causal dispositions is the core of the functionalist theory of mind. That theory is controversial. But few would dispute that these causal roles are at least part of the nature of many mental states.
  6. It appears to follow from this that many mental states necessarily come in packages: in order for something to be a desire, for instance – as opposed to a memory or a visual sensation or something non-mental – it has to occur as part of a network of beliefs and other states with which it is disposed to interact, directly or indirectly, in characteristic ways. Call such packages mental systems. (Let us not confuse matters by calling them minds. You and I are minds in the sense of thinking beings; but we don't want to conflate this platitude with the contentious idea that we are mental systems. For what it's worth, I find the word 'mind' as a count noun unhelpful in thinking about personal identity.) Mental states belong to the same mental system if and only if they relate causally to one another and to actions (or are disposed so to relate) in the right way. A mental system is something composed of mental states related to one another and to certain actions, but not to anything else, in this way.
  7. Now mental systems match up pretty well with people, or thinking beings generally. If I want an orange, and believe that there is an orange in the bag and that it is within my power to get it out of the bag, this will ordinarily result in my attempting to do so, unless I take that to be incompatible with some other goal of mine. My desire for an orange will not combine in this way with anyone else's beliefs to cause action. Ordinarily all and only the mental states of a given thinker will be parts of a single mental system. Where there is more than one independent mental system, there is ordinarily more than one thinker. So it is tempting to suppose that being parts of the same mental system is what it is for mental states to belong to the same thinking being. This is Shoemaker's view:
      It is only when the belief that it is raining and the desire to keep dry are co-personal that they tend (in conjunction with other mental states) to lead to such effects as the taking of an umbrella; if the belief is mine and the desire is yours, they will not directly produce any joint effects. And it seems that if a belief and desire do produce (in conjunction with other mental states) just those effects which the functional characterizations of them say they ought to produce if co-personal, then in virtue of this they are co-personal....Whether mental states...should count as belonging to the same person, or mind, would seem to turn precisely on whether they are so related that they will jointly have the functionally appropriate sorts of effects. (1984: 94; see also 1997: 29440)
    The claim is that, necessarily, for every person or thinking being (“mind”), there is exactly one mental system, all and only the elements of which are the mental states of that being; and for every mental system there is exactly one thinking being whose mental states are the elements of that system. Mental systems and thinkers must match up one to one. This is the psychological individuation principle of §2.941.
  8. This principle may sound attractive, and Shoemaker is not alone in advocating it. It is also closely connected with his explanation of why organisms are unable to think (see §2.542 above), giving opponents of animalism another reason to look favorably on it. And those who accept the orthodox view that psychological facts determine our identity over time may find it natural to suppose that psychological facts also determine how many of us there are at any one time.
  9. The psychological individuation principle suggests that thinking beings are themselves mental systems. How could the number of mental systems necessarily fix the number of anything but mental systems? Remember: the number of mental systems is determined entirely by causal relations among mental states and actions. And it is hard to see how causal relations among mental states and actions could entail both the existence and the precise number of things that are not even partly made up of mental states or actions. But if thinking beings have mental states among their parts, then you and I have mental states among our parts, which is a version of the bundle view.
  10. It is especially hard to see how the psychological individuation principle could be compatible with our being material things. (I assume that no material thing has mental states as parts.) Any material thing that could have mental properties at all, it seems, could be mentally disunified. Nothing could guarantee that the mental states of any material object must be psychologically unified in the way that Kant and Shoemaker demand of a mental subject. Think of an extreme case of multiple personality, in which many of the usual interactions among mental states break down. This would be a being whose beliefs, desires, perceptual states, and so on don’t interact in the usual way to produce actions, any more than your mental states interact with mine to produce action. They would not form a unified mental system. Even if there is enough interaction among the mental states of a human organism in any actual case of multiple personality for them to form a mental system, this doesn’t seem to be a necessary truth.
  11. Suppose there really were such psychological disunity within a human being. If every mental state must belong to a mental system, these disunified states would have to belong to different mental systems. In that case there would be two or more unified mental systems associated with one human organism at once. According to the psychological individuation principle there would therefore be two or more thinking beings – two or more people – “sharing” that animal. Could those people be material things? Well, what sort of material things could they be? They would have to be physically different, else there would be nothing to explain their mental differences. (No materialist would suppose that two people could be physically identical, with the same surroundings and history, yet differ radically in their mental properties.) It seems that each would have to be a different part of the animal’s brain. But that presupposes thinking-subject minimalism; and as we saw in Chapter 443, minimalism faces no end of trouble44.
  12. So the psychological individuation principle looks incompatible with our being material things. It appears to rule out any account of what we are apart from the bundle view. If this is right, it has important implications. It is not only an argument for the bundle view, but an argument against materialism generally, based on a widely held principle about personal identity. It means that you can’t be a materialist and at the same time accept everything we are inclined to say about personal identity. This is especially inconvenient for those materialists – usually advocates of the constitution view – who argue against animalism on the grounds that it is incompatible with our convictions about personal identity. It now turns out that their own view is incompatible with those convictions. Being a materialist is harder than it looks.
6.4 Can thoughts think?
  1. I hope I have shown that there is something to be said for the bundle view. Let us now look at it more critically.
  2. To my mind, the most forceful objection to the bundle view is expressed in this quotation from Reid:
      I am therefore according to Hume’s bundle view that succession of related ideas and impressions of which I have the intimate memory and consciousness. But who is the I that has this memory and consciousness of a succession of ideas and impressions? Why, it is nothing but that succession itself. Hence, I learn that this succession of ideas and impressions intimately remembers and is conscious of itself. I would wish to be further instructed whether the impressions remember and are conscious of the ideas, or the ideas remember and are conscious of the impressions, or if both remember and are conscious of both....This, however, is clear, that the succession of ideas and impressions not only remembers and is conscious, but that it judges, reasons, affirms, denies – nay, that it eats and drinks and is sometimes merry and sometimes sad. If these things can be ascribed to a succession of ideas and impressions, in a consistency with common sense, I should be very glad to know what is nonsense. (1940: 37845)
    As I understand him, Reid is objecting to the idea that a bundle or “succession” of thoughts should think or act. There may be such things as bundles of thoughts, but it is a metaphysical blunder to suppose that such things are the subjects of the thoughts that compose them. Reid doesn’t say why it is a blunder: he takes the claim to be patently absurd once we set it out clearly. That seems to me to be right. (Even philosophers sympathetic to the bundle view have agreed: see for instance Pike 1967: 16346.) But can we say more to help those not yet convinced?
  3. Well, consider the idea that a particular thought might think that very thought. Might your belief that it’s cloudy believe that it’s cloudy? Could your love of hot curry love hot curry? Does your dream of white horses dream of white horses? Surely not. Even hardened bundle theorists will accept that. Nor can your dream of white horses believe that it’s cloudy, or have any other thought. If we know anything, we know that thoughts don’t think – just as games don’t play and dances don’t dance.
  4. Now, could one hold that something composed of many thoughts might think, even if no individual thought can47? The mere fact that a thing is composed entirely of parts that don’t think needn’t prevent it from thinking. A thinking thing could be composed of unthinking atoms, for instance. (So it seems, anyway.) How might a thing made up of nothing but unthinking parts think? Well, it could think if its parts cooperated to produce thought: if they each did something other than thinking, and these individual sub-psychological activities came together to add up to an act of thinking on the part of the being they compose (see §8.448). It is hard to imagine any other way in which something composed of unthinking things could think. But could individual thoughts cooperate to produce thinking? Might they each contribute something sub-psychological, so that these contributions added up to a mental act? It would seem not. Individual thoughts are acts of thinking. They are not sub-psychological ingredients of acts of thought. And combining lots of acts doesn’t give you an actor. Combining lots of games doesn’t give you a player. Combining lots of thoughts doesn’t give you a thinker. The idea that bundles of many thoughts might think seems no more credible than the idea that an individual thought might think.
  5. Sensible as this may reasoning may sound, not all philosophers are convinced. Some deny that there is any real distinction between states and events on the one hand and the things that are in those states or that participate in those events on the other – between thoughts and thinkers, or dances and dancers, or games and players. “Physical objects,” wrote Quine, “conceived thus four-dimensionally in space-time, are not to be distinguished from events or, in the concrete sense of the term, processes49”. If there is no distinction between physical objects and events, or between actors and acts, then there is no obvious absurdity in the claim that dreams might dream, beliefs might believe, or bundles of thoughts might think.
  6. The idea that both bundles and individual thoughts think seems to imply that every thought has at least two thinkers, namely the thought itself and the bundle it is a part of. That would leave it unclear what could make it the case that you were a bundle rather than an individual thought, or how you could ever know. I don’t suppose anyone tough-minded enough to deny the distinction between actors and acts is going to lose any sleep over this. But it certainly is messy.
6.5 Thinking animals once more
  1. Suppose for the sake of argument that a bundle of thoughts really could think. What about the thinking-animal problem – the problem of how we can know that we are not those human animals that appear to think our thoughts?
  2. Well, what sort of things would animals be if the bundle view were true? Would they too be bundles of states or events or qualities? Or would they be something else – substances, perhaps? I think friends of the bundle view will want to say that animals are bundles. If the human animal located where you are were a substance, we should expect your mental states to be states of it (or perhaps states of your brain; in any case they would be states of some substance or other). If there are substances as traditionally conceived, then some states, anyway, will be states of those substances. That’s what substances are for. But if your thoughts are states of an animal, that animal ought to be a subject of those thoughts. It ought to have them. It ought to think. What could be the difference between being in a state of belief and believing, or between being in a state of hunger and being hungry? And if animals think our thoughts, yet are non-bundles different from ourselves, the thinking-animal problem arises once more.
  3. Here is another argument against a “mixed” bundle view. Anyone who says that we are bundles but organisms are substances will want to deny that organisms and other substances think. Why wouldn’t substances think? Presumably because it is impossible for them to think: substances could have non-mental properties, but never mental properties. Something about mental properties would prevent substances from having them. That would open a deep metaphysical gulf between the mental and the non-mental. It would not be substance dualism, the view that some substances have mental properties and others have physical (or non-mental) properties and nothing could have both. It would be an even more profound sort of mind-body dualism: not only could no substance with physical properties have mental properties, but no substance of any sort could have mental properties. The boundary between the physical and the mental would be the boundary between substances and non-substances.
  4. Bundle theorists are unlikely to find this attractive. Nor does the bundle view provide any support for it: the claim that thinking things are bundles rather than substances in no way suggests that material things should be substances rather than bundles. If the subjects of mental states are bundles, we should expect the subjects of non-mental states to be bundles as well. Let us suppose, then, that not only we ourselves, but human animals too are bundles of states or events or qualities. More generally, all ordinary concrete objects are bundles: there are no substances as traditionally conceived.
  5. But this would not yet solve the thinking-animal problem. If animals are bundles of states, which states make up your animal body? We should expect them to include those physical states and activities we attribute to you: your height, your mass, the activities of your digestive system, and so on. But wouldn’t they also include your mental states? If the non-mental activities going on within the animal are parts of the animal, why shouldn’t the mental activities going on within it be parts of it too? And if the animal has thoughts as parts, how can it fail to think? You think, according to the bundle view, by having thoughts as parts. Why shouldn’t the animal also think by having thoughts as parts? If the animal digested in virtue of having digestive activities as parts but didn’t think in virtue of having mental activities as parts, that would again be a metaphysical dualism of the mental and the non-mental; and we should want to know what makes the mental so different from the non-mental.
  6. One could get round this problem by saying that we are those animal bundles: we are not bundles of mental states only, but bundles composed of both mental and non-mental states. That would mean that we are animals. This would solve the thinking-animal problem, all right. However, it would raise the problem of how we know we are not thinking bundles of mental states. And wasn’t the whole point of the bundle view to offer an alternative to our being animals? Bundle-theoretic animalism would have no obvious advantage over the usual “substance animalism”.
6.6 Bundles of universals
  1. I will say no more about the view that we are bundles of mental particulars. What about the view that we are bundles of mental universals? The idea is that I am composed of such properties as believing that it’s cloudy and feeling hungry – properties that I might share with others. In particular, I am composed of those psychological properties that I have or instantiate. Now I have a hard time understanding this. I have enough trouble thinking about universals by themselves. The idea that I myself might be made up of nothing but universals – abstract objects not strictly located in space and time – sounds to me like the sort of thing that comes to one in a dream after eating too many oysters. But I will venture a few brief remarks.
  2. It is not obvious what advantages the “universal bundle view” has over the particular bundle view. If it is hard to see how a bundle of mental particulars could think, it is even harder to see how a bundle of mental universals could think. And if a bundle of mental particulars would have no grounds for believing that it was not an animal, a bundle of mental universals would seem to face the same difficulty.
  3. The universal bundle view also has troubles of its own. Start with the “problem of distinct discernibles”. There could be someone else psychologically just like me. It is of course enormously unlikely that anyone else has a mental life exactly like mine, right down to the smallest detail – so unlikely that we can be confident that it isn’t the case. But it doesn’t seem absolutely impossible. It would be like winning the lottery a million times in a row without cheating, rather than like winning the lottery without buying a ticket. It would not be possible, however, if I were a bundle of psychological universals. For then my doppelgänger and I should be composed of the very same universals. Our parts would be not merely exactly similar, but numerically the same. And surely the same universals cannot compose two different objects. At least it looks impossible to me – though my lights are dim in these regions50.
  4. Another problem is that I have different mental properties at different times. I once believed that I was 20 years old. I used to like bubble gum. There was a time when I had never heard of George W. Bush. Not any longer. But a collection of universals cannot be composed of different universals at different times. The collection composed of universals A, B, and C cannot come to be the collection of B, C, and D, let alone the collection of D, E, and F. These can only be three different collections. So it seems, anyway. Which collection of universals might I be, then? If I am the collection of A, B, and C, I must always be that collection. I cannot come to be a numerically different collection, for the simple reason that one thing cannot come to be another, numerically different thing. But if I must always be the collection of A, B, and C, then presumably I must always instantiate those universals: I must always remain just the same and can never change. Yet if I know anything, I know that I do change.
  5. Universal bundlers may reply that I am composed of temporal parts (O’Leary Hawthorne and Cover 1998: 20851). If I first instantiate the psychological universals A, B, and C (and only those), then later instantiate B, C, and D, and still later C, D, and E, then these three bundles –A-B-C, B-C-D, and C-D-E – are each temporal parts of me. Every bundle, all and only the elements of which I instantiate at some time, is one of my temporal parts. I am a bundle of bundles of universals.
  6. But this looks wrong, for reasons that have nothing to do with objections to the general idea that we are composed of temporal parts. Imagine that A-B-C, B-C-D, and C-D-E are my only temporal parts. And suppose that C-D-E is a later part of me than B-C-D, and that B-C-D is later than A-B-C. (It belongs to the idea of temporal parts that one can be in some sense later than another – though what could make one bundle of universals earlier or later than another is not obvious.) Now it seems possible for someone to instantiate the same psychological universals as I do but in a different order. For instance, someone could start by instantiating C, D, and E, then instantiate B, C, and D, and finally instantiate A, B, and C before ceasing to exist. His career would be just like mine only in reverse. Someone’s career could also be just like mine but rearranged in a more complex way. The universal bundle view appears unable to account for this possibility. It implies that such a person would have the very same parts as I have, making us both qualitatively and numerically identical. But surely we should be both qualitatively and numerically different.
  7. Technically minded philosophers can no doubt think of solutions to these problems; but they are unlikely to hold much attraction, apart from their ingenuity. Those drawn to the idea that particulars are composed of universals are probably better off with the logical-construction view of §6.152. They could say that statements about people and other particulars are true if and only if certain universals relate in such and such a way, without saying that particular things are actually composed of universals – much as phenomenalists say that statements about physical objects are true if and only if certain facts about sense-experiences hold, without saying that physical objects are composed of sense-experiences. Whatever its merits, though, this is not a view about what we are.
6.7 The program view
  1. One final thought that has some affinity with the bundle view is that we are something like computer programs. We stand to our bodies or our brains as computer programs stand to the physical machines they run on. We are not made of matter, or of particular states or qualities. We’re not made of anything particular at all. Call this the program view.
  2. The word 'program', like many expressions, has a type-token ambiguity. For instance, the English language has some 300,000 words – that is, word types. If you have to submit an essay of not more than 5000 words, however, this means word tokens: if the word ‘and’ occurs ten times on page two it counts as ten words, not one. Just as we distinguish word tokens from word types, we need to distinguish the particular copy of the word-processing program Mariner Write 3.6.2 now running on my Macintosh from the type or universal of which it is an instance. The copy I am using to write these words, if there is such a thing, is presumably some sort of concrete electronic event or state. It has a fairly definite location, changes over time, and will cease to exist when I shut down the computer or erase it from the hard drive. But when we speak of the word-processor Write 3.6.2, as when we speak of the word ‘and’, we don't seem to be referring to any particular, changeable thing located at a particular time and place, but rather to the universal of which the particular copies are instances. In any case, it is computer programs as universals that interest us here. The idea that we are computer-program tokens would be a version of the bundle view. I want to consider the view that we are universals.
  3. Let us not confuse the view that we are computer programs with the so-called computational theory of mind. This is roughly the claim that human cognition is a computational process: a matter of manipulating symbols according to mechanical rules. The program view may entail the computational theory of mind, but the computational theory does not entail that we are programs; in fact it has no obvious implications at all about what we are.
  4. It is hard to find an explicit endorsement of the program view in the philosophical literature. This quotation from Dennett comes close:
      If [as Dennett urges] you think of yourself as a center of narrative gravity..., your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative..., which could theoretically survive indefinitely many switches of medium, be teleported as readily (in principle) as the evening news, and stored indefinitely as sheer information. If what you are is that organization of information that has structured your body's control system (or, to put it in its more usual provocative form, if what you are is the program that runs on your brain's computer), then you could in principle survive the death of your body as intact as a program can survive the destruction of the computer on which it was created and first run. (1991: 43053)
    The program view is also a common theme in science fiction, and I have found philosophers attracted to it when pressed in conversation.
  5. Here are some considerations that look like arguments for the program view. In his story "Where am I?" (197854), Dennett invites us to suppose that we could survive the complete destruction of our brains if the information encoded there were “downloaded” into an electronic computer. What sort of thing could literally be transferred by wire from a human being to a computer? It is tempting to say that no concrete object literally moves from brain to machine; all that really happens is that the machine comes to instantiate or realize the informational state that the brain first instantiated. All that is first “in” the brain and then “in” the computer is some sort of universal. And the universals that computers are designed to instantiate or realize are programs. So the view that you could be downloaded into a computer might suggest that you are a program. Those who accept the possibility of resurrection or reincarnation but hesitate to accept Cartesian dualism may find themselves drawn to the program view for a similar reason.
  6. Or consider fission cases. We don’t want to say that transplanting each of your cerebral hemispheres into a different head would necessarily destroy you. We want to say that both resulting people would be you. Yet there are two of them and only one of you, and two things cannot be one thing. And we don’t want to say, as the temporal-parts view does, that there were really two of you all along. Friends of the program view can say that both offshoots are you even though there was only one of you to begin with. They cannot, of course, say that each offshoot is numerically identical with you, but they can say that each is you in the sense of being a concrete instance or token of you: both could be you in the way that the tattered paperback on my shelf and the calf-bound volume on yours are both Moby Dick. Where there was previously only one instance of you, there are now two. What if one of the offshoots has a beard and the other doesn’t? Do you have a beard, or don’t you? Well, if you are a universal, you can’t strictly have any physical feature – beard, nose, sunburn, or what have you- -but speaking more loosely we can say that you have a beard insofar as one instance of you has a beard strictly speaking, and that you have no beard insofar as another instance of you has none. Asking whether you have a beard would be like asking whether Moby Dick has a torn cover. No account of what happens in the fission story is very attractive, and someone might prefer this story to the alternatives.
  7. Finally, consider artificial intelligence. Many people think that it is possible in theory to build and program an electronic computer in a way that would produce thought as genuine as our own. It is no accident that this is commonly described by saying that computer programs may one day be intelligent. There is something odd about saying that computers – material objects made of metal and plastic – may one day be intelligent. If we were to produce an intelligent being by programming a computer, it would seem wrong to say that we had made the computer itself intelligent – that what was previously an ordinary desktop workstation had now acquired the ability to think. When the machine on which the crucial program was first run finally lands in the dustbin, no one would point to it and say that for a few exciting hours that piece of hardware was once intelligent. Nor would the intelligent thing seem to be a concrete electronic state or event going on within the computer at some particular time, or for that matter a material object the computer temporarily constitutes. It seems wrong to say that shutting down the program or erasing it from the computer's data-storage devices would destroy an intelligent being. If anything there is intelligent, it might be more natural to say that it continues to exist as long as the relevant information is still stored somewhere or other. And it would be tempting to say that the intelligent thing we had created could be stored on CDs and run on different machines, just like the word-processor Write 3.6.2. It is tempting to say, in other words, that the subject of artificial intelligence – the artificially intelligent being – would be a program.
  8. But if artificially intelligent beings would be computer programs, we should expect naturally intelligent beings such as ourselves to be programs too, or at least things of the same ontological kind as programs. If an electronic computer of the right sort (the right hardware, the right programming, the right surroundings, and so on) could “realize” an intelligent universal, then a biological organism of the right sort ought to be able to realize an intelligent universal too. How could the fact that the underlying physical processes are electronic and artificial in the one case and neurochemical and natural in the other make a difference to the metaphysical category of the resulting intelligent being? And if each normal human organism is the home of a thinking universal, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are those universals.
  9. Despite these arguments, however, there are grave problems with the program view. For one, it is very hard to say which program, or which universal more generally, you or I would be. This human organism – my body – now instantiates all sorts of universals. If it instantiates any program, it probably instantiates a vast number of them. And it is hard to see what could make just one of those programs intelligent and sentient. But if there are many intelligent, sentient programs “running on my biological hardware”, what could make it the case that just one of them was me?
  10. Even if it should turn out that there is a computer program, the running of which is uniquely responsible for my current mental life, it would be doubtful whether it has always run on my brain. Was the very program responsible for my current mental life responsible for it in my infancy? It is more likely that my brain ran a different program then. If brains run programs at all, they are constantly being reprogrammed. But I cannot be numerically identical with different programs at different times. So if I were the intelligent program now running on my brain, I should not be the program that ran on my brain when I was a child, or for that matter the program that will be running on my brain in a year’s time. My existence would be brief. Or perhaps I should be eternal and timeless, and my career as an embodied human person would be brief. Neither view is very attractive.
  11. Most obviously, universals don’t do anything. They don’t act. They don’t change. It isn’t the program type Write 3.6.2 – the program that you too can use on your own Macintosh – that converts my keystrokes into text, but rather a particular, local instance of it. Nor does Write change when I install it on my machine, or when I start it up or shut it down. Only the concrete instance of it running on my machine changes. Or rather, the program changes only in the way in which the number twelve changed by ceasing to be the number of apostles when Judas hanged himself: it undergoes only “Cambridge change”. It doesn’t undergo any real, intrinsic change. Computer programs as universals are inert and immutable.
  12. But I am not inert or immutable. If I know anything, I know that I am writing these words- -words that would not be written were it not for my actions. (Even if Descartes’ evil genius is deceiving me and I am not really writing, I am still doing something.) I know that I sometimes feel tired, sometimes hear the sound of the wind, sometimes wish I were somewhere else – and sometimes don’t. It couldn’t be the case that what seems to be real, intrinsic change in me is really only Cambridge change – that when I seem to grow more tired all that really happens is that something else – a particular human organism that instantiates me – grows more tired, while I myself remain ever the same, like the number twelve. If I am a universal, I don’t think or act- -not really. The thinker of these thoughts and the author of these words is not a universal. But if there is a concrete thing that thinks my thoughts and performs my actions, and an immutable universal that can be said to think and act only in the loose sense of having a concrete instance that think and acts, isn’t it clear that I am the concrete thing?



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Bundles")

Footnote 14:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 15:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 16:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 17: Footnote 27: Footnote 28: Footnote 29: Footnote 33: Footnote 34: Footnote 35: Footnote 36: Footnote 37: Footnote 38: Footnote 39: Footnote 40: Footnote 44:
  • Some of those troubles might be mitigated somewhat by combining minimalism with the psychological individuation principle. Such a combination might be worth exploring, though I doubt whether the end result would hold much attraction. I argue at greater length for the claim that the psychological unity principle rules out our being material things in Olson 2003.
  • See "Olson (Eric) - Was Jekyll Hyde?".
Footnote 45: Footnote 46: Footnote 47:
  • From here to the end of the Section, the text differs radically from the book.
Footnote 49: Footnote 50: Footnote 51: Footnote 53: Footnote 54:


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Souls"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 7 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
  • This chapter is about the view that we are simple immaterial substances – immaterialism – and related views. It is claimed to be best supported by the difficulty of saying what material things we could be.
  • For instance, the paradox of increase threatens to show that nothing can have different parts at different times, and materialists can solve it only at considerable cost.
  • Immaterialism is then shown to face grave problems concerning the relation of souls to material things. Compound dualism, Swinburne's view that each of us is composed of an immaterial soul and a material body, is shown to face difficulties in addition to those of immaterialism.
  • The Thomistic view that we are hylomorphic1 compounds is shown to combine the problems of compound dualism with those of the bundle view2.
  • The views of Chisholm and Lowe that we are simple material things are then critically discussed.
  • Sections
    1. Immaterialism3
    2. Traditional arguments for immaterialism4
    3. The paradox of increase5
    4. The cost of materialism6
    5. Objections to immaterialism7
    6. Compound dualism8
    7. Hylomorphism9
    8. Simple materialism10

Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File11.

Write-up12 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Souls

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 7, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Souls", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online13 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book14.
  • The text differs slightly from the book.
  • The electronic version of the Chapter was paged backwards, though I have repaired it in the text below.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there15.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
Full Text
  1. Immaterialism16
  2. Traditional arguments for immaterialism17
  3. The paradox of increase18
  4. The cost of materialism19
  5. Objections to immaterialism20
  6. Compound dualism21
  7. Hylomorphism22
  8. Simple materialism23
7.1 Immaterialism
  1. We might be immaterial substances: souls for short. Or each of us might have a soul as a part, along with something material: we might each be composed of an immaterial soul and a material body. I will consider this variant in §7.6.
  2. What is an immaterial substance? Not a sort of immaterial matter or stuff. A soul is a substance in the sense of something that exists in its own right and is not a mere state or aspect of something else. What it is for a substance to be immaterial is not easy to say. It may suffice to say that souls are immaterial in that they are not made up, even partly, of matter – the stuff that makes up sticks and stones – or that they lack mass, energy, temperature, electric charge, and other paradigmatically physical properties. This characterization has the disadvantage of being entirely negative: it tells us what souls are only by telling us what they’re not. Descartes and Leibniz tried to characterize souls positively by saying that their essence is thinking. They are mental through and through: their only intrinsic properties are mental properties. I don’t want to assume that. Clearly, though, souls as immaterial substances are supposed to have mental properties, even if they have intrinsic non-mental properties as well: they are supposed to be thinking substances.
  3. Most philosophers who believe in souls take them to be mereologically simple – that is, to lack proper parts. They deny that souls are made up of “smaller” parts that may belong to different souls at different times or exist without being parts of any soul at all. Likewise, souls are usually not taken to be made up of some sort of immaterial stuff that could exist without being formed into souls. It is certainly hard to imagine what the parts or the stuff of an immaterial soul might be like – more difficult even than to think about souls generally. And many of the arguments for the view that we are souls imply that souls are simple.
  4. Call the view that we are immaterial substances immaterialism. It is not the same as substance dualism: the view that substances come in two exclusive kinds, thinking immaterial substances and unthinking material ones. Immaterialism does not imply that there are any material substances (Berkeley was an immaterialist). Another difference is that according to substance dualism all thinkers are immaterial, whereas immaterialism says only that we are. For all immaterialism says, there may be material thinkers other than ourselves. It would of course be very strange to suppose that some thinkers are material but we are immaterial. Still, it is a possible view. Despite their differences, however, substance dualism and immaterialism are close cousins: most immaterialists are dualists, and most discussions of immaterialism, whether critical or supportive, assume the reality of material things, and are thus discussions of substance dualism.
  5. It would be an understatement to say that immaterialism is out of favor nowadays. Most philosophers of mind treat it as little more than a historical curiosity. Introductory textbooks dispense with it briefly in their opening pages, often citing objections that would be considered flimsy if they were directed against a more fashionable view. In the current intellectual climate the interesting question about immaterialism is not whether it might be true, but how the likes of Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz could ever have believed it.
  6. I will try not to be so dismissive. Immaterialism has its problems – plenty of them. But it also has hidden virtues. Its strength is the weakness of materialism. As I see it, that weakness is not the traditional problem of how a material thing could think or be conscious, but rather the problem of what material things we thinkers could plausibly be said to be. It is the ontology of material objects, not the nature of the mental, that makes trouble for materialism. One way to avoid that trouble is to say that we are immaterial.
7.2 Traditional arguments for immaterialism
  1. There are many traditional arguments for the claim that we are immaterial substances. These three are perhaps the most common24.
  2. The divisibility argument says that any material thing, or at least any that is a candidate for being a thinker, is divisible into parts. But no thinking thing could be divided into parts: the very idea of half a thinker – half a mind – is absurd. Thinkers, ourselves included, must therefore be simple, and hence immaterial.
  3. The argument from disembodied survival says that it is possible for me to survive in a wholly disembodied state. But no wholly material thing could survive in a disembodied state. Not only could no material thing become disembodied and remain a material thing, in the way that no white thing could become blue while remaining a white thing. More strongly, nothing can start out as a material thing and then stop being material and carry on existing in an entirely immaterial state. Anything that could become disembodied must be at least partly immaterial already. It follows that I am not a material thing. (It doesn’t follow that I am a wholly immaterial thing: I might have both material and immaterial parts. But for reasons we will come to presently, immaterialism is the most likely conclusion.)
  4. The third argument says that thinkers must be immaterial because we cannot account for the nature of certain mental phenomena in physical terms. We might call it the inadequacy-of-physicalism argument. One version goes like this: if we try to conceive of thought or consciousness arising out of the interactions of physical particles, we draw a blank. No matter how carefully we examine the workings of even the most complex physical object, we shall never see anything that could account for thinking or consciousness. This is not merely because we don’t fully understand the physical workings of the brain. It doesn’t matter what those workings are: as long as they are physical, it will be inconceivable how they could produce thought or consciousness. Hence, mental phenomena cannot arise out of the interactions of physical particles. But if any material thing could think, its thinking would have to arise out of the interactions of its physical particles. (What else could explain why only material things with a very special physical structure – things with brains – show evidence of thinking?) Therefore no material thing could think: we thinkers must be immaterial.
  5. If there is anything that the critics of immaterialism have got right, it is that these arguments are unpersuasive.
  6. The main premise of the divisibility argument is that no thinking thing could be divided into parts. But how can we know that without already knowing whether a thinking thing could be material? Suppose there were a material thinker: a biological organism, say. In that case we should understand well enough how a thinker could be divided into parts, and what the result would be. So unless we can rule out this possibility from the start, there is no evident reason to agree that thinkers must be indivisible.
  7. The second argument asserts that it is possible for us, but not for any material thing, to survive in a disembodied state. But why suppose that we can survive in a disembodied state? If we already knew that we were at least partly immaterial, that might give us a reason to suppose that we could survive disembodied. But suppose we don’t know that. Suppose that for all we know we are entirely material. Then for all we know we can’t survive disembodied. If there were material thinkers, they would have the same grounds for supposing that they could survive in a disembodied state as we have for supposing that we could; yet they would be mistaken. How can we be sure that we’re not mistaken in this way? Only by ruling out the possibility of our being material ourselves. But that is what we were trying to establish in the first place.
  8. As for the inadequacy-of-physicalism argument: it may well be that we cannot conceive how a material thing could produce thought or consciousness. But then we can no more conceive how an immaterial thing could produce thought or consciousness: no matter how carefully we reflect on the notion of an immaterial substance, we shall never find anything that could account for thought or consciousness. It is no easier to explain a thing’s ability to think on the hypothesis that it is immaterial than it is on the assumption that it is material (Taylor 1963: 25). And if an immaterial thing could produce thought in an ultimately mysterious and inexplicable way, why couldn’t a material thing produce thought in an ultimately mysterious and inexplicable way? There is of course more to be said about these arguments, both on the part of the prosecution and on the part of the defense; but not here. Let us turn to an altogether different sort of case for immaterialism.
7.3 The paradox of increase
  1. One obvious advantage of immaterialism is that it can solve the thinking-animal problem. It could hardly be the case that both immaterial human souls and human organisms think. If we thinkers are immaterial, human animals will lack any mental properties at all. At any rate they will be unable to think as we do. So if we were souls we could know that we are not thinking animals. For that matter, we could know that we are not thinking brains. Only one being would think your thoughts. Whether any other account of what we are has this advantage is contentious (see Chapter 9). Of course, immaterialists will still need to explain why human animals cannot think. But they will have resources for doing so that are unavailable to materialists. It is easier to explain why human animals cannot think on the hypothesis that no material thing could think than it is to explain why they can’t think even though other material things can think.
  2. Here is something different: a problem for almost any account of what we are save immaterialism25. If we were anything other than simple immaterial substances – if we were animals, or material things constituted by animals, or parts of animals, or bundles of mental states, for example – then we should have different parts at different times. We should sometimes grow by acquiring parts, and sometimes shrink by losing them. But there is a metaphysical obstacle in the way of a thing’s acquiring new parts.
  3. Suppose we have an object, A – anything at all – and we want to make it bigger by adding a part, B. That is, we want to bring it about that A first lacks and then has B as a part. Let us therefore conjoin B to A in some appropriate way. Never mind what this conjoining amounts to: let us do whatever it would take to make B a part of A if it can ever be. Have we thereby made B a part of A?
  4. It seems not. We seem only to have brought it about that B is attached to A, like this: Figure 7.1 We have rearranged A's surroundings by giving it a new neighbor, but we haven't given it a new part. If we have made B a part of anything, we have made it a part of the thing made up of A and B after our conjoining. But that thing didn't gain any new parts either. It didn't exist at all when we began. Our conjoining B to A brought it into existence. Or if it did exist at the outset, it already had B as a part then and we didn't make it any bigger, but merely changed it from a disconnected object (like an archipelago) to a connected one. It seems that nothing we can do would ever give A a new part. And because this reasoning makes no assumptions about the nature of A or B or the manner in which they are conjoined, it entails that nothing, including you or I, can grow by gaining new parts. This is the paradox of increase or growing argument.
  5. A similar argument appears to rule out a thing’s shrinking by losing parts. Suppose we want to make an object X smaller by removing a part, Y. That is, we want to bring it about that X first does and then doesn't have Y as a part. Let us therefore detach Y from X in some appropriate way: let us do whatever would bring it about that Y ceases to be a part of X if X can ever lose Y as a part and carry on without it. Have we thereby made it the case that X no longer has Y as a part? Have we made X smaller? It seems not. X starts out made up of Y and the rest of X – call the rest of X Z – like this: Figure 7.2 What happens to X when we detach Y? Apparently it ceases to exist. Or if it does still exist, it still has Y as a part, and we have merely changed it from a connected object to a scattered one. Either way, it doesn't shrink by losing a part. And of course Y and Z don't lose any parts either. It seems that nothing we can do would make anything smaller by removing one of its parts. Alert readers will recognize this as the amputation puzzle of §3.3. Like the growing argument, it assumes nothing about the nature of X or Y or the manner in which Y is detached. So it threatens to show that nothing could ever lose a part: the very idea of shrinking by losing parts is incoherent.
  6. If these arguments are sound, it is hard to see how anything could exchange an old part for a new one without shrinking or growing either. So they suggest the more general conclusion that nothing can have different parts at different times: it is absolutely impossible for anything to have a certain part at one time and exist without having that thing as a part at another time. This is the doctrine of mereological constancy. (It is not the same as mereological essentialism, the claim that nothing could exist without having just the parts it actually has. Mereological constancy does not entail mereological essentialism: the impossibility of my having a certain thing as a part at one time and lacking it at another would not rule out my existing without ever having it as a part. It might be possible for me to have had different parts all along, even I cannot change my parts.)
  7. The doctrine of mereological constancy is plainly trouble for anyone who takes us to be material things. For that matter, it would be trouble if nothing could grow by gaining parts, even if mereological constancy in its full generality were false; but it is simpler to put the argument in terms of mereological constancy. If you are a material thing, your atoms are constantly coming and going, owing to metabolic turnover. Mereological constancy implies that the atoms you assimilate do not become parts of you, and the atoms you expel do not cease to be parts of you. It follows that you are not the being who bore your name a moment ago, for you now have parts that were not then parts of that being. Nor are you the being who will answer to your name a moment hence, for that being will have parts then that are not now parts of you. What appears to be a persisting human being is in reality a series of numerically different beings, succeeding one another at a rate of trillions per second. You retain your human form for only a moment.
  8. What happens to you when your metabolism assimilates or expels an atom – supposing that you are a material thing? Mereological constancy by itself does not answer this question. It says only that you don’t gain or lose any parts. That doesn't tell us what happens to you because it doesn't say what it would be for you to gain or lose parts. Specifically, it doesn't tell us whether the atoms you shed thereby stop being parts of you, or whether the atoms your metabolism assimilates are parts of you before it assimilates them. And what happens to you when you expel an atom depends, among other things, on whether that atom continues to be a part of you when it no longer coheres with the rest of your atoms.
  9. Suppose first that it doesn’t. Then according to mereological constancy you – or perhaps we ought to say the being we now call you – exist only as long as all your current atoms stick together: not long at all. As soon as you shed an atom, you cease to exist and are instantly replaced by something new: something very like the human being who existed a moment earlier, but numerically different because it has different parts. You are what we might call a momentary mass of matter.
  10. Now suppose the opposite: that your atoms do remain parts of you when they disperse. In that case you presumably continue to exist for as long as your atoms exist, no matter how they come to be arranged. (If your atoms remain parts of you even when they are scattered to the four winds, it is hard to see what could cause them to cease to be parts of you, save destroying them.) So the being we now call you survives the expulsion of an atom, and merely changes thereby from a connected object to a disconnected one. Part of you remains in one piece; the rest of you disperses. In a few years’ time, when all your current atoms have been expelled, you will be scattered thinly across the biosphere. You were similarly scattered in the past. You have existed for billions of years, and will continue to exist until one of your atoms is destroyed. You have spent most of your career up to now as a nondescript and widely scattered cloud of cosmic dust. More recently you became confined to the earth, and a short time ago you began to coalesce into human form. But the moment you become fully human you immediately begin to disperse once more. In all likelihood your future holds nothing but eons of unremitting tedium. As in the first story (where you perish when you shed an atom), you are instantly replaced, when you cease to be human, by another human being. The difference is that on the second story the beings that successively bear your name exist before and after they take on human form, whereas on the first story they exist only for the brief moment when they are human. On this account you are what we might call a persisting mass of matter.
  11. Now these are, I suppose, possible views about what we are. The momentary-mass view would be that each of us is a momentary mass of matter: a material thing that exists only as long as the atoms composing it remain stuck together. The persisting-mass view would be that each of us is a persisting mass of matter: a material thing that exists if and only if the atoms that compose it at any time exist. Either view would make it impossible to say which mass of matter you are. Presumably you would be a mass the size of a human being, rather than something larger or smaller. But a different mass would bear your name at every moment, and it would be entirely arbitrary to say that any one of them, rather than another, was you. In this respect both proposals resemble the stage view (§5.8).
  12. The view that we are masses of matter, whether momentary or persisting, can only be described as dreary. If that is what materialism comes to, so much the worse for it. It would be no help to suppose that we are bundles of mental states, for mental states come and go nearly as rapidly as atoms do. Given mereological constancy, the only account of what we are that is compatible with our having anything like the sort of careers we think we have – with our persisting as human thinkers for dozens of years – would seem to be immaterialism. So here is an argument for immaterialism: Nothing can have different parts at different times; but the only sensible account of what we are that is compatible with this is immaterialism; therefore we are immaterial substances.
  13. There are two broad ways of resisting this argument. One is to argue that we needn’t accept the doctrine of mereological constancy. That is, we might try to solve the paradox of increase and the amputation puzzle. The other is to propose a materialist account of what we are that is compatible with mereological constancy. The momentary- and persisting-mass views are examples of this, and in §7.7 we will consider two more. But let us first see what it would take to avoid mereological constancy.
7.4 The cost of materialism
  1. What would it take to solve the paradox of increase? Let us examine it more closely.
  2. The paradox purported to show that an object, A, can never acquire a new part, B. Well, suppose for the sake of argument that conjoining B to A in some appropriate way does make it a part of A. Suppose, that is, that A and B don’t come to make up some new thing, as Figure 7.1 invites us to think, but rather that A comes to be made up of B and something else. That something else may appear to be A itself: it is made of the same matter as A was a moment earlier (supposing that A is a material thing), and that matter continues to be arranged in just the same way. It differs from A as it was before only in its surroundings. This fact – that the thing B ends up attached to appears to be A – is what supports the claim that B never comes to be a part of A, thereby generating the paradox. But let us try to resist this thought. To avoid assuming the point at issue, call the thing that looks like A and ends up attached to B, C. Suppose, then, that when we conjoin B to A we make it a part of A, so that A comes to be made up of B and C: Figure 7.3
  3. Is there anything wrong with this? Well, where did C came from? Where was it before we attached B? Presumably it existed then: conjoining B to A didn’t bring C into being. If conjoining two objects adds anything to the furniture of the earth, it ought to be something made up of those two objects. We don’t expect conjoining B to A to create a new object that is now just like A was before the conjoining. We can make this more vivid by imagining the process in reverse: suppose A is made up of C and B and we want to make it smaller by removing B as a part. If attaching B to A brings C into being, then detaching B again ought to destroy C. But surely we can’t cause an object to cease to exist just by detaching from it an object that was never a part of it. We can’t destroy an object merely by changing its surroundings.
  4. Suppose, then, that C existed before B was attached. Presumably C was the same size as A was then: attaching B didn’t make C any bigger or smaller. A and C must have occupied exactly the same place before B was attached. So Figure 7.3 ought to show A and C superimposed on the left-hand side. But their relationship then is more intimate than mere colocation: they coincide materially. They are made of the same matter then, and share all their proper parts; or at least there are things that compose A, and also compose C, before B is attached.
  5. But it seems that two different things cannot coincide materially. The same parts cannot make up two different wholes at once. In that case C really is A, and our story has fallen apart. C wasn’t supposed to acquire B as a part: that was the whole point of bringing C into the story. But if C is A, then A didn’t acquire B as a part either, contradicting our original assumption that A did acquire B as a part. That assumption has therefore been reduced to absurdity.
  6. Let us make the argument’s premises explicit. First we supposed, for reductio, that conjoining B with A makes it a part of A:
      1. A acquires B as a part.
    In that case, we reasoned, A comes to be composed of B and a third thing, “the rest of A apart from B”, which we called C:
      2. When A acquires B as a part, A comes to be composed of B and C.
    Now obviously B doesn’t come to be a part of C when we attach it:
      3. C does not acquire B as a part.
    And making B a part of A doesn’t appear to bring C into being; rather, C existed before we attached B to it:
      4. C exists before B is attached.
    Nor did C get any bigger or smaller when we attached B: it had the same boundaries, before B was attached, as A had then. What’s more, there were things that composed A and also composed C then:
      5. C coincides materially with A before B is attached.
    But
      6. No two things can coincide materially at the same time.
    And 5 and 6 imply that
      7. C = A.
    But if C is A, and C doesn’t acquire B as a part (3), then neither does A:
      8. A does not acquire B as a part,
    contrary to 1. The assumption that A gets bigger by gaining a part leads to a contradiction, and is therefore false. There are, as far as I can see, five possible ways of blocking this argument.
  7. One is to challenge its logic26. Someone might say that C and A are one thing before we attach B and two things afterwards. What start out as a thing and itself come to be a thing and another thing. Identity is time-relative: things might be identical at one time and distinct at another, just as you and I might be neighbors today and not neighbors tomorrow. So all that follows from 5 and 6 is that C is identical with A before B is attached, not that C is identical with A simpliciter. If C is not A after B is attached, then the fact that C doesn’t gain B as a part does not imply that A doesn’t gain B as a part, and the argument fails. This idea – call it the way of funny logic – is hard to take seriously. Suppose that C and A are one thing now but two things tomorrow. The suggestion is that tomorrow B will be a part of A and not a part of C. So A is about to get bigger, but C isn’t. That means that A now has a property that C now lacks, namely being such that it will have B as a part tomorrow. But C and A are now the very same thing. How can a thing now have a property that that very thing now lacks27? If the growing argument is logically impeccable, those who reject its conclusion will have to deny one of its premises.
  8. The first substantial premise is 2, that if A acquires B as a part, it comes to be composed of B and “the rest of A”, C. This assumption makes trouble because C appears to be identical with A; and since C doesn’t acquire B as a part, it follows that A doesn’t either. So we might deny that there is ever such a thing as C. Of course there is something in the box labelled ‘C’ in Figure 7.3. B is never A’s only part: there is another part of A that B ends up attached to. But there is no one such thing as “all of A apart from B”. There is no one thing whose boundaries the box represents. There are only a lot of smaller things – D, E, and F, say – each of which partly fills that space. We can illustrate this by re-drawing the picture so: Figure 7.4 before: after: A starts out composed of D, E, and F, and when it gains B as a part it comes to be composed of D, E, F, and B. But D, E, and F don’t themselves compose anything after B is attached: there is nothing that has D, E, and F as parts then, and every part of which then shares a part with D, E, or F. The proposal is not merely that D, E, and F don’t then compose anything interesting, or don’t compose a “genuine object” or the like. It has to be that they don’t then compose anything at all. Call this the way of sparse ontology.
  9. We can perhaps best see how surprising this proposal is by considering the corresponding solution to the amputation puzzle (van Inwagen 1981, Lowe 2002: 75-76). (If the way of sparse ontology is to provide a general solution to the paradox of increase, we should expect it to solve the amputation puzzle in a similar way.) That would be to deny that anything ever has a proper part that it could be pared down to. Assuming that you could survive the loss of your left hand, this implies that there is now no such thing as your left-hand complement – “all of you but your left hand”. Nothing wrong with that, you might think: hand complements would be arbitrary, gerrymandered objects, and there is little reason to believe that they exist. But it has worrying implications. For one thing, if there are no hand complements, there are unlikely to be any hands. What principled reason could there be to suppose that there are hands but no hand complements? Hands don’t seem to be ontologically special. More seriously, the way of sparse ontology implies that there is now no such thing as your head either – assuming that it is possible for you to survive, even briefly, being pared down to a head. That would demolish the ontology of “parts of the body” that we learned at nursery school – hardly a comforting thought.
  10. A third way of resisting the argument is to accept that C exists after B is attached, but deny that it exists beforehand (step 4). We could say, rather, that attaching B to A brings C into being. More generally, whenever any object gains a part, a new thing, composed of the object’s original parts, is thereby created. Suppose we have a house made of red Lego bricks, and we make it bigger by adding an extension made of blue Lego bricks. (If any material thing can grow by acquiring new parts, it ought to be possible for a house to do so.) When the original red house expands by acquiring blue parts, a new red house, composed of the original red bricks, immediately comes into being to take its place. Or perhaps we ought not to call the new object a house: maybe no proper part of a house can be a house itself. In any case, the building work creates a new material object very like a house.
  11. Applied to the amputation puzzle, the claim is that whenever anything loses a part, the complement of that part – the thing composed of all the object’s parts save those that overlap the lost part – ceases to exist. So there is now such a thing as your head, but cutting away the rest of you would necessarily destroy it: the head you would be in this radically maimed condition would not be the head you have now.
  12. Call this the way of funny persistence conditions (Burke 1994, 1996; Rea 2000). It is no easier to believe than the way of sparse ontology. When we lay bricks, we may expect to create a new object made up of those bricks. But the way of funny persistence conditions has the baffling implication that laying only blue bricks can bring into being an object made up entirely of red bricks. Likewise, we can destroy an object made entirely of red bricks by moving only blue bricks. This is not merely implausible, but arbitrary and unprincipled: it implies that things come into being and pass away in an apparently capricious and inexplicable way.
  13. The next questionable claim in the argument is 6, that no two things can coincide materially at once. As we saw in Chapter 3, constitutionalists say that different things can coincide materially at once. They will say that C is not identical with A; it begins, rather, by coinciding materially with A, and ends up as a part of A when A grows by assimilating B. Likewise, when an object shrinks by losing a part, it comes to coincide materially with the complement of that part – the largest part of the object that didn’t share a part, before the loss, with the lost part. Call this the way of coincidence.
  14. This may sound like a neat solution: simply drop the dogmatic assumption that no two things can be in the same place and made of the same matter at once. In fact some philosophers use the amputation case as an argument for constitutionalism (Thomson 1983). But if this solves the puzzle, it creates another: If A got bigger, why didn’t C get bigger too? If conjoining B to A makes it a part of A, why doesn’t conjoining it in the same way to C make it a part of C? Presumably it is no accident, according to the way of coincidence, that A acquires B as a part and C doesn’t: if we conjoined B a thousand times, it would come to be a part of A each time and would never become a part of C. A, but not C, has the capacity to grow by gaining B as a part. Presumably C cannot gain any parts at all. This is surprising. A and C are exactly alike before the attachment. They have the same parts then, arranged in the same way. They are physically identical. They have the same surroundings. They may even have the same past history. There is no difference between A and C that could account for their differing capacities to acquire parts. In any case, we saw earlier that constitutionalism faces all manner of problems.
  15. Finally there is the way of temporal parts (Heller 1984, Sider 2001: ch. 5). Suppose, to make things simple, that A’s acquiring B is the only change of parts in its career, and that B comes to an end when A does. Then A is composed of C and the largest temporal part of B located after it is attached. On this view our “before” and “after” pictures are misleading; it is better to use a spacetime diagram, where the vertical axis represents space, the horizontal axis represents time, and A is the shaded object: Figure 7.5.
  16. The way of temporal parts is hard to compare with the alternatives because it holds that things have their parts without temporal qualification. In stating the paradox we spoke of the parts a thing has at some time, much as we speak of how tall something is at some time. But according to the way of temporal parts things have their parts timelessly (§5.2). A thing may have parts that are located at different times, just as it may have parts located in different places, but those parts are parts of it simpliciter. Like the way of coincidence, the way of temporal parts rejects 6, the claim that no two things can coincide materially at a time. But because fourdimensionalists take parthood to be a timeless relation, they understand 6 differently from coincidentalists. On their view, for things to coincide at a time is simply for them to share those of their temporal parts that are located then. So as they see it, A coincides with C before B is attached only in the way that two roads may coincide for part of their length.
  17. Four-dimensionalists accept the atemporal analog of 6: that no two things can coincide materially simpliciter. A differs from C, on their view, in that A but not C has the later temporal parts of B as parts. This gives the way of temporal parts an advantage over the way of coincidence: it is not committed to the mysterious view that things can differ in their kind and their capacity to gain parts without differing in their internal structure or surroundings. But as we saw in chapter 5, the way of temporal parts is no less controversial than any other solution to the paradox.
  18. To my mind, none of these five ways offers a satisfying solution to the paradox of increase. It is far from clear whether any of them is better than the mereological ailment it is meant to cure. This might make the combination of mereological constancy and immaterialism look rather attractive.
  19. Whether this is a strong argument for immaterialism, though, is uncertain. Even if the argument for mereological constancy is sound, there is peril in inferring from this that we are immaterial. Consider those material objects that, according to mereological constancy, take on human form for a moment before either ceasing to exist (if they are momentary masses of matter) or gradually dispersing (if they are persisting masses). Each of those beings has, for a moment at least, a working human brain and nervous system. It is surrounded by a community of thinkers and speakers. It has the same evolutionary history as we have. That ought to suffice for it to have mental properties. It ought to be conscious and intelligent, just as we are, for as long as it remains human. The material thing that is now human and sitting in your chair ought to be a subject of your current thoughts and sensations: it ought to think what you now think and feel what you now feel.
  20. But if there are material beings thinking our thoughts, even if each one thinks for only a moment, there are unlikely to be immaterial beings thinking our thoughts as well. No one ever supposed that for each human person there is, at any moment, both an entirely material thing and an entirely immaterial thing, each bearing all the mental properties that person has then. And if there is no immaterial thing thinking your thoughts, then you are not an immaterial thing. (Surely you are not an unthinking immaterial thing.)
  21. Those who say that you and I are immaterial will want to deny that any material things think our thoughts. But the argument from mereological constancy, by itself anyway, gives no grounds for such a denial. The claim that material things have careers very different from the ones we thought they have looks consistent with their being able to think as we do while they are human. Put it this way: the argument from mereological constancy implies that we are either immaterial things or material things with alien careers. But it gives no reason for choosing the first alternative over the second. For that we should need a reason to suppose that the material things we should be if we were material at all would lack the mental properties that we have. But we appear to have no such reason.
  22. You might argue that nothing could think for only a trillionth of a second. That just isn’t long enough. Since no material thing would have more than a trillionth of a second to think if mereological constancy were true, it would follow that no material thing could think. This is certainly an argument worth considering. On the other hand, even if no isolated being that existed for only a trillionth of a second could think, maybe a thing could have a mental property for any length of time—even for an instant—if it has the right causal antecedents28. (Indeed, the ontology of temporal parts appears to be founded on this claim.) What it is right to say here, it seems to me, is anyone’s guess.
  23. The paradox of increase may not be a strong argument for immaterialism. But even if it isn’t, it looks like a powerful argument for some surprising claim. If nothing else, it shows how hard it is to be a materialist. Materialists will need to say something about it. We will return to this theme in Chapter 9.
7.5 Objections to immaterialism
  1. Objections to immaterialism are all too familiar. Now I complained earlier that many common objections were over-hasty, owing to the perceived weakness of their target. But here are three serious worries. They are not strictly objections to immaterialism per se, but to substance dualism; but because few immaterialists want to accept idealism, we can see them as objections to most versions of immaterialism as well. (Nor is idealism entirely immune to them.) All have to do with the way the mental relates to the physical.
  2. If you step on a tack and cry out in pain, it seems plain enough that the damage to your foot causes your pain and that your pain causes your cry. If you are a soul, your pain is a state of that soul. One of the over-hasty objections claims that no non-physical state of an immaterial thing could possibly bring about, or be brought about by, physical events in a material thing. I find this objection dogmatic. We cannot predict a priori what can cause what, and no experience tells us that nothing non-physical can cause something physical. But we can sharpen the objection. We can ask, for instance, what it is about a given soul that enables it to interact in this way with a given organism. According to immaterialism damage to my animal body causes pain in my soul, and mental events in my soul cause my body to move. It is a striking fact that no other soul interacts with my body in this way, and that my soul never interacts in this way with any other organism. Why should this be? Kim (2001) calls this the pairing problem: what “pairs up” souls with bodies?
  3. We are unlikely to find an answer to this question in the intrinsic features of souls and bodies. It seems evident that I should not interact in this way with a duplicate of my body, nor would a duplicate of my soul interact in this way with my body. The same goes for material things. Why is it that turning this key opens that lock? It isn’t just the way the two objects are in themselves. Turning a key in Tasmania – even a key of just the right size and shape – won’t open a lock in Japan. For a key to open a lock, the key and the lock need to be in the same place. Perhaps that is how it is with souls and bodies: for a given soul to move a given body, they have to be in the same place. What prevents my soul from moving other bodies and other souls from moving my body might be that they are in different places29.
  4. But this suggestion is problematic. For one thing, if the soul interacts with the body, it interacts with different parts of the body, specifically different parts of the brain, at the same time: for instance, it receives visual information from the occipital lobe at the same time as it receives auditory information from the temporal lobe. (Descartes was wrong about the pineal gland.) If this interaction requires spatial co-location, then the soul needs to be at least as big as the brain, threatening the claim that it is simple and immaterial. More seriously, we should have to wonder what keeps my soul and my body in the same place. Substances that don’t share any parts ordinarily move independently. But if my ability to move and perceive requires my soul to be located where my body is, then wherever my body goes, my soul goes too: I never find myself suddenly unable to move or perceive because my body and my soul have got separated. What sort of psycho-physical glue averts this calamity?
  5. A second problem to do with soul-body interaction is what van Inwagen (2002b: 196-98) calls the remote-control argument. If it is souls that think, then they relate to their bodies in something like the way someone relates to a device she is operating by remote control – a robot, say, that not only moves according to her commands but also sends her sensory information about itself and its surroundings via headphones and a video screen. Now damage to such a robot might interfere with this exchange of information, so that the robot stops acting on the operator’s commands and stops sending her sensory information. That is, damage to the robot would affect the operator’s ability to interact with it. But it wouldn’t affect the operator directly in any other way. If this analogy is correct, then according to substance dualism we should expect a violent blow to the head to affect the soul's ability to interact with the body, perhaps rendering one unable to move or perceive anything – but it shouldn’t affect the soul directly in any other way. We should expect someone who is “knocked out” to remain conscious, and to be able to tell us afterwards what she was thinking while she was unable to move or perceive. Yet we know that this is not the case: a hard knock on the head causes complete unconsciousness. As long as we remain embodied, anyway, we cannot think or be conscious unless our brains are working. This is an awkward fact for the immaterialist. Why should damage to a material thing prevent something entirely immaterial from functioning?
  6. One might answer by denying that souls think. Rather, the soul might do something necessary but insufficient for thought: for thought to occur, the soul’s contribution must combine with some sort of activity on the part of the brain. All mental activity would consist of an immaterial ingredient in the soul and a material ingredient provided by the body. In that case damage to the brain could stop thought by removing the material ingredient. Whatever merits this proposal may have, however, it rules out immaterialism, for if souls don’t think our thoughts but something else does, then we are not souls. It suggests that we are things made up of both souls and bodies (or souls and brains) – a view we will take up in the next section30.
  7. Then there is the duplication problem (van Inwagen 2002b: 198-201). Imagine a machine capable of making a perfect physical duplicate of anything: an object indistinguishable from the original, right down to the subatomic level. What would happen if we put a human being into this machine – you, for instance? Well, we should get a perfect physical duplicate of you. What would it be like? Unless modern biochemistry is badly mistaken, it would be alive in the biological sense. But what mental properties would it have? Immaterialism suggests that it would have none at all. (Let us suppose that there is no miraculous divine intervention.) Because it would lack a soul, it would be a sort of human vegetable. At any rate it would lack those mental properties that only things with souls can have; and there is little point in believing in souls unless there are many such properties.
  8. Of course, we shall never be able to test this prediction experimentally. But it doesn’t sound right – not to most of us, anyway. It certainly isn’t what medical science leads us to expect. As far as we know – and neurologists have studied the matter extensively – every actual case in which a human animal has a serious cognitive deficiency over a long period is a case in which there is a serious physical defect in its brain. It would be astonishing if the animal produced by duplication, which would have a physically normal brain, had anything but normal mental capacities. If our expectations are correct and the duplicate would have normal mental capacities, though – if reproducing your physical states suffices to reproduce your mental states- -then we don’t think by virtue of having immaterial souls, contrary to immaterialism.
  9. Someone might try to solve this problem by saying that a brain brings a soul into existence when it is in the right state, much as a piece of steel in the right state produces a magnetic field (Hasker 1999: 190; 2001). Since your physical duplicate would have a brain just like yours, its brain would cause a soul to exist, just as your own brain causes your soul to exist. Given that like causes tend to have like effects, we should expect the new soul to resemble yours. This might help answer other hard questions too: for instance the question of when in the course of its development a human organism acquires a soul (and why then, rather than earlier or later). It may even help with the remote-control problem: perhaps a hard knock on the head causes the soul to go out of existence, much as heating a magnet and thus realigning its particles destroys its magnetic field. If the brain recovers sufficiently, it then generates a new soul (or perhaps the original soul comes back into being), and mental activity resumes. Advocates of this sort of view call it emergent dualism.
  10. Emergent dualism seems to me to face an awkward dilemma. We have been supposing that souls are immaterial substances. But it is hard to see how the physical activities of a biological organ could bring into existence an immaterial substance. That would be creation ex nihilo (the soul wouldn’t be forged out of previously existing materials). Of course, the mere fact that it is hard for us to see how one thing could bring about another may be a poor reason to suppose that it couldn’t happen. But it doesn’t help matters that there are no other uncontroversial cases in which a substance is created ex nihilo. The idea that brains produce immaterial substances also does nothing to solve the pairing problem.
  11. The emergence of souls out of brains would be less mysterious if souls were not substances but rather states or modes of the brain – like your fist or your lap, rather than like your hand. That is what the analogy of the magnetic field suggests: though the metaphysics of fields is poorly understood, they sound more like states – either of the objects generating them or of space (or spacetime) itself – than like substances. This would also help with the pairing problem: your soul could no more leave your brain behind than your lap could wander off without you. But the view that souls are states rather than substances is incompatible with our being immaterial substances – that is, with immaterialism. What are we, then, if we think by virtue of having immaterial but insubstantial souls? If we are those souls, then we are something like collections of mental states: a version of the bundle view. If we are not souls, but rather the substances of which they are states, then we might be organisms, or brains, or material things constituted by organisms or brains.
  12. These worries would cause me a good deal of unease if I were an immaterialist.
7.6 Compound dualism
  1. I turn now to three views that resemble immaterialism. The first says not that we are souls, but that we have them as proper parts. We are only partly immaterial: each of us is made up of both a simple immaterial substance and a material organism. Call this compound dualism. We can call the view that we are souls and that we have bodies that are not parts of us pure dualism. (Pure dualism differs from immaterialism by implying the existence of material things.)
  2. Those who speak of substance dualism more often state it as compound dualism than as pure dualism, and a least one prominent dualist is a compound dualist (Swinburne 1984: 27, 1997: 145). The attraction of compound dualism over pure dualism is presumably that it would give us the physical properties we ordinarily take ourselves to have. Pure dualism, like the bundle view, implies that we are not really visible or tangible. We don't literally grow larger in our youth or grey and wrinkly in old age. We are not even men or women: a man or a woman must surely be at least partly material. Only our bodies are visible or wrinkly or male or female, and they are not parts of us. Compound dualism, by contrast, implies that parts of us really are visible and tangible; and having a visible part seems to be a way of being visible. Despite this virtue, however, compound dualism has troubles that have nothing to do with worries about dualism generally, and which pure dualism avoids.
  3. To start with, compound dualism inherits the problems facing materialist accounts of what we are. Consider, for example, the paradox of increase. Pure dualists can give a neat solution: simply accept that nothing can change its parts, and point out that this doesn’t affect us because we are simple. Compound dualists will have to choose from the messy solutions available to materialists, thus forfeiting what is to my mind the best reason for accepting dualism in the first place.
  4. Second, there is what we might call the thinking-soul problem. If our souls think, yet we are not our souls, then we are not the beings that think our thoughts. We merely have thinking parts. That might make it true to say, in the right context, that we think, just as it might be true to say in the right context that my house is made of glass owing to the fact that it has glass windows. But we shouldn’t be thinkers in the strictest sense. And the idea that strictly speaking we don’t think, but things other than us think our thoughts, is hard to warm to. For that matter, if I believe that I am the compound, doesn’t my soul believe that it is the compound? How do I know that I’m not making that mistake? What justifies my belief that I am the compound and not the soul? Compound dualists will also need to explain why intelligent, self-conscious souls don’t count as people.
  5. Of course, this sort of trouble is not unique to compound dualism: we saw in §5.9 that according to the temporal-parts view we think only in the sense of having temporal parts that think strictly speaking. But then the ontology of temporal parts has all sorts of repugnant consequences. Its advocates are willing to live with them for the sake of its theoretical benefits, such as the solution it offers to the paradox of increase. Whatever the merits of this trade-off may be, no one can say that compound dualism offers theoretical benefits comparable to those of four-dimensionalism.
  6. Here is a third problem for compound dualism. Suppose my body is destroyed at the end of Monday and that my soul continues to exist without a body on Tuesday. Compound dualism ought to allow for this: a substantial soul shouldn’t need a body in order to exist. Now if my soul could survive this, I could survive it. (That’s what compound dualists say.) But in what form should I survive? It seems that I should survive as a soul. There is nothing else there on Tuesday that I could be. But according to compound dualism I couldn't be my soul on Tuesday, for I was not my soul on Monday; and a thing cannot come to be identical with something that was previously only a proper part of it.
  7. Here is the problem laid out stepwise. Compound dualism implies that I could survive the destruction of my body at the end of Monday, so that
      (1) The thing that is I on Monday is the thing that is I on Tuesday.
    In that case I should be identical with my soul on Tuesday:
      (2) The thing that is I on Tuesday is the thing that is my soul on Tuesday.
    And we supposed that my soul survives the destruction of my body, so that
      (3) The thing that is my soul on Tuesday is the thing that is my soul on Monday.
    From these three claims it follows by the transitivity of identity that
      (4) The thing that is I on Monday is the thing that is my soul on Monday,
    which contradicts compound dualism. Call this the problem of disembodied survival. The obvious solution, for those who believe in disembodied survival, is to accept 4 and say that I was identical with my soul all along: that is, to adopt pure dualism.
  8. Now the problem of disembodied survival is a special case of the amputation puzzle. And we have already seen that compound dualists need to find a solution to that problem anyway. Can they not solve the problem of disembodied survival in the same way? Well, maybe they can. But it looks harder to solve the problem of disembodied survival than to solve the amputation puzzle generally. That is, even if we can explain how it is possible for a thing to survive the loss of some part, it looks harder to explain how a soul-body compound could survive the loss of its body. Obviously the way of sparse ontology won’t work, for that would mean denying the existence of embodied souls. The way of funny persistence conditions doesn’t look very nice either: it would mean that a person’s disembodied soul is not identical with the soul she had when she was embodied. No dualist would accept that.
  9. What about the way of constitution? Perhaps when I lose my body, my soul comes to constitute me, in the way that a lump of clay constitutes a clay statue. In that case I don’t come to be my soul when my body is destroyed, contrary to 2. But what would it mean to say that my soul constitutes me? The things philosophers typically say about the constitution relation don’t apply in the case of souls and people. For instance, it seems to belong to the idea of constitution that when one thing constitutes another they must be made of the same stuff or composed of the same proper parts. They have to coincide in some sense. The idea that disembodied souls constitute people numerically different from them therefore seems to require souls to have parts, or to be made of some sort of immaterial stuff. Most dualists reject that.
  10. Moreover, all constitutionalists accept three principles. First, a constituting thing can outlive the thing it constitutes: squash a clay statue and you destroy it, but the lump of clay that constituted it will still exist. Second, a constituting thing can constitute different things at different times: if we squash a statue of Thatcher and model the clay into the shape of Pinochet, the lump will constitute first one statue and then another. Third, a constituted thing can be constituted by different things at different times: by partial replacement of its matter, a statue constituted by one lump today can come to be constituted by another lump tomorrow. Now if your disembodied soul could constitute you, the first principle implies that your soul could outlive you: the survival of your soul is not enough for you to survive. The second principle implies that what is now your soul might one day come to be someone else's soul. The third implies that you could have different souls at different times. Compound dualists are unlikely to accept these claims.
  11. A fourth principle that constitutionalists generally accept is that whatever is constituted by something at one time must be constituted by something or other whenever it exists. If your soul constitutes you when you are disembodied, this implies that something must constitute you when you are embodied as well. It will presumably have to be something composed of your soul and your body: otherwise you and it would not in any sense coincide. (Remember that constitution, in the sense that is relevant here, is by definition a one-one relation: your soul and your body could not jointly constitute you.) So there would have to be two things now made up of your soul and your body: you, and the thing that now constitutes you. But only one of them would be able to survive disembodied31.
  12. These objections suggest that compound dualism is more interesting than it is attractive. If I were a dualist, I would be a pure dualist.
7.7 Hylomorphism
  1. The idea that we are each composed of an immaterial soul and a material body might call to mind the Aristotelian view that we are compounds of form and matter. The idea is something like this: a human person, or indeed any material thing, comes into being when a certain human form or configuration is imposed on some matter. That form is not a universal – it is not the human form that all human people share – but rather a particular state that configures a particular batch of matter. The state that configures your matter comes into being when you do, namely when your matter first takes on your particular human form; and it is located where you are. You are in some sense made up, at a given time, of your human form and the matter that the form configures at that time. Or rather you are made up of those things and also various accidental forms, such as your mass and posture. Your accidental forms are only contingently parts or constituents of you, but your human form is an essential part: you couldn’t exist without having it as a part, nor could it exist without being a part of you. It determines what you most fundamentally are. Because of this it is called your substantial form.
  2. Aristotle called the substantial form of a living thing a soul; let us call it a hylomorphic soul in order to distinguish it from the Cartesian or Platonic soul that figures in immaterialism. A hylomorphic soul is not a substance, but rather a sort of state: the substance is what you get when a soul configures some matter. That is what distinguishes this proposal from compound dualism. Call the view that each of us is made up (at any given time) of a hylomorphic soul and some matter hylomorphism. I have serious misgivings about discussing hylomorphism.
  3. I don’t properly understand the view. It is true that I have discussed a number of views that I understand no better: the universal bundle view and the program view, for instance. I was happy to give my opinion about those views because I don’t think anyone properly understands them. But there are people who at least appear to have a profound understanding of hylomorphism, and they will no doubt find my remarks amateurish. Because they take hylomorphism to be an important account of our metaphysical nature, however, I feel I ought to say something.
  4. Hylomorphism is not a version of immaterialism. It says that we are material things. In fact all versions of hylomorphism that I know of say that we are biological organisms; so hylomorphism is strictly speaking a version of animalism. And hylomorphism as I have stated it appears to be compatible with everything I said about animalism in Chapter 2. However, some versions of hylomorphism diverge considerably from what I said there, and these differences might appear to make it more attractive than “ordinary” animalism.
  5. Someone might claim that hylomorphism combines the virtues of animalism with those of the constitution view. It implies that we are animals, just as we appear to be, and thus avoids the thinking-animal problem. More generally, it doesn’t make the troublesome claim that the same matter can make up qualitatively different things at the same time. On the other hand, it may avoid the traditional objections to animalism having to do with our identity over time. Suppose your cerebrum is transplanted into another head. Many people want to say that you would go along with that organ. Yet the human organism appears to stay behind with an empty head. If you are an organism, it follows that you stay behind with an empty head in the transplant case, which many people take to be absurd. Hylomorphists might be able to avoid this consequence without denying that we are animals. That is, they might be able to say that the human organism goes along with its transplanted cerebrum. How? Well, your soul – the configurational state that makes you what you most fundamentally are – is a rational soul. It is what gives you the capacity for rational thought. And your capacity for rational thought goes along with your cerebrum in the transplant case, rather than staying behind. Your hylomorphic soul therefore goes along with your transplanted cerebrum. And where your soul goes, you go. Thus, transplanting your cerebrum transplants you. It doesn’t move you from one animal to another; rather, it moves an animal from one batch of matter to another. In a similar way, hylomorphists might argue that each human animal is essentially rational, which ordinary animalism denies.
  6. Hylomorphists might say this, though it is not clear whether their hylomorphism demands it. (One of the reasons why I don’t understand hylomorphism is that I can’t work out what follows from it.) Should they say it? Should anyone say it?
  7. I myself find it deeply implausible. Forget about personal identity for a moment and think about biological organisms. Not even the hylomorphist will suppose that there are two human animals located where you are before the transplant. (That would be a version of constitutionalism, or perhaps four-dimensionalism.) So the view that a human animal goes along with its transplanted cerebrum implies that the animal left behind with an empty head (which may be alive and breathing on its own – the cerebrum plays no role in the regulation of life-sustaining functions) is not the animal that was previously whole. It is a brand-new human animal. At any rate it is biologically human. Hylomorphists may say that because it lacks the capacity for rational thought it is not human in the fullest sense. But never mind what sort of animal it is; the point is that according to the hylomorphist proposal you can bring a good-sized primate into existence by surgically removing someone’s cerebrum. That sounds wrong. Isn’t the result of removing an animal’s cerebrum simply that the animal loses an important organ? Couldn’t an animal – even a human animal – lose its cerebrum and continue living in a debilitated condition, just as it might lose a liver and continue living in a debilitated condition? The hylomorphist proposal says no.
  8. Or consider the empty-headed organism into which your cerebrum is implanted. What happens to it when the transplant is carried out? Doesn’t it acquire a new organ, much as an animal without a liver might acquire one? Not according to the hylomorphist story: when your cerebrum gets put into that animal’s head, the animal must cease to exist. Otherwise there would be two human animals in the same place at once – the one that lately had an empty head and the one that got transplanted – which is absurd. But implanting a cerebrum into an empty cranium doesn’t seem to be a way of destroying an animal. It seems, rather, to be a way of giving an animal a new organ. (We can see that this proposal commits its adherents to something like the way of funny persistence conditions of §7.4.)
  9. Now think of the animal that is supposed to move from one head to another. It would cease to be a living organism when it is removed from its head: a detached cerebrum is no more an organism than a severed arm is an organism. So the story implies that the animal ceases to be an organism while it is being transplanted and becomes a mere organ, and later becomes an organism once more. Being an organism is only a temporary and contingent property of organisms.
  10. It seems to me that there are two organisms in the story, and that one of them gives the other one an organ. But according to the hylomorphist proposal there are three: one that comes into being when the cerebrum is removed, one that ceases to be when the cerebrum is placed in the new cranium, and one that moves from one cranium to another. Hylomorphists will say that there are three organisms in the story because there are three different substantial forms: one rational soul, which moves from one head to another, and two nutritive souls, one of which configures the brainless matter left over after the cerebrum’s removal, and one of which informs the brainless matter that receives that transplanted organ. But this explanation doesn’t seem to make the proposal any more plausible.
  11. To my mind, the divergence of hylomorphism from ordinary animalism makes it less plausible than ordinary animalism, not more. An even more radical departure from ordinary animalism is Thomistic hylomorphism. It says that your hylomorphic soul can continue to exist after your death, when it no longer configures any matter. Not that it comes to configure some sort of immaterial stuff: it exists in a disembodied state as pure form. The soul can even engage in mental activity while it is disembodied: it can think and remember and be happy or sad (though it cannot, for lack of the relevant physical organs, perceive or act bodily). Some Thomists say that you can exist in this disembodied state; others say that you cease to exist when your soul becomes disembodied, but come back into being if your soul once again comes to configure some matter.
  12. When I try to think about Thomistic hylomorphism I see nothing but problems. Most obviously, I cannot see how a thing’s substantial form could continue to exist without being the form of anything, other than itself. Remember, a hylomorphic soul is neither a substance nor a universal, but a particular configurational state of a substance. Your hylomorphic soul stands to you as a dent stands to a dented car, or a knot stands to a knotted rope. The claim that a human being’s form could continue to exist after the human being is burned to ashes is like the claim that a knot could continue to exist after the rope it was in is burned to ashes.
  13. Thomists will want to say that the human soul is different from such states as dents and knots, and that this difference explains how the human soul can exist disembodied. It may be, for instance, that the human soul is not a physical or material state like a knot: you can explain what it is for a thing to be knotted in physical terms, but not what it is for a thing to be rational. But even if that is true, it doesn’t seem to help: a non-physical state that is not a state of anything is no less mysterious than a physical state that is not a state of anything.
  14. Nor do I see how a state, disembodied or otherwise, could think. That is like saying that thoughts think or dreams dream. This was one of the main objections to the bundle view. It appears to be an objection to Thomistic hylomorphism as well.
  15. Now consider the relation between yourself – the person or organism – and your soul. Suppose you could continue to exist in an immaterial state when your soul becomes disembodied. If it is hard to understand how an organism could persist without being an organism, that is nothing compared to understanding how an organism could persist without being a material thing at all. Thomists may say that you would no longer be an organism if you were disembodied; but that hardly helps. The trouble is not how something could be at once immaterial and an organism, but how something that is a biological organism at one time could be entirely immaterial at another time.
  16. And how would you relate to your disembodied soul? You couldn’t be your soul when it is disembodied, for you were not your soul when it was embodied. Yet there is nothing else, after your matter is dispersed or destroyed, that you could be. This is the same problem of disembodied survival that afflicts compound dualism.
  17. What if you couldn’t persist in a disembodied state, and would cease to exist, at least temporarily, if your soul became disembodied? That would mean that psychological continuity was not sufficient for you to persist: here would be a case in which your soul is uniquely psychologically continuous with you as you were when you existed, yet without being you. This is precisely the objection most commonly made against ordinary animalism, and which hylomorphism was supposed to avoid. Someone who says that you could be outlived by your thinking soul can hardly object to ordinary animalism’s implication that you might perish even though someone has your intact cerebrum.
  18. More seriously, if your soul can think when it is disembodied, why can it not think when it is embodied? If it does think when it is embodied, yet isn’t you, then you are not the being that now thinks your thoughts, but merely something that has that thinker as a part. Thomists would then face the same thinking-soul problem as compound dualists face. The obvious way to avoid the problem would be to say that we are souls. That would be a version of the bundle view. But it would not be hylomorphism.
  19. Thomistic hylomorphism seems to me to combine the problems of the bundle view with those of compound dualism. Thomists have attempted to reply to these objections, but the replies I have seen do not seem to me to answer them. The reason may be that I have not understood the replies. Or it may be that the Thomists have not understood the objections. Or perhaps I have misunderstood Thomistic hylomorphism in the first place. I don’t know. I will say no more about hylomorphism.
7.8 Simple materialism
  1. We have considered the view that we are simple immaterial things and the view that we are each composed of a simple immaterial thing and a biological organism. What about the view that we are simple material things? Though this thought lies far off the beaten track, two important figures have defended it.
  2. Chisholm (1989) once argued that we are tiny physical particles. Although he didn’t say that these particles must be simple, his reasoning suggests that they would have to be32. More precisely, he reasoned that we must be tiny particles if we are material things at all. He argued for this in much the way that I argued for immaterialism in earlier sections: If we were material things, we should be either our bodies or parts of our bodies. But there are really no such things as our bodies, for they would change their parts, and nothing can change its parts. So we cannot be our bodies. We must therefore be parts of our bodies – in particular, parts of our bodies that never gain or lose any parts themselves. Chisholm suggested that each of us is a tiny particle within the brain. Call this view Lilliputian materialism.
  3. Why suppose that we are simple material things, rather than immaterial ones? Chisholm would probably turn the question around: why suppose that we are immaterial? Once we have accepted that we are simple, what do we gain by taking ourselves to be immaterial as well? What can an immaterial thing do that a material thing can’t? As we noted earlier, it is no easier to understand how an immaterial thing could think than it is to understand how a material thing could think. And supposing that we are immaterial makes trouble that materialism avoids: recall the pairing problem, the remote-control argument, and the duplication problem of §7.5. Lilliputian materialism is designed to avoid both the problems of materialism – the paradox of increase, for instance – and the problems of immaterialism.
  4. Here is an obvious objection: If we are material things, our thought arises in our brains. But a tiny physical particle hasn’t got a brain; and surely a material thing needs something like a brain to think. Chisholm replies that the tiny particle that you are has got a brain, even though its brain isn’t a part of it. Your brain needn’t be a part of you in order for you to use it to think. "The brain", says Chisholm, "is the organ of consciousness, not the subject of consciousness" (1989: 126).
  5. A more serious worry is this. There are many particles in the brain. Why is only one of them the subject of the mental states realized there? If a particle within the brain really could use the brain to think, why don’t they all think? And if only one particle thinks, what determines which one it is? Come to that, why must the thinking particle be located within the brain at all?
  6. The only answer I can think of to these questions is that the particles in the brain are not all equal. One of them is special: it directs the brain’s activities in something like the way that a conductor directs an orchestra. That is why it thinks and no other particle does. If it were removed from the brain, the brain would stop working as it ordinarily does, and the organism would show all the signs of complete unconsciousness – at any rate until some other particle takes over the directing role. Mysterious though the brain’s workings may be, however, I take it that neuroscience has pretty well ruled this out.
  7. Lowe has also argued that we are simple material things, or at least simple things with physical properties. His view is not that we are tiny particles, however, but that we have the size, shape, and weight that we think we have: we are six-foot, 150-pound mereological atoms (Lowe 1996: 36, 2000: 15-20, 2001: 151-154). We can get bigger or smaller without gaining or losing any parts. Call this Brobdingnagian atomism.
  8. This remarkable view contradicts the widely held principle that every extended thing must have proper parts – a north half and a south half, for instance – even if they cannot be separated. I hesitate to endorse this principle. But Brobdingnagian atomism also conflicts with the more compelling claim that internally heterogeneous objects must have parts. Something that is internally heterogeneous has different properties in different places: it might be red in one place, for instance, and not red in another. And nothing can be both red and not red. At most a thing might be partly red and partly not red. But what could it be for a thing to be partly red and partly not red, if not for it to have parts that are red and other parts that are not red? And of course if we are as big as we appear to be, we are internally heterogeneous: you yourself might be partly red and partly not red. It seems, therefore, that you must have parts.
  9. Not everyone agrees that internally heterogeneous objects must have parts. Spinoza thought that the cosmos had no parts, despite being as heterogeneous as can be. Spinoza and Lowe don’t say how a thing can be red in one place and not red in another without having any proper parts. One thing they might say, though, is that things in space have properties relative to places, just as things in time have properties relative to times33. For an ordinary thing to be red, it seems, is for it to be red at some time. And many philosophers believe that a thing can be red at a time without having a temporal part located exactly at that time that is red without temporal qualification. (Four-dimensionalists disagree: see §5.2.) Analogously, Lowe might say that a thing can be red in a place without having a spatial part located exactly in that place that is red without spatial qualification. For a thing to be red would be for it to be red at a place as well as a time (or at a spacetime location): here now, or in Chicago in 1975, or at every place and time where it exists. In that case things could vary across space without having spatial parts, just as things can change over time without having temporal parts.
  10. It is hard to know what to make of all this. If nothing else, it ought to lead us to wonder whether anything has parts. Take living organisms. Surely they have parts – vast numbers of them. (Lowe agrees. Although Brobdingnagian atomism is at least formally compatible with our being organisms, Lowe says that we are not our animal bodies, but merely coincide in some way with them.) But if the particles within your boundaries are not parts of you, and your vastly complex internal structure is compatible with your having no parts whatever, what reason could we have for supposing that organisms have parts? To put it the other way round, isn’t any reason to suppose that organisms have parts equally a reason to suppose that we have parts – supposing we have the physical properties of organisms? It is tempting to consider this a reductio ad absurdum of Brobdingnagian atomism.
  11. In any case, Lowe has an argument for the claim that we are simple (Lowe 1991: 88-89, Lowe 2001). Although it does not imply that we are simple material things, it is interesting in its own right. The idea is roughly this: if I had proper parts, I should have the same parts as my body. That would make me identical with my body. But I am not identical with my body. Therefore I have no proper parts. The main premises of the argument are these (where ‘part’ means proper part):
      1. I am not my body (though both my body and I exist).
      2. I am not a part of my body.
      3. I have no parts that are not parts of my body.
      4. No two things can have all the same parts.
    Suppose I had parts. Then those parts would have to be parts of my body as well (by 3). Moreover, they would have to be all my body’s parts: if my parts were only some of my body's parts, that would make me a part of my body, which (by 2) I am not. So if I had any parts, they would all be parts of my body, and all of my body's parts would be parts of me. In that case I should be my body (by 4), which I am not (1). So I have no parts.
  12. The premises of this argument are all attractive, and although the conclusion doesn’t strictly follow, the further premises needed to make it formally valid are relatively uncontroversial. I suppose it might provide some reason to suppose that we are simple. But it is unlikely to make many converts, for the allure of its premises is more than matched by the repugnance of its conclusion. If we are to come to believe that despite appearances we have no parts, we are going to need more than just a valid argument from attractive premises. We are going to need an argument that makes it seriously uncomfortable to believe that we have parts.
  13. As far as I can see, Lowe’s argument fails to do this. It does nothing to undermine the principal alternatives to its conclusion, for its premises amount to little more than bald denials of those alternatives. Premise 1 denies, in effect, that we are animals. (That is how Lowe understands it.) Premise 2 denies that we are spatial or temporal parts of animals. Premise 3 is inconsistent with most versions of the bundle view: if we are bundles of mental states, those states are unlikely to be parts of our bodies. (Bundlers who think the mental states composing us are parts of our bodies will probably deny 2.) And most advocates of the constitution view deny 4: they say that we have the same proper parts as human animals, even though we are not those animals. So Lowe’s argument will not trouble anyone who accepts one of these alternative views. Nor will it help those who are undecided about what we are. Imagine someone wondering, "What am I? A simple substance? An organism? A part of an organism, or something constituted by an organism? Or maybe a bundle of perceptions?" Such an inquirer would find Lowe's argument of little help, for in order to accept its premises she would have to rule out the main alternatives to our being simple things in advance. That is, she would have to believe, on grounds independent of Lowe’s argument, that we are not animals, or parts of animals, or bundles of perceptions, or things constituted by animals. The argument appears to be aimed at those who are inclined to accept its premises but who deny its conclusion. It is hard to think of anyone who fits that description.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Souls")

Footnote 12:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 13:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 14:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 15: Footnote 24:
  • The divisibility argument appears in Descartes’ Sixth Meditation; for an interesting variant see Swinburne 1984: 14-21. For the argument from disembodied survival, see Swinburne 1984: 29-30 and 1997: 322-332. The classic statement of the inadequacy-of-physicalism argument is §17 of Leibniz’s Monadology; a good contemporary defense of it is Foster 2001: 25-28. §8.4 considers two further traditional arguments that would support immaterialism.
Footnote 25:
  • The argument below is derived from Chisholm (1976: 89-113, 145-158). Zimmerman (2003) offers a complex argument a bit like this one for the same conclusion. Another important argument for immaterialism, so new I haven’t had time to consider it, is in Unger 2006: ch. 7. This section and the next are based on Olson 2006b.
Footnote 26:
  • In the book, this is relegated to a footnote, with a reference to Olson 2006b.
Footnote 27:
  • Funny logicians have an answer to this objection, but it does not seem to me to blunt its force. For more on the way of funny logic see Myro 1986 and Gallois 1990, 1998; Sider 2001: 165-76 is a helpful critical discussion.
Footnote 28:
  • See §5.4. Shoemaker’s argument for the claim that no organism could think (§2.5) would also entail that no mass of matter could think, and his case against thinking masses might be stronger than his case against thinking animals. I doubt, though, whether it is compatible with our being immaterial substances (Olson 2002b; see also Shoemaker 2004). Immaterialists could also explain why there are no thinking material things by denying the existence of composite objects, thus combining mereological constancy with an extreme version of the way of sparse ontology.
Footnote 29:
  • Foster (1991: 163-72) proposes a different solution, too complex to summarize here. Another important discussion of these matters is Shoemaker 1977.
Footnote 30:
  • The question of why damage to the body renders the soul unable to think will be even more worrying for idealistic immaterialists than it is for dualistic immaterialists. For a different proposed solution to the remote-control argument see Robinson 1989: 49.
Footnote 31:
  • I owe this point to David Hershenov. I say more about compound dualism in Olson 2001, where I probably treat it a bit too harshly.
Footnote 32:
  • Quinn (1997), who discusses a different Chisholmian argument for the same conclusion, says explicitly that we are simple material objects.
Footnote 33:
  • Hudson (2001: ch. 2) argues for a special instance of this view, namely that things have parts relative to places.


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Nihilism"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 8 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File13.

Write-up14 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? Nihilism

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 8, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Nihilism", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online15 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book16.
  • The text differs slightly from the book.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there17.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
Full Text
  1. We do not exist18
  2. Is nihilism mad?19
  3. Is nihilism self-refuting?20
  4. Unity and simplicity21
  5. Paraphrase: the mentalistic strategy22
  6. Paraphrase: the atomistic strategy23
  7. What it would mean if we did not exist24
8.1 We do not exist
  1. We have considered many sorts of things that we might be: material things and immaterial things, persisting things and momentary things, simple things and composite things. But there is one possibility that we haven’t yet considered: there is no sort of thing that we are. We don’t exist. Our personal pronouns refer to nothing, there being nothing there for them to refer to. Nothing thinks our thoughts. Nothing wrote these words, and nothing is now reading them. Call this view nihilism.
  2. Nihilism is not the view that you and I are not people, or not “selves”, or that there is some other important kind that we thought we belonged to but don’t. It is the view that we are nothing. It does not, however, say that there are no people at all: it doesn't rule out the existence of non-human people, such as gods or angels. Like the other answers to our question, it is a view about ourselves, and not about people generally.
  3. Nihilism is more or less the same as what Strawson called the “no-ownership doctrine of the self”, that “it is only a linguistic illusion that one ascribes one’s states of consciousness [to anything] at all, that there is any proper subject of these apparent ascriptions, that states of consciousness belong to, or are states of, anything” (1959: 94). I say “more or less” because nihilism does not say that the belief that we ascribe states of consciousness to something is the result of a linguistic illusion – though this might be a plausible thing for a nihilist to say.
  4. The view that we do not exist might seem so far detached from reality that only a madman could believe it. Or it may appear self-refuting: mustn’t anyone who denies her own existence be mistaken? We will deal with these charges presently. Let us first ask what can be said in support of nihilism.
  5. Nihilism may appeal to those dissatisfied with the other answers to our question. Suppose we take there to be things of a certain description, but despite our best efforts we cannot discover an account of their nature that looks even approximately right. This might of course be our fault: our best efforts might not be up to the task. But another possibility is that there is no such nature to be found, for there were never any such things in the first place. The longer our efforts to come up with an account of the nature of these things continue without success, the more tempting it will be to suspect that their existence is some sort of illusion.
  6. Nihilism has the advantage of solving at a stroke all metaphysical problems about personal identity. It solves them by depriving them of their subject matter, in the way that atheism solves all metaphysical problems about the nature of God. It may face other problems, of course. For instance, it might seem to face our old friend the thinking-animal problem. If there are [human animals, and they think our thoughts, how could we not exist? Surely the existence of a being that thinks my thoughts is sufficient for me to exist. Unless nihilists can argue that [human animals cannot think, they will have to deny that there are any such things. But if there are no human organisms, there are no organisms of any other sort. And whatever rules out the existence of organisms is likely to rule out the existence of all ordinary things: houses, bicycles, planets, the lot. That’s not a very appealing picture.
  7. Now once someone has denied the existence of people, herself included, it may seem odd for her to worry that she must also deny the existence of trees and houses. If we don’t exist, how can it matter whether there are trees? But some philosophers seem more willing to doubt their own existence than that of other concrete objects. In any case, nihilists can turn this apparent problem to their advantage. They can accept that there are no trees or houses. They will probably want to deny the existence of any composite objects at all – any objects with parts other than themselves. Just as denying the existence of people does away with all problems about the metaphysical nature of people, denying the existence of composite objects does away with all problems about the metaphysical nature of composite objects: the replacement puzzle, the amputation puzzle, the paradox of increase, the problem of the [ship of Theseus, the sorites paradox, and so on do not arise. Nihilism is probably best seen as a corollary of a more general metaphysical program that would do away with all the ordinary furniture of the earth and the troubles that go with it.
  8. Nihilism is not my own invention. Though not many philosophers have explicitly denied their own existence, a surprising number have held views that seem to imply it. Parmenides said that the world was thoroughly homogeneous: despite appearances to the contrary (which are admittedly rather hard to explain away), the world never differs from one time or place to another. And what things, in a thoroughly homogeneous world, could you or I be?
  9. Spinoza thought that there was just one substance – God or Nature. It is not homogeneous as Parmenides thought, but exhibits a wide variety of local variation: it has different modes or states in different places. For instance, it exhibits a certain mode of extension and a certain mode of thought here: it is locally anthropomorphic and thinking about philosophy. Many commentators say that on Spinoza’s view you and I and other ordinary objects are modes, or collections of modes. That would be a version of the [bundle view. But we can just as easily read Spinoza as a nihilist, for it is doubtful whether any anthropomorphic state of Nature is a human being, or whether any episode of thinking thinks.
  10. The early Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus, "There is no thinking, representing subject" (5.631; for a similar remark see Carnap 1967: 261). That certainly seems to imply that we don’t exist: surely we are thinking, representing subjects if we are anything. We could hardly be unthinking things (see §6.1).
  11. Russell once wrote,
      all the ordinary objects of daily life are apparently complex entities: such things as tables and chairs, loaves and fishes, persons and principalities and powers....For my part, I do not believe in complex entities of this kind....Suppose you made any statement about Piccadilly, such as: 'Piccadilly is a pleasant street.' If you analyse a statement of that sort correctly, I believe you will find that the fact corresponding to your statement does not contain any constituent corresponding to the word 'Piccadilly'. (1918: 50; see also 1921: 17-18)
    Russell's view (in 1918 anyway) was that the world consists entirely of momentary propertyinstances, such as "little patches of colour or sounds". We can collect these things into classes, such as the class of all Socrates' experiences, but classes, Russell thought, are “logical fictions” and don't really exist. Strictly speaking, then, there are many experiences, but no beings that have them. (A few pages later Russell jokes, "the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it" (53).) And although Hume is often said to have thought that we are bundles of perceptions, his remarks are also consistent with a view like Russell’s, that there are perceptions but no perceivers.
  12. Unger is the most notable recent philosopher to have endorsed nihilism, though he has since changed his mind25. It appears to be a recurrent theme in Buddhist philosophy, and it appeals to students of a certain temperament. The idea that we do not exist undeniably has a certain magnetism.
  13. Nihilism is hard to come to grips with. This chapter has given me more trouble than any other, and I am still not sure what to say about the view in the end. But I think I know what to say to begin with.
8.2 Is nihilism mad?
  1. According to nihilism there are no human people, just as there are no dragons. This may sound like an absurd denial of the obvious. We believe that there are no dragons because if there were it is likely that someone would have seen one, or some fossilized remains, or some other good evidence of dragons, and no one has. Our experience tells against the existence of dragons. But our experience doesn’t tell against the existence of human people. On the contrary: it tells us that there vast numbers of them. No sane person can walk through London and believe that it is uninhabited. Yet according to nihilism there are no more people in London than there are dragons.
  2. Nihilism is of course intended to be a sober metaphysical hypothesis and not an insane delusion, so it had better not be the view that people are mythical, like dragons. What is the difference, then, between the nihilist’s denial that there are people and the ordinary denial that there are dragons? Well, when philosophers deny the existence of things we thought we could observe or otherwise know about, they do not deny that there appear to be such things. In fact they typically concede that those of our ordinary beliefs and statements that appear to entail the existence of such things are often in some sense correct – in contrast to the belief in the existence of dragons. But they claim that what makes these beliefs and statements correct is something not involving the existence of those things. So when the ordinary non-philosopher, in the course of discussing the sizes of European cities, asserts that there are around six million people in London, the nihilist will accept that there is something right about this claim. We can take it for ordinary purposes to be true. It describes some real, unified state of affairs26. Since that state of affairs does not strictly contain any people, the ordinary statement may describe it in a way that is loose or misleading or perhaps even wrong. But it isn’t completely wrong, as it would be to say that there are six million dragons in London. Something about the state of London – something having to do only with things other than people – makes it appropriate or perhaps even true to describe it by saying, "There are six million people there."
  3. It is common enough for philosophers to deny the existence of things whose existence we appear to assert in non-philosophical contexts. Suppose I say that there is an acute shortage of food in Zimbabwe27. This appears to assert the existence of a shortage. But we might wonder whether there really are such things as shortages. A shortage doesn’t seem to be a sort of thing. It is, rather, a lack or an absence of a thing; and we may doubt whether the furniture of the earth includes not only things but also absences of things. Now if there are no such entities as absences then there is no such entity as the current shortage of food in Zimbabwe. But it ought not to follow from this metaphysical claim that food is plentiful there. There is clearly something going on in Zimbabwe that journalists and aid workers describe as a shortage of food: many people in Zimbabwe have less food than they need.
  4. More seriously, some philosophers propose a sparse ontology of material objects. We saw in §3.2 how denying the existence of clay statues and lumps of clay can help solve the claymodelling puzzle, and we saw in §7.4 how denying the existence of such things as undetached hand complements can help solve the paradox of increase. But surely there is something right in the statement that there is a large copper statue on an island in New York Harbor. How can that be if there are no statues? Well, there is a large region of space in New York Harbor, shaped roughly like a robed woman holding aloft a torch only hollow, filled with a vast number of copper atoms. They are in a solid state, and are strongly bonded to one another but not to the atoms surrounding them, apart from those that they rest on. They were put there by a sculptor with the intention of creating a work of art. And so on. None of this entails – in any obvious way, at least – that there is a statue.
  5. In each of these cases there is an appearance of inconsistency: what the intellectuals say in the seminar room appears to conflict with what the rest of us, and for that matter the intellectuals themselves, say in the street. If I say both, “There is a shortage of food in Zimbabwe,” and, “There are no such things as shortages,” I seem on the face of it to be contradicting myself. If I am to stand by both statements I shall need to explain away this appearance of conflict. Nihilists and sparse ontologists are in a similar situation: they need to say how our ordinary statements and beliefs could be true or at least somehow appropriate even though there are no people or shortages or statues. They cannot simply assert that despite appearances their claims are consistent with our ordinary beliefs and then stop. They must say how they can be consistent. At any rate their inability to do so will be reason to doubt whether they have a coherent position. (Another example: philosophers who deny the existence of abstract objects will need to say something about such statements as, “There are prime numbers between 10 and 20,” which, though undoubtedly in some sense correct, appear to entail the existence of numbers, which are abstract. They will need to explain what makes this statement correct in a way that is consistent with their ontology.) We will return to this point in §8.5.
8.3 Is nihilism self-refuting?
  1. Nihilists are philosophers who deny their own existence. But no one can deny her own existence and be right. Anyone who denies that she herself exists is bound to be mistaken, for you have to exist in order to deny anything. We owe this point to Descartes. He imagined a powerful demon bent on deceiving him; yet even an all-powerful demon, he reasoned, could not deceive him by causing him to believe wrongly that he exists, for the simple reason that you can’t deceive someone who isn’t there to be deceived. If there is no such being as Descartes – never was and never will be – then there is nothing that anyone could possibly do to deceive him. Or rather, in order to deceive Descartes we should first have to bring him into being; only then could we practice our deceptive arts upon him. Because I believe that I exist, and I couldn’t do so unless I did exist, it therefore follows that I exist, and nihilism is false. Nihilism looks self-refuting.
  2. The claim that I do not exist is not self-contradictory. I might not have existed: what I say when I utter the words 'I do not exist' could easily have been true. It would have been true if my parents had never met. It seems, though, that the claim that one does not exist could never truly be asserted in the first person. For if it is asserted, then someone or something asserts it, and it refers to that being. That being is therefore asserting that it itself does not exist, which can only be false. So the claim that one does not exist will be false whenever it is asserted in the first person. It is like the claim that one is not making an assertion: although it could be true, it could never truly be asserted. It is, as philosophers of language say, pragmatically inconsistent: the conditions necessary for it to be asserted ensure that it is false. Contrariwise, the claim that one exists can never falsely be asserted. And the first-person belief that one exists could never falsely be held. So our quick refutation of nihilism is this: I believe that I exist, and that belief can never falsely be held; therefore it is true – I exist – and nihilism is false.
  3. This sort of argument is often criticized. The critics concede that anyone who believes that he exists must be right, but question whether anyone believes anything. If I believe that I exist, then that belief will be true; but what justifies the claim that I believe something? That is already to assume too much: it presupposes that there is such a thing as I. The argument that nihilism is self-refuting therefore assumes the point at issue. For the argument to give us a reason to believe that we exist, the objection goes, it would have to begin with a premise that can be established without illicitly assuming that anyone exists. So no useful argument for the claim that I exist can start with the claim that I think. It would have to start, rather, with the claim that there is thinking, or that there is an occurrence of the belief that I exist, or the like. But from these claims it doesn't follow, or at least doesn’t follow in any obvious way, that I or anyone else exists. Without further argument we cannot infer that anyone thinks, and therefore that anyone exists, from the premise that there is thinking. Even if Descartes’ demon could not get me to believe falsely that I exist, for all we know he could cause an occurrence of the thought I exist to occur on an occasion when it is false – that is, when it is not a thought of anyone or anything. Likewise, it may be that anyone who asserts that he does not exist is bound to be mistaken; but from the fact that such an assertion is made it doesn’t follow that anyone makes it. So for all we know the assertion that one exists might be made on an occasion when it is false. The pragmatic inconsistency of denying one’s own existence does not therefore refute nihilism.
  4. I suppose the critics are right that there is no obvious valid inference from the occurrence of thinking to there being someone or something that thinks. Nihilism is not self-refuting, or at least not obviously so. There is no quick and easy way to defeat it. To argue that we exist we are going to need something more substantial. We are going to need a metaphysical argument. Can we find one?
8.4 Unity and simplicity
  1. Let us suppose that human thinking goes on. This is something that even Descartes’ critics grant; they simply doubt whether this thinking has to be done by anything. But can there be thought without a thinker? Is it possible for there to be mental states and activities – beliefs, wishes, dreams, and so on – and yet nothing that is a subject of those states or events? If not, then the existence of human thought entails that nihilism is false. (If it is possible, on the other hand, it would not follow that nihilism is true, though it might cast some doubt on our existence.)
  2. One argument for the claim that thought requires a thinker is that mental states and events “owe their identity as particulars to the identity of the person whose states they are” (Strawson 1959: 97). Here is one thing this might mean. Suppose there is a particular pain P1 and a particular pain P2 simultaneous with P1 and qualitatively just like it. P1 and P2 are either the same pain or two different pains. But what could make it the case that they were two and not one, or vice versa? The only possible answer, the argument says, is that they are one if they have the same subject and two if they have different subjects (Carruthers 1986: 57-58). No being could have two qualitatively indistinguishable pains at once, and two beings could never share a single pain. So the number of pains is determined at least in part by the number of suffering beings. And there is a number of pains. It follows that there could not be a pain that was not the pain of some sentient being. And what goes for pains goes for mental states and events generally. It follows that all thinking requires a thinker, and nihilism is false.
  3. I have two worries about this argument. First, if there are sentient beings, I see nothing to prevent a single sentient being – one that is mentally disunified – from having two indistinguishable pains at once (Olson 2003). If this is possible, then the claim that every mental state must have a subject would not answer the question of what determines whether particular mental states are identical or distinct, and would therefore get no support from the argument28. Second, it is not clear whether the question of what makes P1 and P2 two (if they are two) and not one must have any interesting answer. Why must something make them two – apart from the bare fact that they are two?
  4. Another argument begins with the claim that the very idea of a state that was not a state of anything is incoherent. There couldn’t be a dent without a dented object. There couldn’t be a knot that wasn’t a knot in a rope or a string or the like. Think of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, that disappears and leaves behind its grin – no head, no lips, just the grin. This is a metaphysical joke: you can’t have a grin without anything grinning. For the same reason, there cannot be a pain or a dream that was not a state of some suffering or dreaming being. (Roald Dahl’s story about a giant who catches dreams and keeps them in jars until he can put them into the heads of sleeping children is another joke.)
  5. Sensible though this sounds, however, there is a weakness in it. You could deny that thoughts require thinkers without endorsing an Alice in Wonderland metaphysic by supposing that many unthinking things combine or cooperate to produce thought. Thinking might be like putting on a play. Although someone could put on a play all by herself, it is more often a joint production: many actors, directors, stage hands, and others each do something less than performing the play, and those lesser activities together make it the case that the play is performed. To take another example, the cables of a suspension bridge cooperate to hold up the deck of the bridge, for although no single cable supports the bridge by itself, they hold it up jointly or collectively. This shows that things can “cooperate” to get something done without intending to do so.
  6. It seems possible for many people to put on a play together without thereby composing anything that performs the play individually. The fact that a dozen people cooperate to put on a play does not entail the existence of a disconnected concrete object made up of those dozen people. At any rate it would be a contentious metaphysical claim to suppose that it does. Though there may be reasons for believing in the existence of something the twelve people compose, the fact that they put on a play together does not appear to be one of them.
  7. It seems, then, that at least some tasks can be performed without any one thing performing them, if several objects, by individually doing other things, cooperate to perform the task jointly. This is not the Alice in Wonderland view that things can get done or that properties can be exemplified all by themselves. For all the Alice in Wonderland argument says, then, thinking might be a cooperative activity like putting on a play. Perhaps many unthinking things – atoms, say – could each do something less than thinking in such a way that these lesser contributions add up to an act of thinking, but without making up any subject of the thinking they jointly produce. In that case there might be thought without a thinker.
  8. But is thinking like putting on a play or holding up a bridge? Could it be a mere cooperative activity – something that many things can cooperate to bring about without anything doing it individually? Some say no. Van Inwagen, for instance, says that things working together to produce thinking are “forced, by the very nature of the task set them,” to produce thinking by composing something that thinks individually (1990a: 118). This is not the case, he says, for putting on a play or holding up a bridge. If he is right, it is impossible for things to cooperate to produce thought without there being a subject of that thought. There could not be thought without a thinker. Nihilism is incompatible with the existence of thinking, and therefore false. But van Inwagen doesn’t say why thinking could not be a mere cooperative activity. He simply finds it obvious. Can we do any better? Can we say what it is about thinking that requires things that do it jointly to compose (or at least be parts of) something that does it individually?
  9. Suppose that an act or state of thinking – a mental event or state – really could be produced jointly by a lot of non-thinkers. Then we might expect that act of thinking to be made up of parts: as many parts as there are unthinking beings cooperating to produce it. The reason why many people can put on a play jointly is that this task can be parcelled out into smaller sub-tasks that individuals can perform singly: uttering certain words, making certain gestures, and so on. It is the job of the play’s producer to assign these tasks to individual people. Likewise, the task of holding up a bridge can be broken down into sub-tasks that individual cables can perform: each cable has to exert enough upward force so that the sum of those forces equals the weight of the bridge. So if atoms, say, produced thought collectively, we should expect every such act or state of thought to be divisible into a vast number of atom-sized “sub-thoughts” – acts or states that are not themselves thoughts – each of which is produced individually by a single atom. Of course, we have only the vaguest idea of what these atomic roles would be – that is, what each atom would have to do in order for the sum of their activities to amount to an act of thinking. But that, the nihilist will say, is only because we know so much less about how thought is produced than we do about how plays are performed or bridges held up, and not because it is impossible for atoms to produce thought collectively.
  10. Someone might suggest that atoms could jointly produce a simple, monolithic act of thought, not composed of parts distributed over those atoms. Thought might be something “new” or “emergent” that is in no way reducible to anything non-psychological29. Given how little we know about the metaphysics of thinking, it is hard to rule this out with any confidence. That said, I shouldn’t expect any nihilist to accept it. Nihilism is a paradigmatically “reductionist” claim: it says that we can account for thinking beings – or the appearance of there being thinking beings – in terms of smaller and simpler things. By contrast, the idea that acts of thought, despite being carried out jointly by a lot of unthinking atoms, are in fact simple, is strongly anti-reductionist. It says that we cannot account for acts of thought in terms of smaller and simpler things. There may be no formal inconsistency in saying that we can account for thinking beings, but not acts of thought, in terms of smaller and simpler things; but it would be a strange combination of views. In any case, it would be important news if the only way of defending nihilism were to accept that acts of thought must be simple.
  11. Let us suppose, then, that an act of thought produced collectively by atoms that don’t think individually would have to be made up of non-thoughts, each produced individually by a single atom. But are acts of thought made up of non-thoughts? You might think not. For one thing, it is hard to imagine what the parts of an act of thinking could be. Some acts of thinking may have other acts of thinking as parts: for instance, thinking that it's cold and windy might be made up of thinking that it's cold and thinking that it's windy. But what could be the parts of an act of thinking that it’s cold? The very idea of a part of that thought sounds like a muddle – like the idea of the back side of a rainbow. If acts of thinking do not have parts, but they would have to have parts in order for non-thinkers to produce them jointly, then non-thinkers cannot cooperate to produce thought without there being a subject of that thought. Or at any rate thought without a thinker would be an Alice in Wonderland phenomenon like a grin without a cat.
  12. Even if there were such things as sub-thoughts, some argue that it would remain a mystery how they could come together to compose a whole thought unless they were all states of one subject30. If Blott thinks that it’s cold and Clott thinks that it’s windy, the parts of the compound thought that it’s cold and windy will exist, but they won’t make up that compound thought unless Blott is Clott. Things can be parts of a single act of thinking only if they are unified in the right way; their mere existence doesn’t suffice for them to compose a thought. And the only way for parts of thoughts to be unified in such a way as to make up a whole thought, it seems, is for them to be states of the same being – in which case the thought has got a subject after all. For there to be an act of thought without a thinking subject, that act would have to be decomposable into sub-thoughts performed by non-thinkers; but those sub-thoughts would compose a genuine thought only if they were states of some one thinking being. So again there cannot be thought without a thinker.
  13. There are two different arguments here. Both start from the premise that a thought with no subject, produced cooperatively by many unthinking things, would have to be made up of sub-thoughts – parts that aren’t themselves thoughts. The first argument goes on to say that acts of thought are not composed of sub-thoughts, and therefore cannot be produced cooperatively. The only way to avoid the Alice in Wonderland view that thoughts simply occur, like clouds, is to say that they must have a subject. Call this the simplicity-of-thought argument. The second says that even if acts of thought did have such parts, they could compose a whole thought only by being states of a single being – that is, only by having the same subject. Again, thought requires a subject. Call this the unity-of-thought argument.
  14. These arguments would entail that every act of thought must have a thinker, ruling out nihilism. But they appear to entail more than that: they seem to entail that thinking beings must be mereologically simple. If they entail that we exist, they also entail that we have no parts. Suppose a thinking thing – something that thinks in the strictest sense, not merely something that thinks by virtue of having a part that thinks – were composed of unthinking parts. Then our two arguments suggest that its thoughts would be composed of sub-thoughts distributed over its parts (or at least some of its parts). Now as we stated them, the arguments said only that a thought with no subject produced cooperatively by many unthinking things would have to be composed of sub-thoughts. But the idea behind this premise was that any task that many beings could carry out jointly must be decomposable into sub-tasks, like roles in a play. And this seems to be so whether or not those beings thereby compose something that performs the task individually. Even if it were impossible for a dozen people to put on a play together without thereby composing a disconnected object that performs the play individually, mustn’t the performance be composed of parts, each of which can be performed by an individual person? So it seems that any act of thinking produced by the cooperative activities of many atoms, whether or not those atoms thereby compose a subject of that thinking, must be made up of sub-thoughts performed individually by atoms.
  15. And both arguments say that no act of thought could be composed of sub-thoughts performed individually by non-thinkers. According to the simplicity argument there are no sub-thoughts at all. It follows that thought could be produced only by a simple thinker. According to the unity argument, sub-thoughts would have to be states of the same thing, and not of different things, else they wouldn’t make up a thought. Suppose there are many unthinking atoms, each in a different state; and suppose those states are intrinsically suited to compose a certain sort of thought: they would compose a thought if they were suitably unified. Still, they can’t compose a thought because they are all states of different objects. They can no more add up to a thought than Blott’s thought that it’s cold and Clott’s thought that it’s windy can add up to the thought that it’s cold and windy (supposing that Blott and Clott are two).
  16. You might suppose that if certain atoms compose something, then their individual states are states of the same thing, namely the thing they compose. So how does the unity argument imply that every thought must have a simple thinker, and never a composite one? Well, suppose that Blott, who thinks that it’s cold, and Clott, who thinks that it’s windy, compose some larger, disconnected object. (Many philosophers believe that any objects whatever, including Blott and Clott, compose something.) That clearly would not suffice for an occurrence of the thought that it’s cold and windy. Perhaps the thing Blott and Clott compose would believe that it’s cold and also believe that it’s windy, but it would not believe that it’s cold and windy. So the mere fact that states of different individuals that are intrinsically suited to compose a thought are all states of something or other does not suffice for them to compose a thought. What does suffice? It seems that states could compose a thought only if they are all states of the same simple being. You and I, who obviously think, must therefore be simple.
  17. Because the simplicity and unity arguments have such revolutionary (or perhaps I ought to say reactionary) implications, we ought to be on our guard. And grounds for doubt are not hard to find. Start with the main premise of the simplicity argument: that no act or state of thought could be composed of non-thoughts. Though this has some attraction, it is hardly compelling, and I shouldn’t know how to begin to argue for it. I admit that I have no idea what the parts of a thought might be, except in the special case where they are themselves thoughts. But that is because the nature of thought is obscure to me, and not because I can see by the clear light of reason that acts of thought must be mereologically simple.
  18. What about the main premise of the unity argument, that states or activities of different objects could never add up to a whole thought? To my mind this is nothing more than an intriguing speculation. You may well ask: How could states of different things add up to a whole thought? What does it take for different states or activities to compose a state or act of thought? That is, how do states or activities that are intrinsically suited to compose a mental activity have to relate to one another (and to their surroundings, if that is relevant) in order for them to compose a mental state or activity? We might call this the mental composition question. It is analogous to asking how atoms of the sort that are intrinsically suited to compose an organism – atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on, in the right proportions – have to relate to one another and to their surroundings in order for them to compose an organism. If mental states and events can have parts, then the mental composition question must presumably have an answer. The unity-of-thought argument answers it by saying that states intrinsically suited to compose a thought actually do compose a thought if and only if they are states of the same simple object.
  19. I have no alternative answer to the mental composition question. (If I had to guess, I would say that states compose a thought by virtue of their causal relations to one another and to their surroundings, along the lines of §6.3. But that is little more than a vague gesture.) If accepting that states of different objects could never compose a thought would help us to answer the mental composition question, that would be a reason to accept that principle. But it isn’t clear whether it does help. For all I know, states intrinsically suited to compose a thought might be states of a single object – even a mereologically simple object – without composing a thought. Why couldn’t a being – even a simple being, if a simple being could think at all – believe that it’s cold and believe that it’s windy at the same time without believing that it’s cold and windy? That is, why couldn’t a simple being have a disunified mental life? Being states of a simple object doesn’t appear to suffice for appropriate states to add up to a thought. And if it’s not sufficient, why suppose that it’s necessary? If we had an account of what sufficed for states of a simple object to make up a thought, I should expect it to suffice also for states of different parts of a compound object to make up a thought. And if unthinking things can cooperate to produce thought, it is not obvious what could prevent them from doing so without composing any subject of that thought.
  20. These arguments for the claim that thought requires a thinker are disappointing. Thinking may not seem like the sort of thing that could be carried out jointly by many non-thinkers without having a subject; but for all we have been able to show this is little more than a hunch. So we have failed to find any good argument for our existence. But it hardly follows that this that we don’t exist, or that the belief in our own existence is unwarranted. You can’t argue for everything. There are some things, surely, that it is reasonable to believe without an argument. And that we exist might be as good a candidate as any for being one of them.
8.5 Paraphrase: The mentalistic strategy
  1. Let us return now to the topic of §8.2. Nihilism entails that the true story of the world – the story that is strictly true and not misleading – is not a story about people, for according to nihilism there are no people. If nihilism is true it ought to be possible, in principle at least, to tell that story. That is, it ought to be possible to state all the facts without mentioning or otherwise implying the existence of people. But although none of these facts involve people, some of them must make certain ordinary statements that appear to be about people in some way right, and others just plain wrong. Sensible nihilists will agree that in most contexts it would be a mistake to say that London is uninhabited. There is something right about the claim that there are many people in London. We can take it for ordinary purposes to be true. Even if nihilism is true, there is some state of affairs – one not involving people – that this ordinary statement describes, albeit in an unperspicuous and misleading way, and which makes that statement true, or if not true then at least somehow right. The nihilist’s “impersonal” story of the world must include this state of affairs.
  2. If this is right, then every ordinary statement that appears to be about people will be true, or at least somehow right, if and only if a certain state of affairs not involving people obtains. And it ought to be possible to describe that “impersonal” state of affairs in a way that is strictly true and perspicuous and not misleading: in terms that do not even appear to entail the existence of people. That is, it should be possible, in principle if not in practice, to paraphrase any ordinary statement about people into a statement that nihilists can accept without qualification. The paraphrase ought to capture the truth behind the original statement. It is unlikely to be strictly synonymous with the original – it can’t be if the paraphrase is true and the original is false – but it must be close enough to capture what is right or wrong about the original. (This is a difference between the nihilistic paraphrase strategy and the project of “logical construction” mentioned in §6.1: a logical construction of person talk out of vocabulary of some other sort would count as a nihilisic paraphrase, but a nihilistic paraphrase needn’t count as a logical construction.) Of course, nihilists are not obliged to use these paraphrases. (They are likely to be forbiddingly complex.) Once they have satisfied themselves and their critics that such ordinary sayings as ‘Martina has three brothers’ can be made correct in ordinary circumstances by facts about non-people and are thus in a sense compatible with nihilism, they can continue to use them like anyone else.
  3. Earlier I said that ordinary statements about food shortages could be true even if strictly speaking there are no such entities as shortages: they might be made true by facts about the distribution of people and food. For instance, when the papers say that there is a shortage of food in Zimbabwe, this might be true if and only if many people in Zimbabwe have less food than they need. This paraphrase does not appear to imply the existence of shortages. (More elaborate examples can be found in Lewis and Lewis 1970 and van Inwagen 1990: §11.) Nihilists will want to do for ourselves, so to speak, what we seem to be able to do for shortages. But what might stand to ourselves as people and food stand to food shortages?
  4. Two thoughts come to mind. The first is a “mentalistic strategy”. Maybe there could be particular mental states and events (human ones) even if nihilism is true and they are not the states of anything. The truth behind the statement that I am now hungry would then have something to do with the existence of a certain hunger sensation. The second thought, an “atomistic” strategy, will be the subject of the next section.
  5. Now we cannot simply paraphrase 'I am now hungry' as 'there is now a hunger sensation', for the mere existence of a hunger sensation cannot make it right to say that I am hungry, but at most that someone or something is. Likewise, we cannot paraphrase ‘I am not now hungry’ as ‘there is not now a hunger sensation’ (Williams 1978: 97). Nor does the existence of a hunger sensation and a thirst sensation make it right to say that someone is both hungry and thirsty, but at most that someone is hungry and someone is thirsty. Plainly the nihilist needs some device for collecting together those mental states and events that we correctly but loosely describe as having the same subject. She needs to say that the ordinary statement ‘someone is hungry and thirsty’ is correct if and only if there is a hunger sensation and a thirst sensation and those sensations relate to one another in a certain way, a way that it is somehow apt, even if perhaps strictly false or misleading, to describe as their being states of the same person. But this has to be a relation that mental states can stand in without being states of the same being.
  6. At this point we might return to the idea that mental states come in bundles (§6.3): when mental states are related in a certain way – in the way non-nihilists say they are related when they are the mental states of a thinking being – they compose a bundle. We might be able to characterize this relation in causal terms: the mental states that non-nihilists ascribe to a single subject, but not those they ascribe to different subjects, are disposed to interact in certain characteristic ways that often lead to action. This will of course help the nihilist only if these bundles are never themselves subjects of the mental states that compose them, for if the bundles think, then we exist, contrary to nihilism. The idea must be, rather, that ordinary statements that appear to ascribe mental properties to people are made right or wrong by facts about bundles of subjectless mental states. Then the statement that I am hungry would be correct if and only if a certain bundle – this one, the one producing this utterance – includes a hunger sensation.
  7. Bundles would help in other cases too. The ordinary statement that there are six million people in London would seem to be right if and only if there are six million bundles of thoughts of the appropriate human sort there. (I say “of the appropriate human sort” to exclude nonhuman bundles: feline and angelic bundles, for instance. When we speak of the number of people in London we are not taking a stand on the number of cats or angels there.) It is wrong to say that there are people on the moon because that barren world contains no such bundles. Bundles of thoughts would be convenient for the nihilist because they would be good substitutes, so to speak, for thinking beings.
  8. One difficulty for the mentalistic strategy is statements ascribing non-mental properties to people: that Brita is riding a bicycle, say. The truth behind this statement may have something to do with a certain bundle of mental states, but it clearly involves more. It may be tempting to say that this something more has to do with a certain human body or organism. But nihilists will not want to accept the existence of organisms, for they would be thinkers.
  9. More seriously, if there are no people, there are unlikely to be any bundles of thoughts either. If bundled thoughts – mental states that relate to one another in a way that gives the appearance of their being states of a single thinking being – compose bundles, then we should expect the physical particles that now appear to compose you to compose something as well. Why should bundled thoughts compose something while physical particles arranged in human form compose nothing? Why should there be things made up of mental states but no things made up of quarks and electrons? And if “your” particles – those particles now arranged in human form and resting on your chair – compose something, the thing they compose will be a good candidate for being you: something that thinks your thoughts and performs your actions. And if anything thinks your thoughts and performs your actions, surely you do, in which case you exist and nihilism is false.
  10. It looks, then, as if anyone who denies that we exist will want to deny that any things ever compose anything. Nothing is ever a part of anything. There are no composite objects. Everything is mereologically simple. And presumably this is no accident: there couldn’t be composite objects. Let us call this claim compositional nihilism to distinguish it from nihilism about ourselves. If it is true, then statements apparently about ourselves will have to be made correct or incorrect by facts about mereological simples.
  11. Compositional nihilism is an interesting thesis raising worries of its own. One is that no one knows for certain whether there are any simples. Perhaps even the smallest known particles are composed of smaller parts, which are themselves composed of yet smaller parts, and so on, right down to infinity. That would be incompatible with compositional nihilism. Whatever is not simple is by definition composite; so if there were neither simples nor composites, there would not be anything at all, and we know that that isn’t true. If nihilism about ourselves entails compositional nihilism, then nihilism too is committed to there being simples.
  12. Another problem is that mental states and events themselves might be composite. This would not be at all surprising if each particular mental state or event were a physical state or event in the brain – that is, if some sort of token-identity theory were true. Any physical event that was a candidate for being a mental event would be vastly complex, involving the activities of hundreds of millions of cells. If it makes sense to speak of the parts of states or events, we should expect states and events of this sort to have parts. In that case compositional nihilism entails that there are no mental states or events; at best there could be simple non-mental states and events that it is somehow apt to describe as if they composed thoughts. The nihilist could not then simply replace talk of bundles of thoughts with talk of bundled thoughts.
  13. The nonexistence of mental goings-on would be troublesome for another reason too. Recall Descartes’ argument for his own existence: I think I exist, and I couldn’t think anything unless I existed; therefore I must exist. Descartes’ critics say that it is assuming too much to suppose that I think; I am entitled to say only that thinking occurs. It looks now as if even that assumes too much. If I didn’t exist, I shouldn’t be thinking; so insofar as my existence is doubtful, so is the claim that I think. In the same way it seems that if I didn’t exist there would be no acts or states of thinking either; so insofar as my existence is doubtful, so is the existence of thinking.
  14. But is it really coherent to doubt the existence of thinking? Even if there could be an occurrence of the thought I exist on an occasion when it is false because no one thinks it, not even an omnipotent deceiver could cause an occurrence of the thought thinking is going on to occur on an occasion when it is false because there is no thinking. The thought thinking is going on could never be false. And there are clearly occurrences of the thought thinking is going on. It is occurring right here. At any rate it appears that thinking is going on; and isn’t this appearance itself an instance of thinking?
  15. If this is right, nihilists will have to account for the appearance of thinking in non-mental terms. This is a challenge that eliminative materialists also face. They too deny that there is any thinking, though not on metaphysical grounds but on the grounds that “folk psychology” – the theory according to which we can explain people’s actions in terms of their mental properties – has been shown empirically to be false. Even if this is so, the challenge goes, there still appear to be mental goings-on, and this appearance looks like something mental itself. Unless nihilists and eliminative materialists can deny that the appearance of there being mental states is itself mental, their views will be self-refuting. We will consider a suggestion for doing this in the next section.
8.6 Paraphrase: The atomistic strategy
  1. Though nihilists deny that we exist, they will nonetheless want to say that there is something right about many ordinary statements that appear to imply the existence of people, such as the statement that more people live in London than in Berlin. We considered an attempt to state this something right in terms of bundles of mental states, but abandoned it on the grounds that if mental states compose bundles, there are likely to be things that compose human thinkers as well: whatever prevents your atoms (if we may so speak) from composing a thinking being is likely to prevent your mental states from composing bundles as well. To be safe, nihilists will probably want to deny that any things ever compose anything: they will want to be compositional nihilists. But compositional nihilism threatens to imply not only that there are no thinking beings, but that there are no states or acts of thought either. Is there a way of telling the whole story of the world without implying the existence of either thinkers or thinking?
  2. Perhaps we could tell it in terms of simple particles. Some simple particles – quarks and electrons, according to current physics – have certain properties and relate to one another and to other simple particles in such a way that they would compose a person if they composed anything. They are the ones that non-nihilists take to compose people, and the ones that would compose people if nihilism were false. They are the particles that collectively produce a certain sort of thought – the sort that (to lapse once more into person-talk) distinguishes people from non-people. At any rate it is appropriate for ordinary purposes to describe their activities as making up thought. We might abbreviate all this by saying that such particles are “arranged person-wise”. The proposal, then, is to replace talk of people with simple talk of particles arranged person-wise. This would be an atomistic strategy for paraphrasing people talk, as opposed to the mentalistic strategy we began with31.
  3. The general idea is something like this. We replace quantification over people by quantification over particles arranged person-wise: for instance, if an ordinary statement says ‘Someone…’, we replace it by ‘Some particles arranged person-wise…’. Thus, we can paraphrase the ordinary statement that there are two people in the lift as ‘there are particles arranged person-wise, and some other particles arranged person-wise, different from the first (let us ignore conjoined twins, who share particles), and they are all enclosed within the particles arranged lift-wise’. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to paraphrase the ordinary statement that there are six million people in London in this fashion. We replace singular reference to particular people by plural reference to particular particles: we replace ‘Socrates’, for instance, by ‘the Socrates-particles’: those particles that, according to non-nihilists, compose Socrates at the appropriate time. It will not be easy to say, in nihilistic terms, what makes it the case that a particle is one of the “Socrates-particles”; but this might be a mere technical detail rather than a principled obstacle in the way of the atomistic strategy. (This would mean that our personal pronouns and proper names do refer to something, despite our initial characterization of nihilism as the view that they refer to nothing. They don’t refer in the singular to people, but rather in the plural to many particles.) And we replace the predicates attached to these expressions – terms like ‘is hungry’ and ‘is taller than’ – by plural collective predicates true of particles.
  4. A plural collective predicate is one that applies (or fails to apply) to a number of things jointly, rather than to each individually: ‘surrounded the house’, ‘are putting on a play’, ‘outnumber’, and ‘are arranged person-wise’ are examples. To say that Tom, Dick, and Harry are eating lunch is just to say that Tom is eating lunch, and Dick is eating lunch, and Harry is eating lunch: ‘are eating lunch’ is a plural distributive predicate, not a collective one. But to say that Tom, Dick, and Harry surrounded the house is not to say that Tom surrounded the house, and so did Dick, and so did Harry. They eat lunch individually, but they surround the house jointly: each individually does something less than surrounding the house, and these activities add up to their surrounding the house collectively. (Many predicates are ambiguous as between collective and distributive: to say that Tom, Dick, and Harry are carrying a piano is ordinarily to say that they are carrying a piano together, but it could mean that each is carrying a piano by himself.)
  5. Now consider the statement that someone is hungry. We cannot paraphrase this as ‘some particles are hungry’, because ‘are hungry’ is a distributive rather than a collective predicate. That is, to say that x, y, and z are hungry is to say that x is hungry, y is hungry, and z is hungry: ‘are hungry’ is like ‘are eating lunch’, and not like ‘surrounded the house’ or ‘are carrying a piano’. Because no particle is hungry, it follows that if there are only particles and nothing composed of particles, then nothing is hungry. Nihilists might try to argue that despite appearances the ordinary predicate ‘are hungry’ is a collective predicate, not a distributive one. But there may be no need for them to say this, for we might be able to invent a collective “hunger” predicate that applies jointly to a lot of particles just in the case that it is correct for ordinary purposes to describe them as composing a being that is hungry. The predicate might be ‘are collectively hungry’ – though it is important to keep in mind that being collectively hungry is not a way of being hungry. So what makes it right for ordinary purposes to say that someone (or something) is hungry would be that some particles are collectively hungry. What does that mean? Well, maybe particles are collectively hungry if and only if they are of such a nature and relate to one another and to other particles in such a way that they would compose something hungry (in the ordinary sense of the word) if they composed anything.
  6. None of this appears to require the existence of either thinking beings or composite objects. In particular, it doesn’t appear to require the existence of mental states or events. What about the appearance that there are mental states? Isn’t that itself a mental state? The atomistic strategy suggests that it is correct in ordinary circumstances to say that thinking appears to someone to go on if and only if there are particles arranged in such a way that they would compose someone to whom it appeared that thinking was going on if they composed anything.
  7. This has an important implication: if the atomistic strategy can be made to work, it seems that nihilism is not committed to the claim that there can be thought without a thinker. In §8.4 we considered arguments to the effect that particular mental states could not be produced cooperatively by many unthinking beings, or that they would have to be individuated by their subjects, and hence could not exist unless they were states of some thinking being. But now it looks as if those arguments are powerless against nihilism, for even if they succeed on their own terms they are perfectly compatible with it. Nihilists can agree that there can’t be thoughts without thinkers: they will simply deny that there are thoughts. And they will hope to account for what is right about talk that appears to be about thoughts in terms of simple particles alone.
  8. The statement that someone is hungry is easy to paraphrase. Or at least it is easy given the crucial assumption that there could be such a thing as the made-up predicate ‘are collectively hungry’, true of particles if and only if it is correct for ordinary purposes describe them as composing something hungry – and given that we could understand that predicate. Other cases, however, will be more challenging. Take statements about identity over time. Suppose we say that Mina is taller than she was a year ago. It is no good paraphrasing this as ‘there are certain particles arranged person-wise now (let us ignore the problem of how to specify which ones), and there were certain particles arranged person-wise a year ago, and the first particles are now arranged in such a way that their collective lengthwise extent is greater than the lengthwise extent the other particles had a year ago’. This can at most make it correct to say that Mina is now taller than someone was a year ago. Not just any particles that were arranged person-wise a year ago are relevant to statements about Mina’s height then, but only those that, according to those who reject nihilism, composed Mina then. The nihilist will need to find a time-spanning relation holding among particles that stands in, as it were, for the identity of a person over time- -something vaguely analogous to the personal temporal counterpart relation mentioned in §5.8.
  9. Or consider the modal statement that anyone in Fargo might have been in Hong Kong. We cannot paraphrase this as ‘Any particles arranged person-wise in Fargo might have been arranged person-wise in Hong Kong’, for that is at once too strong and too weak. It is too strong because, as non-nihilists would say, an inhabitant of Fargo could have been in Hong Kong without being composed of the very particles that actually compose him. It is too weak because the particles non-nihilists say compose an inhabitant of Fargo could be arranged person-wise in Hong Kong without making it correct to say that that very person is in Hong Kong. The problem is more obvious if we consider the statement that anyone might have been made up of different atoms from the ones that actually make her up – something whose obvious rightness the nihilist ought to be able to account for.
  10. For another challenge, try paraphrasing statements with complex quantificational structure, such as ‘Some people are taller than all their friends’ or ‘Anyone who is taller than all his friends is envied by his neighbors’ in terms of simple particles. (Difficulties of this sort affect even the “shortage” example of §8.2: although we can paraphrase ‘There is a shortage of food in Zimbabwe’ easily enough as ‘Many people in Zimbabwe have less food than they need’, paraphrasing ‘Food shortages are more frequent than they used to be’ is far more difficult.)
  11. For all I know, someone with enough patience and ingenuity could come up with atomistic paraphrases of statements like these. The paraphrases might be cumbersome, but I cannot see any insuperable obstacle in the way of producing them32.
  12. If atomistic paraphrase is possible, it would answer the charge that nihilism is an absurd denial of the obvious. Note, however, that this does nothing to make nihilism plausible – any more than the existence of temporal counterpart theory makes the stage view plausible.
8.7 What it would mean if we did not exist
  1. Let us turn now to a different sort of question. What would it mean if we did not exist? What practical consequences would it have? How would it affect our lives if we came to believe it and acted accordingly? How bad would it be if it were true? It might not matter much, practically speaking, whether we are organisms or temporal parts of organisms or bundles of thoughts or what have you. That question is primarily of theoretical interest. But it might be of more than merely theoretical interest whether we exist at all. Here are three thoughts about what the practical consequences of nihilism might be.
  2. One is that it would be unbearably depressing if nihilism were true. To be a nihilist is to believe that all the people you ever loved or respected have never existed. It is hard to imagine a more crushing thought. Compare nihilism with solipsism. A solipsist is someone who believes that there are no people other than herself: what appear to be other people are either unthinking brutes (organisms with no mental properties) or mere persistent hallucinations on her part. For most of us this would be an utterly appalling prospect. If nothing else, it would be impossible for a solipsist to love or admire anyone other than herself: you cannot sustain a feeling of love towards someone if you believe that there has never been any such person. At any rate a solipsist could not love or admire anyone else except by believing something incompatible with solipsism. A consistent solipsist could not love anyone but herself. Now the nihilist goes the solipsist one better and says that she too does not exist. So a consistent nihilist could not even love herself. That seems to make nihilism even worse than solipsism. Or maybe not quite as bad: it might be better for me not to exist than to be the only thinking being in the universe. Either way, we can only hope that nihilism isn’t true.
  3. You might wonder how nihilism could be depressing if it implies that there is no one to be depressed. Well, I might want something to be the case even if no one would be in any way unhappy if it weren’t the case: for instance, I might find it a good thing that the universe contains sentient life. And although it may be that if nihilism were true we couldn’t be depressed, it could make us depressed if we falsely believed it to be true. The question is not whether we ought to be depressed if nihilism were true, but whether we ought to find the prospect that nihilism is true depressing.
  4. The second thought is that our not existing might have its bright side. Perhaps accepting it would make us less selfish. At any rate it would mean that self-interest was not a rational motive for action. How could it be, if there is no “self” to have any interests? If there are no such beings as myself or others, there can be no reason to put my interests above those of others. Nihilism might imply that all interests are of equal value. We might find that liberating.
  5. This hopeful thought is threatened, however, by a third33 thought, namely that nihilism might deprive us of any reason for acting at all. Why do we act? What reason have we for doing anything? Ordinarily we act for the good of someone or something. We don’t always succeed in benefitting anyone or anything, but that is our aim. Let us understand the word ‘good’ or ‘benefit’ broadly: to make someone happier than she would otherwise be, or to satisfy a desire or preference of hers, or to act in her interests, or to prevent a violation of her rights is to do her good or to benefit her. But if there are no people or other sentient beings, there are no beings that our actions could benefit. Think of solipsism again. According to solipsism the only reason for me to act is for my own benefit. At any rate I am the only one who can benefit from any action. What could be the point of acting for someone else’s benefit if there is no one else, and never could be? For a solipsist to act in the interests of others would be like an atheist acting to propitiate the gods. But if nihilism is true then I don’t exist either. There is no one at all. In that case there is no reason to act for anyone’s benefit. So a nihilist would have to conclude that there is no point in doing anything. Now it probably isn’t true that the only possible reason for acting is to benefit someone. Suppose I could do something that would prevent the existence of beings who would have utterly miserable lives. That might be a reason for acting that did not aim at benefitting anyone. (It couldn’t benefit those who are thereby spared a miserable life, for if I act there will be no such beings. It might, of course, benefit those who would have to care for these wretched beings; but it needn’t.) This sort of thing could not be a reason for acting if nihilism is true, however. If nihilism is true, I cannot prevent the existence of beings who would have utterly miserable lives, for there will be no such beings no matter what I do: I could no more prevent there from being certain miserable beings than I can prevent there from being objects that move faster than light. The only reasons a consistent nihilist could have for acting would be reasons that did not even require the possibility that anyone or anything could be benefitted or harmed. And it is not clear whether there could be such reasons.
  6. If any of this is right, nihilism would have enormous practical consequences. Just how a nihilist ought to think or act may be hard to say, but few of us could accept nihilism and carry on living as before – or at least not without doing something that presupposes that nihilism is false.
  7. But is any of it right? Take the complaint that nihilism would be as depressing as solipsism, on account of its implication that none of the people we care about ever existed. Someone might object to this comparison. Sensible nihilists, as we have seen, will accept that there are particles arranged person-wise other than their own. Solipsists will disagree: they believe that the only particles arranged person-wise, and the only thoughts, are their own. (At least that’s what I suppose a solipsist would believe. I have never had the misfortune to meet a real solipsist. But that is what I should believe if I were a solipsist.) The difference between solipsism and nihilism is not just the difference between there being one person and there being none. Nihilism does not merely take solipsism and subtract something. It has something that solipsism lacks, namely particles other than one’s own that collectively think and are collectively conscious.
  8. This may leave us wondering whether nihilism would deprive us of anything valuable at all. My particles – the ones producing these words – can still collectively love or admire other particles arranged person-wise, and those other particles can collectively relate to my particles in the same way. Nihilism is consistent with the occurrence of births and deaths, memories and dreams, conversations, relationships, and everything else that we care about – or at least with the occurrence of activities at the level of particles that it is appropriate for ordinary purposes to describe as births, deaths, relationships, and so on. Once our beliefs and statements are reformulated in terms compatible with nihilism, we might find (to put it crudely) that everything we thought was true of people is true of particles arranged person-wise. All that is missing are thinking subjects. And why should anyone but a metaphysician care whether there are thinking subjects? Nothing of any practical importance is lost. Ordinary life can go on as before.
  9. Let us have an example. Imagine that one of my strongest desires is to be married. As it happens, I believe that I am married. I believe therefore that I have what I want. But should I have what I want if nihilism were true? It may seem not. The desire to be married is the desire to be married to someone, and nihilism implies that there is no one for me to be married to. If nihilism would frustrate one of my strongest desires, it would matter a great deal to me whether it was true.
  10. On the other hand, nihilism allows that my particles are “collectively married” to certain other particles. Would that give me what I want? Well, what would it be for particles to be collectively married to other particles? The collective-marriage relation is not the familiar relation of marriage that beings enter into pairwise: a particle cannot be married to another particle. The atomistic paraphrase strategy of the previous section suggests something like this: for the xs to be collectively married to the ys is for the xs and the ys to be of such a nature and to relate to one another and to their surroundings in such a way that, if the xs composed something and the ys composed something, the xs would compose something that was married (in the ordinary sense) to something the ys composed. If that is anywhere near right, then the truth behind the belief that I am married, according to nihilism, is roughly this: the world’s particles are arranged in such a way that, if nihilism were false, my particles would compose a person and certain other particles would compose a person and the first person would be married to the second.
  11. Suppose the particles really are arranged in that way. That may not appear to satisfy my desire to be married. What I want, surely, in wanting to be married is that I be married, not that certain particles be “collectively married” to certain other particles. And according to nihilism no one is married. It is merely the case that if I existed, and a certain other person existed, but everything at the level of particles were equal, then I should be married. And that purely hypothetical state of affairs can hardly satisfy my desire to be married – any more than the fact that if I inherited a million dollars then I should be rich does anything to satisfy my desire to be rich. So it seems that if nihilism is true I don’t have what I want in wanting to be married. I could have it only if certain particles arranged person-wise composed something – that is, only if nihilism were false.
  12. This is not right as it stands, however. The fact that my particles are collectively married to other particles is not the purely hypothetical fact that if I existed and a certain other person existed and all else were equal then I should be married. It is, rather, that the world’s particles are in fact arranged in such a way that, if nihilism were false but other things were equal, my particles would compose a person and certain other particles would compose a person to whom the first person was married. And that is not a purely hypothetical state of affairs. It implies that certain particles actually are arranged in a special way, a way that we ordinarily describe – in a misleading way if nihilism is true, but nonetheless aptly – by saying that two people are married. The impediment that nihilism would put in the way of my being married is not like the usual impediments – poverty, egotism, slovenly habits, that sort of thing. What nihilism offers as a substitute for my being married strictly speaking is not merely the hypothetical fact that if something incompatible with nihilism were the case then I should be married, but a categorical state of affairs to do with particles.
  13. We might still wonder how facts about things that could not possibly be married could satisfy my desire to be married. What do I care about particles if they never compose anything I could be married to? Well (the idea goes), my desire to be married is an attitude whose content I express in the words ‘that I be married’. And nihilism appears to allow that it is correct to say, in contexts that have nothing to do with metaphysical speculation, that I am married: it is correct if there are particles arranged in the right way. Moreover, my desire to be married is an ordinary desire, not one freighted with metaphysical content – a desire I could have even if I had no metaphysical thoughts. So it ought to suffice to satisfy it that it be correct to say, in ordinary contexts, that I am married. And so it is. If that is right, then the way the particles are arranged gives me what I want in wanting to be married.
  14. This reasoning is based on two claims. First,
      1. It is correct to say, in ordinary circumstances, that Olson is married if and only if the particles are arranged in such a way that, if the Olson-particles composed something and certain other particles composed something, the Olson-particles would compose something that was married to something the other particles composed.
    (The “Olson-particles” are those that would be collectively denoted by the name ‘Olson’ at the relevant time if nihilism were true. As before, let us set aside the considerable problem of specifying which ones they are.) This, or something like it, is what would make the ordinary statement that Olson is married correct if nihilism were true. Second,
      2. Olson’s desire to be married is satisfied if it is correct to say, in ordinary circumstances, that Olson is married.
    It follows that
      3. Olson’s desire to be married is satisfied if the particles are arranged in such a way that, if the Olson-particles composed something and certain other particles composed something, the Olson-particles would compose something that was married to something the other particles composed.
    In other words, the way the particles are arranged suffices to satisfy my desire to be married.
  15. The premises of this argument are plausible. If 1 were false it would mean that nearly everything I said about paraphrase in the previous section is wrong. There might perhaps be a way of paraphrasing talk of people in nihilistic terms that is radically different from the atomistic strategy. Failing that, however, nihilism would imply that all statements that appear to entail the existence of people are not only strictly false, but cannot even be taken to be true for ordinary purposes: the statement that there are six million people in London would be no better than the statement that there are six million dragons there. That would reduce nihilism to absurdity. A similar argument would presumably show any view according to which there are fewer concrete objects than we might have thought to be an absurd denial of the obvious: for instance the sparse ontology of §§3.2 and 7.4.
  16. If 2 were false, it would apparently be because my desire to be married demands not merely that it be correct for ordinary purposes to say that I am married, but that it be strictly true that I am married to someone, which is incompatible with nihilism. My desire to be married would have a content that goes beyond that of the ordinary statement that Olson is married – it would have metaphysical content, or at any rate metaphysical implications. That might be surprising.
  17. If 1 and 2 are true, then 3 follows, and my desire to be married can be satisfied even if nihilism is true. In that case it is hard to see how nihilism could deprive us of anything that we ordinarily desire. Perhaps there is nothing especially depressing about nihilism after all. And if this is right, similar reasoning is likely to show that the other thoughts about nihilism’s practical consequences – that it would make us less selfish and that it would deprive us of any reason to act – are also mistaken.
  18. What makes me suspicious of all this is that one could argue in the same way that there is nothing depressing about solipsism. Solipsism is not meant to be an absurd denial of the obvious, any more than nihilism is. Solipsists can accept that statements appearing to entail the existence of other people can be in some sense right: there ought to be something right, even if solipsism is true, in the claim that that there are six million people in London, and none on the moon. Solipsists will say that what makes it somehow right has to do with unthinking brutes or sense-impressions or the like. So they can accept a variant of 1 that replaces the bit about particles with something about unthinking brutes or sense-impressions. In other words, they can play the paraphrase game as well as the nihilist can. If I were a solipsist I could maintain that it is correct to say, in ordinary circumstances, that I am married if and only if an unthinking brute relates to me in a certain way. (What this way is might be hard to say, but no harder than saying what facts about particles could make it correct to say that I am married.) And I could say that my desire to be married is satisfied if and only if it is correct to say, in ordinary circumstances, that I am married. It would follow that my desire to be married does not require the existence of anyone other than myself, and would be in no way frustrated by the truth of solipsism. This would suggest that solipsism would not deprive me of anything I desire, and more generally that it would have few if any practical consequences. Becoming a solipsist would be a purely intellectual affair, and need have no effect on the rest of one’s life.
  19. Surely that is wrong. Solipsism is a paradigm case of a depressing philosophical claim. What makes it depressing? Well, it implies that strictly speaking I am not married, and have no children or friends. It implies that no one other than myself will ever read this book. And so on. Those are all bad things, or at any rate things that I want very much not to be the case. And it would be little consolation to me that certain facts about unthinking brutes or about my sense impressions make it correct for certain purposes to say that I am married and have friends. That is nothing more than the well-founded appearance of my being married and having friends, and although it may be better than nothing, it falls dismally short of giving me what I want in wanting to be married and have friends. If this means that those desires have metaphysical content, then so be it.
  20. What about nihilism, then? Would it be as depressing as solipsism? Would it frustrate our those of desires that have to do with people? That depends on the content of those desires. It depends on whether the desire to be married (for instance) can be satisfied by particles’ being arranged in certain ways without their composing people. It depends, that is, on whether our desires involving people demand that there really be people, or whether it is enough that it merely be correct for ordinary purposes to say that there are. I am inclined to say that nihilism does not give me what I want, and that the comparison with solipsism is apt. That certain particles are “collectively married” to my particles doesn’t seem to be enough: I want those particles to compose beings that really are married to each other. At least I think that’s what I want. The way the particles are arranged seems to me to be of little value, if any, unless they compose thinking, sentient beings.
  21. If this is right, then nihilism is a hard philosophy to live by. It is not merely counterintuitive, in the sense that it seems on reflection to be false. It is hard in the sense that it would take some doing to get oneself to believe it, and to accept its consequences, and to change one’s behavior and one’s practical attitudes accordingly. It is hard to live by for the same reason as solipsism is hard to live by. At least anyone who thinks that nihilism leaves everything else as it is and has no practical consequences will need to explain what makes it different in this regard from solipsism.
  22. I have one final thought about what nihilism would mean practically speaking. Nihilism might be not merely hard to live by, but literally impossible to live by. It might be psychologically impossible to believe. Or at least it might be that anyone who accepted nihilism, and accepted nothing inconsistent with it, could only be described as mad.
  23. A number of philosophical claims are impossible to live by. We might call them pathological views. The view there is no free will would appear to be an example. I mean the view that we can never do otherwise than we in fact do: whenever it appears that we have a choice between two incompatible courses of action, A and B, it never the case that it is possible for us to do A and also possible for us to do B. What would it mean for us if we really believed this and acted accordingly? It seems that we should have to stop deliberating (van Inwagen 1983: 154-6). I don’t mean that it would be impossible to deliberate if we actually had no free will, but that we could not deliberate if we consistently believed that we didn’t. You cannot deliberate about whether to do something unless you believe that it is possible for you to do it, and also possible for you not to do it. If you were in a room with two doors, and you knew that one of them was locked and impassable, you could not deliberate about which door to leave by. You might be able to deliberate about which door to try; but to deliberate about which door to try is not to deliberate about which door to leave by; and in any case you could do it only if you believed that it was possible for you to try either door first. If you were convinced that there was never more than one option open to you, even if you didn't know which it was, and if you had no beliefs inconsistent with this, you could not deliberate about what to do. How someone who never deliberated would behave in consequence of this is hard to know, but it would clearly be a pathological condition.
  24. Nihilism might be pathological34 too, by dint of implying that there could never be any reason to do anything. It is hard to see what reason there could be for acting if no action could ever result in anyone’s (or anything’s) being benefitted or harmed in any way. And that there is never any reason for doing anything looks like a claim that no one could believe consistently. At any rate someone who did believe it consistently, and acted accordingly, would be in a state similar to that of someone who never deliberated. So maybe there really is something mad about nihilism. It is not mad because it denies obvious facts, such as the fact that London is populous. There is nothing mad about denying the existence of ordinary objects other than ourselves, provided that one does it for good philosophical reasons and that one can account for the difference between those claims apparently concerning such objects that can be taken to be correct for ordinary purposes and those that cannot. So I have argued, anyway. But denying that we exist might be mad, in that we could not consistently do it and remain sane. Our every action seems to presuppose that nihilism is false.
  25. Now I am not at all confident that this is right. Perhaps there could be reasons for acting that don’t require it to be possible that anyone or anything be harmed or benefitted as a result. There might be some point, for instance, in acting to promote pleasure and prevent suffering, even if there could never be any subjects of pleasure or suffering35. Now I argued in §8.5 that nihilism might rule out the existence of states of pleasure or suffering just as it rules out the existence of pleased or suffering beings. But nihilism might allow that particles are arranged in ways that would make it correct for ordinary purposes to say that someone or something is pleased or suffering, and there might be a reason for preferring particles to be arranged in some of those ways rather than others. Perhaps the fact that particles can be “collectively benefitted” can provide reasons for acting. Some arrangements of particles might be better than or preferable to others, even if there are never any sentient beings or mental states. Maybe. The challenge, for those who take this line, will be to say how the nihilist’s position differs from that of the solipsist: how the facts about particles (or whatever) that according to nihilism make it correct for ordinary purposes to say that someone is benefitted provide reasons for acting, but not those facts about unthinking brutes (or whatever) that according to solipsism make it correct for ordinary purposes to say that other people are benefitted.
  26. What if nihilism really is pathological? That would put its advocates in an embarrassing position: if they really believed their nihilism, they would have no reason to advocate it. In any case they would believe that they had no reason to advocate it, unless they were unaware of its implication that there is no reason to do anything. Anyone who advocated nihilism would be either insincere or inconsistent.
  27. But although this might give non-nihilists some satisfaction, it would not be a reason to suppose that nihilism is false. That we could not consistently deny that we exist without going mad is no evidence for the claim that we do exist – any more than the impossibility of believing consistently that we lack free will without going mad is evidence for the claim that we have free will. Why should the truth be believable? For all we know the true account of what we are might be pathological. That would be a truly absurd situation. If we are humble, we ought to accept that our metaphysical nature might be beyond our ability to know, or even to understand. But it would be a cruel joke on us if we were perfectly capable of understanding or even knowing our metaphysical nature, yet that knowledge, if we were consistent, would inevitably result in madness.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Nihilism")

Footnote 14:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 15:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 16:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 17: Footnote 25:
  • Unger 1979a, 1979b; his recantation is in 1990. See also Stone 1988 and 2005, Horgan 1993, Giles 1997: ch. 5, and Rosen and Dorr 2002. Though Parfit sometimes sounds like a nihilist, he says explicitly that it is not his view (1984: 341).
Footnote 26:
  • Here I follow van Inwagen 1990a: 100-102.
Footnote 27:
  • I owe this example to Jonathan Bennett.
Footnote 28:
  • Someone might appeal to the psychological individuation principle (§6.3) to argue that this sort of disunity is impossible. But we accept that principle we needn’t bother with Strawson’s argument, for it implies all by itself that nihilism is false – assuming, anyway, that there are mental states.
Footnote 29:
  • I owe this suggestion to Dean Zimmerman.
Footnote 30:
  • We find this argument in Kant 1929: A351-2; see also Brentano 1987: 290-297, Hasker 1999: 123-135. Kant rejects it, but only after conceding that it is “no mere sophistical play, contrived by a dogmatist to impart to his assertions a superficial plausibility, but an inference which appears to withstand even the keenest scrutiny and the most scrupulously exact investigation.”
Footnote 31:
  • Rosen and Dorr (2002) endorse this strategy. Merricks (2001b: 2-8) adopts it for inanimate objects, but not for ourselves.
Footnote 32:
  • Compare Argle’s increasingly contrived attempts to paraphrase statements about holes in terms of material objects in Lewis and Lewis 1970. It is noteworthy that van Inwagen, who denies the existence of all composite material objects save organisms, claims that it is impossible to paraphrase statements about such things as artefacts in terms that mention only simple particles. His proposed paraphrases appeal to events he calls “histories of maintenance” (1990a: §13). I suspect that nihilists will be no happier with histories of maintenance than they will be with bundles of thoughts. Merricks (2001b: chh. 4-5; see also Olson 2002c and Dorr 2003) argues that the atomistic strategy must fail because the truth of statements about conscious beings does not supervene on facts about particles. A discussion of this complex and important argument would require a chapter (at least) of its own, however. Elder (2004: especially Ch. 3) objects to atomistic paraphrases on grounds that are not very clear to me.
Footnote 33:
  • This thought seems to have been suppressed in the book.
Footnote 34:
  • In the book, this paragraph is split into two and substantially expanded.
Footnote 35:
  • Parfit (1984) argues for something like this, though whether his “impersonal utilitarianism” is compatible with nihilism is unclear.


"Olson (Eric) - What Are We? What Now?"

Source: What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Chapter 9 (November 2007: Oxford University Press.)


Oxford Scholarship On-Line Abstract
Paper Comment

For the full text as originally published, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File16.

Write-up17 (as at 08/04/2025 09:28:48): Olson - What Are We? What Now?

Introductory Notes – mostly to self
  • This page gives the full draft text of this Chapter (Chapter 9, "Olson (Eric) - What Are We? What Now?", of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology"), which was available online18 at Sheffield University: Eric Olson, but which now seems to have been taken down, though I had taken a copy, and possess the book19.
  • The electronic version of the Chapter was paged backwards, though I have repaired it in the text below.
  • I’ve taken the liberty of reformatting the text to make it easier to read on-line, and to refer back to.
  • The purpose of this page is so that I can easily add a commentary to the text – given that it was available electronically – prior to producing an analysis.
  • The endnotes (“In-Page Footnotes”; subscripted) are as in Olson’s text where the colouration is pink. Otherwise, they are (or will be) my own.
  • Any superscripted links will be to other parts of Olson’s book.
  • Links to my own Notes will be via the footnotes. To save too many unhelpful links from the main text, I’ve restricted footnotes highlighting my Notes to the first occurrence, though I may have many links from the footnotes if I’m discussing other related matters.
  • It would have been interesting – once I’ve completed annotating the whole book – to see how many of my Notes have been cited within the annotations of the Book as a whole, but it seems that this functionality is not yet there20.
  • I will need to update these Notes in the light of this Chapter, but I expect to leave the updates until I’ve completed the whole book.
  • My ultimate intention is to extract my footnotes into a commentary and analysis, and the original text will disappear into the Note Archive as a ‘Previous Version’.
  • I plan is to revisit this Chapter multiple times. In the interim, some of my footnotes will be placeholders, either awaiting enlightenment or time for further research.
Full Text
  1. Some results21
  2. Some opinions22
  3. Animalism and the thinking-parts problem23
  4. Animalism and the clay-modelling puzzle24
  5. Theories of composition25
  6. Composition and what we are26
  7. Brutal composition27
9.1 Some results
  1. That completes our survey of answers to our question. I have tried to discuss the most interesting and important accounts of what we are. There are almost certainly other views that I ought to have considered, and views I have passed over too quickly. But I hope I have at least made a good start. What have we learned? Let me try to summarize our main conclusions up to now.
  2. We began with animalism28. If there is a human animal located where you are, and it thinks just as you do, it is hard to see how you could be anything other than that animal, or how you could ever know that you are. This “thinking-animal problem” is not only an argument for animalism, but also a challenge for any other account of what we are: how can we know we are not the animals that think our thoughts? The most common objection to animalism is that it conflicts with popular claims about personal identity: that our identity over time has something to do with psychology, that we have certain mental properties essentially, and that facts about how mental states relate to one another determine how many of us there are at any one time: the psychological individuation principle. Animalists must reject these claims. They are not alone in this, however: the third claim appears to conflict with almost any account of what we are.
  3. The [constitution view29 says that we are material things constituted by organisms. It is an instance of constitutionalism, the general claim that qualitatively different material objects can be made of the same matter at once. Constitutionalism purports to solve a number of hard metaphysical problems, such as the clay-modelling puzzle and the paradox of increase. And if constitutionalism in general is true, it is likely that we are non-animals constituted by animals. Constitutionalists will want to avoid the thinking-animal problem by denying that the animals constituting us are just like us mentally; but it will be hard for them to explain why physically identical beings in identical surroundings should differ mentally. I also complained that the view rules out any good account of when constitution occurs or of what determines our boundaries.
  4. The view that we are brains30 gets its support from the idea that only brains think in the strictest sense: bigger things can “think” only by having a thinking part. That would solve the thinking-animal problem: we could know that we are not animals because we obviously think in the strictest sense and animals don’t. And anyone who says that we are not brains faces the problem of how we could know that we are not our thinking brains. But the idea that only brains think in the strictest sense turned out to rest on the assumption that all the parts of a genuine thinker must be somehow directly involved in its thinking, and that principle collapsed under scrutiny.
  5. The view that we are temporal parts31 of animals is based on the general ontology of temporal parts. It offers to solve the metaphysical puzzles about lumps and statues and the like that constitutionalism purports to solve, but without claiming that physically identical objects can differ in other respects (though this requires a counterpart-theoretic account of modal predication). It also offers a nifty solution to several problems of personal identity. On the other hand, it implies that there are a vast number of thinking beings now sitting in your chair, most of which have very different pasts and futures from those we ascribe to you. Worse, it implies that in the strictest sense we ourselves don’t think at all; only our momentary stages do. We could avoid this by saying that we ourselves are stages – the stage view – but that is desperately implausible.
  6. According to the bundle view32 we are made up of mental states and events. This appears to be the only account of what we are that is compatible with the psychological individuation principle. But a bundle of mental states doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could think. Nor does the bundle view suggest any solution to the thinking-animal problem.
  7. The paradox of increase provides what may be the best argument for our being immaterial substances33. The easiest solution to the paradox is to deny that anything can change its parts; and the only things we could be that don’t change their parts, yet have anything like human careers, are immaterial substances. This would also solve the thinking-animal problem by ruling out the existence of animals. Immaterialism faces grave problems, however, about the apparent dependence of the mental on the physical.
  8. Then there is nihilism34, the view that we do not exist. It would solve all the problems about our metaphysical nature in one fell swoop. If nihilism is to be a serious claim and not a mad denial of the obvious, however, it must allow that statements apparently about people can be somehow right; so it must be possible to paraphrase those that are right into claims that capture their rightness without implying the existence of people. This will not be an easy task. Nihilism also appears to have unwelcome practical consequences: it is about as depressing as solipsism, and threatens to deprive us of any possible reason for acting.
  9. These seven views (eight if you count the stage view35) have been the main focus of our attention. We also discussed more briefly a number of “minor views”.
    1. There is the view that we are temporal parts of brains, and
    2. The view that we are material things that brains constitute when they are in the right states.
    3. The indeterminate-size view says that it is indeterminate whether we are brains, human organisms, or beings of some intermediate size.
    4. According to homunculism, nothing thinks all of your thoughts: each sort of mental activity is carried out by a different part of the brain.
    5. There is the view that we are unthinking bundles of thoughts,
    6. The view that we are bundles of psychological universals, and
    7. The view that we are something like computer programs36.
    8. We might be “masses of matter”, which either exist only as long as they are in human form (the momentary-mass view), or endure as long as the particles composing them exist, but are human and able to think for only a moment (the persisting-mass view).
    9. There is compound dualism37, the view that each of us is composed of an immaterial substance and an organism.
    10. Hylomorphism38 says that each of us is somehow a compound of a particular form and a parcel of matter.
    11. Finally there is the view that we are simple material things39: either particles in the brain (Lilliputian materialism), or things coinciding with an entire human organism (Brobdingnagian atomism).
    Although there is something to be said for each of these, those that are not simply variants of the principal views are hard to take seriously40.
9.2 Some opinions
  1. I will say no more about the minor views. What about the seven principal views? We have seen that each has its virtues, but also faces worrying objections. And it is hard to get philosophers to agree about how these virtues and vices stack up. Some, for instance, are so impressed with the way the temporal-parts view handles metaphysical puzzles that they are happy to accept its unwelcome implications; others find these implications so repugnant that they will accept almost anything in order to avoid them. Disagreements about such fundamental matters are notoriously hard to resolve.
  2. Rather than leave it at that, though, I will let my hair down and say what I am inclined to think. Many of my opinions about the relative merits of the various views have been evident in previous chapters, despite my attempt to be even-handed. But I can say more. This section is sheer autobiography, and I don’t expect it to persuade anyone. My attempts at persuasion are in the earlier chapters.
  3. As I see it, the brain view and the bundle view are right out. I suppose it is just about conceivable that the brain view might be true. It is certainly better than saying that my brain does my thinking for me. I reject it because there is no reason to believe it. The bundle view, on the other hand, is built on the idea that bundles of thoughts think, which I see as a conceptual mistake.
  4. Immaterialism is more promising. There are arguments for it that, though inconclusive, are not grounded in confusion in the way that the attraction of the brain view is grounded in confusion. On the other hand it faces more than its share of problems. It is shrouded in mystery and impenetrable to reason, yet fascinating – a bit like theism.
  5. Many advocates of the constitution view seem to see it as purely angelic. They see objections to it to as based on misunderstanding, rather than as worrying but inconclusive. I have made it plain enough that I disagree. Though the constitution view is part of a package that would do a lot of useful work, it strikes me as deeply implausible and, above all, unprincipled. There are too many questions about how constitution is supposed to work that have no answers, yet seem to demand answers. It is, like immaterialism, impenetrable to reason. That leaves nihilism, the temporal-parts view, and animalism. I judge these to be the finalists in the contest.
  6. As I have said, I am unsure what to make of nihilism. It would solve a lot of problems, particularly if it is combined with compositional nihilism. (Composite objects attract metaphysical problems like ripe fruit attracts flies.) But I am suspicious of the idea that it solves all problems about composite objects without incurring any of its own. I am not sure whether it is possible to tell an adequate story of the world in terms of mereological simples. I also suspect that nihilism may have grave implications for ethics, practical reason, and the value of our lives. Because it is unclear to me what follows from nihilism, however, I have been unable to turn these suspicions into conclusive arguments. This is an area that needs more work. Nihilism remains, as they say, a live option.
  7. The consequences of the temporal-parts view are better understood, and to my mind they’re not very nice. I don’t like being forced to accept counterpart theory, which seems to me to make important questions about what it is possible for us to do into matters for arbitrary decision. I find it hard to accept that there are millions of beings sitting here and writing these words, most of which diverge radically in the past and future from what I take to be my own trajectory through space-time. Most of all, I don’t like the claim that all things have all their properties without temporal qualification – an essential feature of four-dimensionalism as we know it. This is what implies that persisting things have properties temporarily only in the sense of timelessly having temporal parts located at different times that have those properties timelessly. It seems to me more or less incredible that I don’t think or act in the strictest sense, but something other than me does; and to say that I do think and act in the strictest sense but exist for only a moment, as the stage view has it, is hardly better. That goes against my deepest instincts. I suppose I might be persuaded to put my instincts aside, but only by means of an argument for four-dimensionalism more forceful than any so far proposed.
  8. And animalism? I cannot hide the fact that I have argued for animalism in the past. But it was not my intention to promote it here. Although I suppose I still find animalism the best answer to the question of what we are, that preference rests on my aversion to the temporal parts view and nihilism; and I don’t expect to persuade anyone that those views are false, apart from those who share my aversion to begin with.
  9. There is more to say, though. So far I have discussed only the best-known objections to animalism, to do with its implications about personal identity (§2.841 & §2.942). I argued that they are less troubling than they might appear. And indeed, they might seem rather slight compared with the problems facing the other accounts of what we are. But I also said that there are more serious objections to animalism, and promised to return to them later. Now is the time.
9.3 Animalism and the thinking-parts problem
  1. Recall the thinking-brain problem. Doesn’t my brain think my thoughts? And if it does, how do I know that I’m not it? Now we dispensed with one version of this problem, according to which a human animal can think only in the sense of having a brain that thinks strictly speaking. That would mean that according to animalism I don’t think in the strictest sense, which is absurd. I answered this objection by arguing that there is no reason to suppose that only brains think in the strictest sense, while larger things think only in the sense of having thinking brains as parts. But even if brains are not the only true thinkers, it doesn’t follow that they don’t think at all. Perhaps both brains and whole organisms think in the strictest sense. In that case we should expect every part of an organism that includes a brain to think: heads, upper halves, left-hand-complements, and so on. That would be trouble enough for animalism. It would not imply that we are not animals, but it would make it hard to see how we could ever know that we are animals. If you think you’re an animal, then your head, which thinks just as you do, ought to think, mistakenly but on the same grounds, that it is an animal. So for all you know you might be your head. Why suppose, then, that you are an animal, rather than a head or a brain or some other thinking part of an animal?
  2. Call this the thinking-parts problem. It is structurally analogous to the thinking-animal problem: both consist in the apparent existence of beings other than ourselves that think our thoughts. Animalists need to solve the thinking-parts problem. At any rate they are committed to its having a solution compatible with animalism. Otherwise – if there is no way of knowing that we are animals rather than brains or heads or the like – there will be no reason to accept animalism. I find the thinking-parts problem considerably more troubling than the familiar objections to animalism – its unintuitive consequences in brain-transplant cases, for instance. How bad is it?
  3. Well, it is no worse for animalism than it is for many other accounts of what we are. The same problem arises for any view according to which we are animal-sized things: for the constitution view and the temporal-parts view, for instance. They too presuppose that we are able to know that we are not brains or heads; and their advocates have no resources for solving this problem that are not available to animalists as well. So the thinking-parts problem is no reason to prefer any other view to animalism. (Or at least none except nihilism and immaterialism, which have resources for solving the thinking-parts problem that are unavailable to anyone else: for instance they can adopt mereological nihilism.)
  4. Even so, the thinking-parts problem threatens to show that animalism is no better than its rivals: even if it gives us no reason to prefer any other account of what we are to animalism, it may leave no reason to prefer animalism either. The main reason to suppose that we are animals is the apparent fact that human animals think our thoughts. If this really is a fact, then it is hard to see how we could have any reason to suppose that we are anything other than animals. In other words, animalism has the virtue of avoiding the thinking-animal problem. But if brains and heads also think our thoughts, it is hard to see how we could have any reason to think that we are animals either. The thinking-parts problem threatens to imply that if anything thinks our thoughts and performs our actions, many beings of different sizes do so: organisms, heads, brains, and many other such things.
  5. That would be a mess. Which of these beings should we be? Well, if the question of what we are is the question of what sort of beings think our thoughts, the answer would be that many beings of different sorts do. If the question is what sort of things our personal pronouns and proper names denote, the answer may be that it is indeterminate: they refer ambiguously to brains, heads, human organisms, and many beings of intermediate sizes. Either way, it would apparently be indeterminate whether we are animals, brains, or something in between: the indeterminate-size view mentioned in §4.243.
  6. No one is going to find the indeterminate-size view appealing. But maybe it needn’t come to that. Perhaps animalists can solve the thinking-parts problem. How? Well, we saw that the thinking-parts problem is structurally analogous to the thinking-animal problem; so the possible solutions to the thinking-parts problem ought to parallel the possible solutions to the thinking animal problem. Let us set aside the possibility of solving the thinking-animal problem by accepting animalism, for the analogous solution to the thinking-parts problem is to accept the indeterminate-size view, and that is what we wanted to avoid. There are three other possibilities44. One is to deny that human animals can think: a psychological solution (§2.545). Another is to accept that human animals think our thoughts, and argue that we are nonetheless able to know that we are not those animals: an epistemic solution (§2.646 & §2.747). The third is to deny the existence of human animals: a metaphysical solution (§2.448). Whatever merits these proposed solutions may have, it is easy enough to transform them into solutions to the thinking-parts problem. And if anything, the possible solutions to the thinking-parts problem look rather better than the corresponding solutions to the thinking-animal problem.
  7. A psychological solution to the thinking-parts problem would say that brains, heads, and other spatial parts of human organisms cannot think, or at least not in the way that you and I can. We considered some possible reasons for this in §4.249: brains cannot think because they are not organisms, or because thinking is a maximal property and brains are parts of larger thinking beings, or because the concept we use the word ‘thinking’ to express simply does not apply to brains. Those proposals were not very satisfying. Still, the view that our brains think and act in just the way that we do sounds wrong, even if it is hard to say why it is wrong. Maybe I just haven’t been clever enough to see it. So there may be a good psychological solution to the thinking-parts problem. It certainly looks more promising than a psychological solution to the thinking-animal problem: whatever it is that prevents brains and heads from thinking is unlikely to prevent human animals from thinking – unless perhaps it is impossible for a material thing of any sort to think.
  8. What about epistemic solutions? Could we somehow know that we are thinking animals rather than thinking heads or brains? Someone might suggest that the meaning of the word ‘person’ prevents it from applying to undetached heads, brains, and other proper parts of human animals, despite their eminent psychological qualifications. Just why this should be – what it is about the word ‘person’ that explains this surprising gap in its extension – will not be easy to say. In any case, the suggestion would go on to say that our personal pronouns and first-person thoughts refer only to people. This would be something we could know a priori, just in virtue of being competent speakers of English. It would follow that our personal pronouns do not refer to brains and the like, and that we could know this. And since we are whatever our personal pronouns refer to, we could conclude that we are not brains or heads or other parts of human animals.
  9. This is the personal-pronoun revisionism of §2.750, applied to the thinking-parts problem. As a solution to the thinking-animal problem, personal-pronoun revisionism seems rather desperate: it takes some doing to believe that human animals, despite being psychologically indistinguishable from ourselves, somehow don’t count as “people”. But the idea that undetached brains don’t count as people, even if they really are as clever as we are, sounds a bit more hopeful. At any rate such things are very different from what we thought people were like. (It sounds wrong to say that brains are people, just as it sounds wrong to say that they think and act.) So an epistemic solution to the thinking-parts problem may have more promise than an epistemic solution to the thinking-animal problem.
  10. Then there is the metaphysical solution: there are no brains or heads or upper halves. (Cases in which a human animal has had so many parts cut away that it has itself become a brain or what have you, if that is possible, would be an exception: the proposal is that there are no undetached brains, heads, and so on.) Of course, my head isn’t empty: there are presumably particles “arranged cerebrally” there. But those particles don’t compose anything. Although it is no doubt in some sense correct to say in ordinary circumstances – when we are not doing metaphysics – that human beings have brains, what makes it correct is facts about particles or the like that do not entail the existence of brains. This is the sparse ontology once more. And if there are no brains or heads, we needn’t worry about ruling out the possibility that we might be brains or heads.
  11. The claim that there are no such things as undetached heads is not very plausible. Even so, a metaphysical solution to the thinking-parts problem is surely better than a metaphysical solution to the thinking-animal problem. There is something at least a little bit peculiar about undetached brains and heads – not to mention upper halves and left-hand complements. Their boundaries are at least in part arbitrarily drawn. Aristotle denied their existence, or at least denied that they were substances. Unless every matter-filled region of space, no matter how arbitrary and gerrymandered, contains a material object, we can understand why someone might doubt whether there are such things as undetached heads. If there were no human organisms, on the other hand, just about everything we ever believed about the ontology of material things would be wrong. Organisms look like paradigm cases of material things. To deny their existence is to deny the reality of all ordinary objects.
  12. So although the thinking-parts problem is a serious objection to animalism, it is at least as bad for its main rivals (leaving aside nihilism, anyway). And a solution is not beyond hope. Moreover, it looks less threatening to animalism than the thinking-animal problem looks to its rivals.
9.4 Animalism and the clay-modelling puzzle
  1. Even if the thinking-parts problem is no worse for animalism than it is for any other popular account of what we are, however, there are other metaphysical problems that threaten to afflict animalism in particular. The clay-modelling puzzle, for one, looks like a problem for animalism but not for its main rivals. A lump of clay modelled into the shape of Thatcher seems able to survive being squashed, but not the clay statue of her; yet the lump appears to be the statue. The most popular ways of reconciling these claims appeal to constitution or temporal parts. Constitutionalists accept that the lump but not the statue can survive squashing by saying that they are numerically different and have different persistence conditions, despite coinciding materially: the lump, as they put it, constitutes the statue (§3.251). Four-dimensionalists typically say that the statue and the lump are numerically different because one is a proper temporal part of the other, and explain why we appear to attribute different persistence conditions to the two objects in terms of counterpart theory (§5.352 & §5.453).
  2. Now animalists could say the same thing. They could say that statue-shaped lumps of clay constitute statues and accept constitutionalism; or they could say that statues are temporal parts of lumps and accept four-dimensionalism. At any rate these views are formally consistent with animalism. But animalism does not sit easily with either view. Animalism does not sit well with constitutionalism because constitutionalism suggests that human animals coincide materially with beings that would appear to be mentally just like we are, raising the problem of how we could ever know whether we are the animals.
  3. Constitutionalism suggests that something stands to a human animal as a lump of clay stands to a clay statue – something that would outlive the animal if it were squashed. If clay statues have to be constituted by something, shouldn’t human animals have to be constituted by something too? Now suppose you are an animal, and that a lump of something constitutes you. The lump would be physically indistinguishable from you for as long as it constitutes you. It would have the same brain and nervous system as you have (at any rate it would be neurologically identical with you), and the same surroundings. It would show the same behavioral evidence of intelligence and conscious awareness as you do. That suggests that for a while at least, the lump would be conscious and intelligent – indeed, it would be mentally just like you. What grounds could you ever have, in that case, for supposing that you are the animal and not the lump?
  4. Or again: if the right sort of lump of clay in the right circumstances constitutes something that is essentially statue-shaped, we might expect the right sort of human organism in the right circumstances to constitute something that is essentially able to think. Now no human animal is essentially able to think. But the animals we call our bodies would seem to be of the right sort and in the right circumstances to constitute essential thinkers. So constitutionalism suggests that each human animal coincides with an essential thinker. Again, how could you ever know which thinker you are?
  5. Now it doesn’t strictly follow from constitutionalism that human animals coincide with lumps of something or with essential thinkers. Someone might say that there is a lump of clay constituting a clay statue of Thatcher but no lump of anything constituting Thatcher herself. And someone might suppose that lumps of clay sometimes constitute essential statues but human organisms never constitute essential thinkers. But that would be surprising. More to the point, it would seem arbitrary and unprincipled – a bit like holding that statues of women are constituted by lumps but not statues of men. We should have no idea why the two cases – the case of statues and the case of organisms – are so different; and we should expect there to be a reason why. For all we know, perhaps, it could be true; but it is hard to see how we could ever know that it was.
  6. So combining animalism with constitutionalism raises a problem that animalists will want to avoid. They will want to deny that animals constitute or are constituted by anything. Of course, constitutionalism appears to face this sort of problem whether or not it is combined with animalism: if we are essential thinkers, for instance, we shall coincide materially with human animals, leaving us wondering how we know we are not those animals. So you might think that adopting constitutionalism would leave animalists no worse off than constitutionalists are whether or not they accept animalism. But this is not so. Just as animalists will not want to accept constitutionalism, constitutionalists will not want to accept animalism. If there are essential thinkers coinciding with animals, the widespread conviction that we are essential thinkers will be a reason to reject animalism. If constitutionalism is true, in other words, there are better candidates for being us than human organisms. For these reasons animalists are ill advised to accept constitutionalism. And we saw in §5.454 why animalism fits badly with the ontology of temporal parts: if four-dimensionalism is true, the best candidates for being people, and so the best candidates for being ourselves, would seem not to be animals, but proper temporal parts of animals: parts composed of thinking person-stages, which include no unthinking embryonic stages. A four-dimensionalist could be an animalist without inconsistency, but it is unsurprising that almost no one holds this combination of views.
  7. So animalists will not want to solve the clay-modelling puzzle by adopting constitutionalism or four-dimensionalism. They will not want to solve the paradox of increase, the amputation puzzle, or the replacement puzzle in that way either. Nor can they simply accept the paradoxical conclusion that it is impossible for anything to gain or lose parts, for that is incompatible with our being animals. What can they say, then?
  8. There are always the way of funny logic and the way of funny persistence conditions (§7.455); but they’re not very plausible. There remains the way of sparse ontology. It says, in the case of the paradox of increase, that when an object acquires a new part, there is then nothing composed of the object’s original parts. If you assimilate an atom, there is no such thing, immediately afterwards, as “all of you but that atom”: you are now composed of your old atoms together with the new one, and the atoms that a moment ago composed you now compose nothing. In the case of the amputation paradox, the solution is that you have no part that you could survive being pared down to: you could survive the loss of your left hand, but there is no such thing, now, as “all of you but your left hand”, your left-hand complement. The way of sparse ontology also implies that there is no such thing as your undetached head or brain – supposing, anyway, that you could be pared down to a head or a brain. This has an important implication: solving the amputation paradox by the way of sparse ontology would solve the thinking-parts problem as well. That is because the entities that would generate the thinking-parts problem also figure in the amputation paradox.
  9. Adopting a sparse ontology of material objects can solve the paradox of increase, the amputation paradox, and the thinking-parts problem. We can use the same strategy to solve the clay-modelling and replacement puzzles as well: we can deny that there are any such things as clay statues or lumps of clay56. There may be tiny particles arranged by sculptors in a statuesque fashion, but they don’t compose anything.
  10. In my view this is what animalists ought to do57: they should solve their metaphysical worries by denying the existence of the entities that would generate them. (Some animalists have done it: see58 van Inwagen 1990b, Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1997, Merricks 2001b.) Anyone who likes animalism but dislikes the sparse ontology will have to solve the problems we have been considering – both the puzzles about the ontology of material objects and the thinking-parts problem – in some other way; and no other way looks very nice.
  11. This might come as something of a shock. No one wants to be told that there are no such things as lumps or statues, or undetached brains or heads. It goes against what we learned at mother’s knee. This outcome is especially surprising because animalism seemed at first to be so sensible. That our being animals conflicts with things we are inclined to say about brain transplants may be something we could live with. But now animalists are asking us to give up some of the most ordinary beliefs in the world. What appeared to be a pleasant landscape turns out to have a coal pit running through it.
  12. Let me say three things in defense of the sparse ontology. First, it doesn’t imply that we are mistaken to think that we have heads, or that there are many Greek statues in the British Museum. At least it doesn’t imply that these beliefs are mistaken in the way that it would be mistaken to think that we have tails, or that there are many Martian statues in the British Museum. As we saw in our discussion of nihilism, the sparse ontology allows that such beliefs can be taken for all ordinary purposes to be true. We can say, or try to say, what is right about these ordinary beliefs in terms of objects the sparse ontology recognizes, such as simple particles and people: even if there are strictly speaking no heads or statues, some of our particles are arranged in such a way that they would compose undetached heads if they composed anything, and many particles in the British Museum were arranged more or less as they are now by Greek sculptors. Because our mothers were trying to teach us anatomy and not metaphysics, they were perfectly correct to tell us that we have heads, and we were perfectly correct, as far as our childish purposes were concerned, to believe them. So the conflict between the sparse ontology and our ordinary beliefs is less jolting than may appear. (Some sparse ontologists even deny that there is any conflict at all: see van Inwagen 1990b: §1059.)
  13. Second, the other ways of solving the puzzles are not clearly any better. They may even be worse. If you don’t like the sparse ontology, consider the alternative. Think about the ontology of temporal parts, constitutionalism, funny persistence conditions, and funny logic. Now think about the indeterminate-size view, personal-pronoun revisionism, and the other possible responses to the thinking-parts problem. If the sparse ontology is false, one of each of these groups of repugnant views must be true.
  14. Third, the sparse ontology follows from what most of us will take to be the best approach to another important metaphysical problem: when composition takes place. So it is not only animalists who have reason to accept the sparse ontology. I will develop this thought in the next section.
9.5 Theories of composition
  1. Suppose that animalists really are best advised to solve the thinking-parts problem, the clay modelling puzzle, the amputation puzzle, and the rest by denying the existence of undetached heads and brains, lumps and statues, and the other troublesome entities. This proposal may appear not only implausible, but unprincipled too. If there are so many fewer composite objects than we thought, why suppose that there are any at all? In particular, why suppose that there are any human animals? The proposal is this: there are particles arranged in ever so many ways – undetached-human-headwise, brainwise, clay-lumpwise, statuewise, anthropomorphically, and so on. When particles are arranged anthropomorphically, they compose something. (And not just something: they compose an organism, a thing that persists as a living thing for many years despite constant material turnover. They don’t compose a mere mass of matter.) But no particles arranged in any of those other ways compose anything. In those cases there are only particles. In other words, the troublesome objects are all unreal, but we human animals are an exception. That may sound more like wishful thinking than the verdict of unbiased rational inquiry. Why should particles arranged anthropomorphically compose something, but not particles arranged headwise or statuewise or lumpwise? What accounts for the difference? No one ought to accept this fairy-tale ontology unless there is some principled reason why it must be so.
  2. This worry has to do with a general question about composition: When does it take place? Under what conditions do smaller things (let us restrict ourselves to concrete material things) make up or compose something bigger? If we have some things, the xs, what is necessary, and what is sufficient, for there to exist something composed of the xs – something that has all the xs as parts, and all the parts of which share a part with one or more of the xs? What must those things be like, and how must they relate to one another and to their surroundings, in order for them to compose something? This is what van Inwagen has called the special composition question60. Call an answer to this question a theory of composition. The worry is whether any principled theory of composition is consistent with both animalism and the sparse ontology we have been considering.
  3. We have already discussed the view that there are no circumstances in which smaller material things compose something bigger: there are no composite material things at all, but only simples. In other words, things compose something if and only if there is only one of those things (by definition everything composes itself). This is compositional nihilism. It would rule out our being composite objects of any sort. Since animals are composite61, it is incompatible with our being animals. In fact it is incompatible with almost any account of what we are apart from nihilism and immaterialism.
  4. Another theory of composition is that things always compose something, no matter what they are like in themselves or how they are arranged or situated: composition is universal or unrestricted or automatic. This is compositional universalism. It is of course incompatible with the sparse ontology. It is also highly counterintuitive. It implies that there are vastly more material objects than we would ordinarily have thought. Virtually all material things, on this view, have completely arbitrary boundaries: they are mere “ontological junk”. The proportion of material objects that are dogs or bicycles or planets or anything else of any interesting sort would be about the same as the proportion of regions of the earth’s surface exactly occupied by continents.
  5. What’s wrong with this surplus of objects? Well, for one thing it implies that every dog or bicycle – or person, if we are even partly material things – will almost exactly overlap with a vast number of other beings that differ from it only by having or lacking among its parts a few particles. That will probably make it indeterminate which of the many candidates you are – that is, which one we refer to when we say ‘you’ or use your name. This is the problem of the many of §5.862. Universalism also gives us many objects that differ from ourselves in more disturbing ways. It implies that there is, for instance, an object now made up of your upper half and my lower half – a being that is presumably psychologically indistinguishable from you. In fact universalism appears to imply that virtually all the beings that now think your thoughts are pieces of ontological junk. For all you know, it seems, you could be one of them.
  6. There are things that universalists can say to assuage these worries. They can say that it doesn’t matter if it is indeterminate which of the many candidates for being you is you because for all practical purposes we can’t tell them apart anyway. So everything we ordinarily want to say about you comes out true on any assumption about which one you are. And they can say that in ordinary contexts we ignore the arbitrary objects. Our names, pronouns, general terms (such as ‘dog’ and ‘man’), and quantifiers (such as ‘some’ and ‘all’) simply pass them by as if they weren’t there. There is endless room for debate about the extent to which stories like these make universalism easier to believe. But it takes a rather tough-minded philosopher to feel comfortable with it. (We will consider another disputable consequence of universalism in the next section.)
  7. In any case, animalists who accept the sparse ontology will reject both compositional nihilism and universalism, and many others will too. They will say that some objects compose bigger things and others don’t, depending on what those objects are like and how they relate to one another and (perhaps) to their surroundings. There are some composite objects, so to speak, but not just any: a few special matter-filled regions of space contain (exactly contain) material objects, but most don’t. They will plead for an intermediate theory of composition. Sensible though that may sound, however, it raises our worry once more: if some things compose bigger things and others don’t, which do, which don’t, and why? In particular, why suppose that any good theory of composition will be consistent with both the existence of human animals and the nonexistence of undetached heads, clay statues, and the rest of the troublesome lot?
  8. We should expect an intermediate theory to say that things compose something just when they are somehow unified: when they relate to one another, and to nothing else, in some special causal or spatio-temporal way. Things not unified in this way will be those that would compose arbitrary or gerrymandered objects if they composed anything. The particles that we take to make up a live cat look like good candidates for being unified: a cat is the very opposite of an arbitrary object. The particles that are now located within the North Sea are considerably less likely candidates, and those located either within the North Sea or within the further half of the Andromeda Galaxy are less likely still – though even they are a good deal more unified than most.
  9. What sort of unity might be necessary and sufficient for things to compose something? It is surprisingly hard to say. I don’t know of any answer that has much plausibility on the face of it. I certainly don’t know of any that entails both the existence of most of the familiar furniture of the earth – dogs, bicycles, stones, that sort of thing – and the nonexistence of most of what I have called ontological junk. To my knowledge only two63 intermediate answers to the special composition question have ever seriously been proposed. Both count as “sparse”.
  10. The first is van Inwagen’s view that things compose something if and only if their activities constitute a biological life – a self-organizing event that maintains the internal structure of an organism (van Inwagen 1990b64; see also §2.265 above). This has the startling implication that there are no non-living composite objects. The only material things are simples – and I take it that the only material simples are elementary particles – and living things, things with lives. What sort of things have lives? Well, organisms do. Whether anything other than a living organism has a life depends on whether an organism can coincide materially with a non-organism (a point I will return to presently). If not, then the proposal is that the only composite objects are biological organisms.
  11. It is plausible enough to say that things compose something if their activities constitute a life. A life provides the sort of unity that leads us to suppose that the particles caught up in it compose something bigger: living things are paradigm cases of composite objects. But why should things compose something only if their activities constitute a life? Why couldn’t there be non-living composite objects? Van Inwagen’s argument is roughly that nothing other than a biological life provides the right sort of unity: taking any other unity relation to be necessary and sufficient for composition – in particular any sort of physical bonding – leads either to repugnant consequences or to grave logical difficulties.
  12. Call the view that things (or at least material things) compose something if and only if their activities constitute a life biological minimalism. This is not the place for a full-scale evaluation of minimalism. Whatever its merits, though, it is a principled theory of composition. And it has a most convenient consequence for the animalist: it entails the existence of human animals and rules out the existence of nearly all the entities that would cause trouble for animalism. Undetached heads, proper temporal parts of human animals, statues, and lumps, for instance, do not have lives. Neither are they simples. Biological minimalism therefore implies that there are no such things. Thus, not only does the way of sparse ontology enable animalists to solve the metaphysical problems they face, but it follows from one of the few principled theories of composition on offer.
  13. Now there is one sort of troublesome entity whose existence biological minimalism does not explicitly rule out: things coinciding materially with human animals. Minimalism is formally consistent with constitutionalism. It says that things compose something just when they are caught up in a life, but it doesn’t say that such things compose only one thing, namely an organism. For all it says, particles caught up in a life might compose both a human organism and a human non-organism. That would be trouble again: an awkward surplus of thinkers.
  14. But as we saw in §3.666, no one will want to combine biological minimalism with constitutionalism. Minimalism provides its own solution to the metaphysical puzzles that constitutionalism was invented to deal with: the clay-modelling puzzle, the replacement puzzle, the paradox of increase, and so on. If you’ve already accepted minimalism, there is no point in adopting constitutionalism as well. That would be paying twice for the same thing. The two views are also fundamentally opposed in spirit. Constitutionalism is a rich ontology; minimalism is an austere one. No one is going to suppose that almost none of those particles we think of as composing something actually compose anything, but those few that do compose something compose more than one thing. No one will say that the furniture of the earth consists of nothing but simple particles, organisms, and things coinciding with organisms. That would be like recommending a diet of bread, water, and chocolate fudge cake.
  15. So animalists can solve all their metaphysical worries at a stroke by adopting biological minimalism67. That may seem a high price to pay, but it does the job. And it may not be such a great sacrifice after all, compared with the other theories of composition.
  16. The second intermediate theory of composition, advocated by Hoffman and Rosenkrantz68, is strikingly similar the first. They agree with van Inwagen that there are living organisms. (They disagree with him about what it is for things to compose a living organism – they propose an account in terms of what they call “functional unity” rather than in terms of lives – but this is a fine point.) The important difference is that on their account there are also non-living composite objects, which they call “mereological compounds”. Things compose a mereological compound, they say, just when they are physically bonded in a certain rigid way, the details of which I won’t try to reproduce. So their theory of composition is roughly this:
  17. Disjunctivism70 implies that there are no parts of organisms except tiny particles. That is because the members of any subset of particles that compose an organism are neither functionally united nor rigidly bonded. They are not rigidly bonded because some of them are in a liquid state: it belongs to the nature of an organism that most of its particles are not rigidly bonded. According to disjunctivism, then, such particles compose neither organisms nor mereological compounds. That is, they compose nothing at all. This makes disjunctivism a sparse ontology of material objects, even if it is less sparse than minimalism. It implies that the heads, shoulders, knees, and toes of our nursery-school ontology do not exist. Nor are there any undetached tails, leaves, or flowers. Like minimalism, then, disjunctivism implies the existence of human animals and the nonexistence of the parts of human animals that would generate the thinking-parts problem. It also solves the paradox of increase and the amputation paradox, or at any rate the versions of those problems that threaten to imply that organisms cannot change their parts, by the way of sparse ontology. Now because disjunctivism is consistent with the existence of non-living composite objects, it does not by itself do away with all the entities that would make trouble for animalism. It may not solve the clay-modelling puzzle, for instance, which threatens to imply that human animals coincide materially with non-animals. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz solve metaphysical puzzles not involving organisms by making the further claim that all mereological compounds have their parts essentially. This claim, together with disjunctivism, leads them to say that all nonliving composite objects are what I called momentary masses (§7.371): things that persist only as long as their particles remain stuck together. So they might solve the clay-modelling puzzle by adopting “lumpism” (§3.272), the view that there are statue-shaped lumps of clay but no statues73 – but they reject the problematic claim that there are lumps of flesh on the grounds that the parts of such things would not be rigidly bonded. Because all non-living objects are momentary masses, on their view, there are no ordinary non-living things: what appears to be a persisting stick or stone or statue that frequently sheds an atom or two is in reality only a series of shortlived masses. None of these further claims strictly follow from disjunctivism. One could combine disjunctivism with constitutionalism. But that would be hardly more appealing than combining constitutionalism with minimalism.
  18. I won’t try to judge whether disjunctivism is more plausible than biological minimalism, less plausible, or about as bad. The important point is that it would solve the metaphysical worries facing animalism just as well as minimalism would.
9.6 Composition and what we are
  1. We have seen that animalists can solve the most serious worries facing their view by denying the existence of the troublesome entities that generate them. That may not be the only way of solving the problems, but it is the simplest, and, in my view, the best. We have also seen that this solution is not merely ad hoc, but follows from either of two principled theories of composition, minimalism and disjunctivism. So animalism leads very naturally to a certain sort of theory of composition.
  2. Now it seems that the reverse also holds: these two theories of composition lead almost inevitably to animalism. Biological minimalism rules out the existence of most of the things we could be apart from animals. If the only material things are elementary particles and organisms, it would seem perverse to say that you and I are not organisms. Biological disjunctivists will also say that we are animals, for similar reasons. Someone could combine disjunctivism with immaterialism, or the bundle view, or the constitution view, or even nihilism without formal contradiction; but that would have no appeal.
  3. Minimalism and disjunctivism are not the only possible intermediate theories of composition – that is, the only ones apart from universalism and compositional nihilism. But it is no accident that they are the only ones that anyone has actually endorsed. Any other theory of composition that I can think of strikes me as considerably less plausible than either of these. If that is right, then anyone who rejects universalism and compositional nihilism ought to say that we are animals. In other words, animalism will be the best account of what we are if some but not all material things compose something bigger. There may perhaps be a good intermediate theory that does not lead almost inevitably to animalism, but rather supports some other view of what we are or leaves it entirely open; but none has ever been proposed.
  4. Here, then, is a bold conjecture: there is an intimate connection between the question of what we are and the question of when composition takes place, or what material objects there are. Each theory of composition implies an account of what we are, or at any rate a narrow range of accounts. Compositional nihilism leads to nihilism about ourselves (or perhaps to immaterialism). Universalism leads to some version of the temporal-parts view. And anyone who accepts an intermediate theory of composition will find it hard to avoid animalism. Let us explore this thought.
  5. It is easy to see the link between compositional nihilism and nihilism about ourselves. Compositional nihilism entails that the only things we could be are mereological simples, as that is all there is on that view. That is of course compatible with our being simple immaterial substances, or even simple material things. But I doubt whether anyone tough-minded enough to endorse compositional nihilism will be drawn to immaterialism, and simple materialism is an exotic bird. In any case, compositional nihilism implies that we are simple things if we exist at all.
  6. How does universalism lead to the temporal-parts view? Nearly all universalists accept four-dimensionalism. They think that elementary particles are composed of temporal parts – particle-stages – and that any particle-stages whatever compose something. That makes it natural to suppose that we are composed of particle-stages, which is a version of the temporal parts view. I will explain.
  7. Suppose, for reductio, that universalism is true and you are not composed of particle-stages, but rather of particles. And suppose for a moment that no particles ever compose more than one thing at once: suppose that constitutionalism is false. (I will return to this assumption presently.) Now consider the particles that currently compose you. Call them the Ps. The Ps did not compose you a month ago. Most of them were not even parts of you then, but were widely dispersed over the earth’s surface. But all the Ps existed then74. And according to universalism they composed something then, for they compose something at every time when they exist. Call the thing the Ps composed then M (for ‘mass of matter’).
  8. Where is M now? Does it still exist? It would seem to. If the Ps compose something whenever they exist, no matter how they are arranged, we should expect them always to compose the same thing. If the arrangement of the Ps makes no difference to whether they compose something, how could it make a difference to which thing they compose (van Inwagen 1990b: 7775)? In other words, M would seem to be what I earlier called a persisting mass (§7.376): something composed of particles that exists, composed of the same particles, whenever those particles exist. In that case M is now located exactly where you are, and is now composed of the very particles that now compose you. Given that those particles cannot compose two things at once, it follows that you are M. But you are not M. You are not a persisting mass. You were not composed of the Ps a month ago. You were never widely dispersed. Our original assumption, that universalism is true and you are composed of particles, must therefore be false.
  9. What if M doesn’t exist now? What if the thing your current particles composed a month ago no longer exists? Well, why doesn’t it still exist? What caused its demise? Presumably it was that its parts, the Ps, got rearranged in some way. What way? The Ps have been in constant motion relative to each other for the last month. At what point during this period did M cease to exist? Which particular rearrangement of the Ps brought about M’s demise? The most plausible answer is that M ceased to exist as soon as the Ps got rearranged at all. It would be hard to believe that M managed to survive all the rearrangements the Ps have undergone during the past month, only to perish the moment those particles came to be arranged in human form. If a thing cannot survive its particles’ coming to be arranged in human form, surely it cannot survive its particles’ being rearranged in any way at all. And if a thing cannot survive any rearrangement of its particles, then an object whose particles are in constant motion can exist for only a moment. But your particles are in constant motion. It follows that you exist for only a moment: you are a momentary mass. But that is absurd. You are no more a momentary mass than you are a persisting mass. Once again, the assumption that you are composed of particles, given universalism, must be false.
  10. So you could not be composed of particles if universalism is true. What could you be composed of, then? The most obvious answer is that you are composed of particle-stages. None of the Ps are parts of you; rather, your parts include certain temporal parts of the Ps. (Though it may not be easy to say which ones. Animalists can say it is those caught up in your biological life, but non-animalists will deny this.) And if you are composed of temporal parts of particles, then you yourself have temporal parts.
  11. This is the sort of reasoning that leads universalists to the temporal-parts view. It is not a watertight proof, for it is consistent with universalism that we are composed neither of particles nor of particle-stages. We might be composed of mental states. Or we might be composed of nothing at all, other than ourselves: we might be simple. One might even say that M survived all the rearrangements of the past month but perished when the Ps came to be arranged in human form – another version of the way of funny persistence conditions (Rea 199877). But these are eccentric views.
  12. The most obvious weakness in this argument, you might think, is the assumption that constitutionalism is false. Why not say that M still exists now and simply coincides materially with you? More generally, perhaps any particles whatever compose a persisting mass (or a momentary mass; it doesn’t matter), but none of us is a mass; rather, each of us is constituted, at any moment, by a mass. In that case M would stand to you roughly as a lump of clay stands to the clay statue made from it, except that you come to be constituted by a different mass every fraction of a second, whereas a statue coincides with the same lump for a longer period.
  13. Now I have argued against constitutionalism. But I needn’t rely on those arguments here. Even if constitutionalism is completely unobjectionable, there is no point in bringing it in now, to block the inference from universalism to the temporal-parts view. The proposal we are considering is to answer the special composition question by accepting universalism, and to make this compatible with our being composed of particles rather than particle-stages – different particles at different times – by asserting that we coincide materially with masses. But this only raises a new question about composition: under what circumstances do particles compose something other than a mass? Call this the new composition question. (It is a close relative of the question of when constitution occurs of §3.578.) We should expect it to have an answer if the special composition question has an answer.
  14. Constitutionalists will not want to give a “universalist” answer to the new composition question. They will not say that any particles whatever, no matter how they are arranged or what they are like in themselves, compose something other than a mass. It is bad enough to have to say that the particles now composing you composed anything at all a month ago when they were randomly scattered; it is far worse to say that they composed two things then: not only a persisting mass, but also something other than a mass, something that stood to the mass then as a clay statue stands to the lump of clay it is made out of. If universalism is a bloated ontology of material objects, this is double bloating. Nor can constitutionalists give a “nihilistic” answer to the new composition question: they cannot say that particles never compose something other than a mass. They will want to give an intermediate answer: they will say that whether particles compose something other than a mass depends on what they are like and how they are arranged and situated. But then what is the point of answering the special composition question with ‘always’? Whatever intermediate answer constitutionalists can give to the new composition question will do just as well as an answer to the special composition question. If we could say how things have to be arranged and situated in order to compose something other than a mass, why not say that that is what it takes for things to compose anything at all? What is gained by adding a capacious ontology of masses to a moderate ontology of ordinary material things? As far as I can see, nothing at all.
  15. So the combination of universalism and constitutionalism is unappealing. Universalists are under considerable pressure to accept the temporal-parts view, and it is unsurprising that nearly all succumb to it.
  16. If this is right, then our conjecture about a link between when composition occurs and what we are would seem to be confirmed. Universalism leads by a devious but fairly secure path to the temporal-parts view. Compositional nihilists will are almost certain to accept nihilism, or perhaps immaterialism. And we have seen that the only other serious theories of composition on offer, minimalism and disjunctivism, lead almost inevitably to animalism. I concede that none of these inferences is irresistible. A determined metaphysician could devise an account that combined universalism with animalism, say, or compositional nihilism with the constitution view, or biological minimalism with immaterialism. But I doubt whether there would be any point in such an exercise. So it appears that a theory of composition would tell us what we are. At any rate what we say about composition will constrain dramatically what we are able to say, or what it would be sensible to say, about our metaphysical nature. The way to find out what we are – or one way, at least – is to find out when composition occurs.
9.7 Brutal composition
  1. Earlier I expressed the opinion that the three best accounts of our metaphysical nature are nihilism, the temporal-parts view, and animalism. And I have argued that each of these accounts follows very naturally, if not quite inevitably, from one of the available theories of composition: compositional nihilism leads to nihilism about ourselves, universalism leads to the temporal-parts view, and intermediate theories lead to animalism. The dependence also runs the other way: nihilism about ourselves leads to compositional nihilism, the temporal-parts view presupposes universalism, and animalism is plausible only on an intermediate theory of composition. If that is right, then we can just about answer the question of what we are by giving a theory of composition, and we can just about work out when composition occurs on the basis of what we are.
  2. This picture may be too neat, however, for I haven’t considered the possibility that there is no true theory of composition – that is, that the special composition question has no answer. Or rather that it has no systematic or principled or intellectually satisfying answer: no complete and non-trivial answer that we could know or write down. It may be that certain conditions are necessary for things to compose something: perhaps objects that exert no causal influence over one another cannot compose anything, for instance. It may also be that certain conditions are sufficient for things to compose something: perhaps things caught up in a biological life always compose something. Even so, there may be no complete, finite set of conditions, each of which is necessary and all of which are jointly sufficient for things to compose something.
  3. Markosian (199879) has called this idea brutal composition – the idea being that whether things compose something is a brute fact, not explainable in terms of any general principle. Its attraction is plain enough. It seems to most of us that some things compose bigger objects and others don’t, ruling out the two “extreme” theories of composition, compositional nihilism and universalism. Yet neither biological minimalism nor biological disjunctivism sounds right either: most of us are inclined to believe that there are at least some visible parts of organisms. The fact that no plausible answer to the special composition question compatible with these two convictions has ever been proposed might suggest that the question has no answer.
  4. Although brutal composition is a response to the special composition question, it does not actually answer that question. It doesn’t tell us when composition occurs. It tells us, rather, that we cannot say when composition occurs. So the possibility that composition might be brute challenges the idea that we could find out what we are by finding out when composition occurs.
  5. Well, how does brutalism relate to the question of what we are? It might seem to support animalism. Brutalists will almost certainly accept the existence of human animals. Human animals are paradigm cases of composite objects: anyone who denies that particles arranged anthropomorphically compose human organisms might as well accept compositional nihilism. And if there are such things as animals, it is hard to deny that we are animals. Animalism and brutal composition also share the same air of humble plausibility – especially when compared to the alternatives, which in both cases are rather wild.
  6. They may even seem an ideal match. Animalism would be threatened by the existence of such troublesome entities as thinking parts of animals and material things coinciding materially with animals. I suggested ridding ourselves of these entities by accepting a sparse ontology of material things, such as biological minimalism. Could we not dispense with them at a lower cost by going brutalist?
  7. I think the answer is no. As far as I can see, brutalism is no help in defending animalism against the objections we have considered in this chapter. It is hard to combine brutalism with animalism. In fact it is hard to combine it with any attractive account of what we are. At any rate the considerations that make brutalism attractive make it hard to say what we are.
  8. Brutalism would help the animalist if the troublesome entities were all arbitrary objects: pieces of ontological junk, things that only friends of universalism would believe in. And some are: undetached hand complements, for instance. But not all. Consider undetached heads: they belong to the nursery-school ontology that we learned as children. Undetached brains belong to the anatomy-textbook ontology that we learned later on. The conviction that there have got to be such things, and not merely particles arranged capitally or cerebrally, is just the sort of thing that leads philosophers to reject minimalism and disjunctivism and retreat to brutalism. If there are any composite objects other than organisms, one is tempted to say, there are surely heads. If there are no heads we may as well accept minimalism. So brutalists are likely to accept the existence of undetached heads and brains, even if they deny the existence of arbitrary parts of human organisms. This will prevent them from giving a metaphysical solution to the thinking-parts problem – that is, from saying that we know we are not heads or brains because there are no such things. And I have not seen any other very satisfactory solution to the thinking-parts problem. Certainly brutal composition suggests none.
  9. For the same reason, brutalists cannot solve the amputation paradox or the paradox of increase by the way of sparse ontology. If there are such things as undetached heads, and if you were pared down to a head and kept alive by life-support machinery, how would you then relate to your head? Brutalists could of course turn to funny logic or funny persistence conditions, but that would diminish their view’s attraction considerably. If they accept the existence of undetached heads, and accept that you could survive being pared down to a head, and reject the ontology of temporal parts, funny logic, and funny persistence conditions, they will have to turn to constitutionalism: to say that you and your undetached head would come to coincide materially if the rest of you were cut away. The clay-modelling puzzle will also push brutalists towards constitutionalism. Because they want to give an account of what material objects there are that comes close to what we are ordinarily inclined to say, they will want to accept the existence of statues and lumps. So they will be unable to solve the clay-modelling puzzle by denying the existence of statues and lumps of clay, or by saying that there is a lump there but no statue. Nor will they want to solve it by turning to temporal parts, for they reject universalism. Funny logic and funny persistence conditions aside, once again, constitutionalism looks like the only alternative. The trouble with brutalism is that the very ontological generosity that makes it attractive gives us many of the material things that make it hard to say what we are.
  10. Brutalists might try to solve this problem by persisting in their brutalism. They might adopt constitutionalism, and say that we are things constituted by animals. They might go on to say that things constituted by human animals can think but human animals themselves cannot; and neither can a brain or any other proper part of a human animal. Why not? What is it about animals or undetached brains that prevents them from thinking? Brutalists might reply that nothing does: their inability to think is simply a brute fact, not consisting in or explainable in terms of other facts. They can’t think, and that’s all there is to it. The question of what it takes for something to be able to think has no answer, or at any rate no systematic or principled or satisfying answer. Or at least we shouldn’t assume that it has an answer, and thus our inability to answer it need not trouble us. They might go brutalist in response to other questions that arise on this view as well, such as when constitution occurs and what determines our boundaries. I complained earlier that many questions about how constitution is supposed to work have no answers, yet seem to demand answers. One might simply reject this demand.
  11. This is not the place to discuss the merits of brutalism as a general philosophical strategy. But the brutalism about thinking that I have suggested here has little of the attraction of brutal composition. The brutalist about composition wants to say that there are such things as organisms, undetached heads, lumps of clay, and clay statues, and no such things as hand-complements and disconnected objects composed of the upper half of one human being and the lower half of another. That sounds good. The only worry is that it might be unprincipled: we can’t think of any reason why there should be heads but no hand-complements. (Someone might say that hand-complements would be arbitrary objects, while heads are not; but then the question is what this arbitrariness comes to.) Brutalism denies that there must be any such reason why. The brutalist about thinking, on the other hand, claims that human animals cannot think but material objects physically indistinguishable from them can. That isn’t plausible on the face of it. Quite the opposite. To say further that there is no explanation for this astonishing state of affairs only makes matters worse. Perhaps we could be warranted in believing that there are such things as undetached heads but no such things as undetached hand complements, even if we have no principled reason for it. But we are surely not warranted, without a principled reason, in denying that human animals ever think.
  12. So whereas accepting one of the proposed theories of composition would more or less settle the question of what we are, accepting brutal composition would not. It would tell us next to nothing about what we are. In fact those versions of brutal composition that look more attractive than minimalism would make the question of what we are very hard to answer. It gives us too many sorts of things that we could be. Despite its initial attraction, then, brutal composition is not so appealing when all is said and done.
  13. If brutalism is false, then it seems that we really can find out what we are by finding out when composition occurs. Alternatively, we can find out when composition occurs by finding out what we are. Or we can try to work out both together. I won’t venture to say which procedure is the best one. In any case, the connection between the two questions ought to make progress on both easier.



In-Page Footnotes ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? What Now?")

Footnote 17:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (08/04/2025 09:28:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 18:
  • I can’t remember when this was. The pdfs of a few Chapters – including this one – are dated May 2007 and the pdf of the book is dated 11th November 2007 – so in the year the book was published. I think they must have been available for some considerable time thereafter, but I can’t be certain.
Footnote 19:
  • Purchased on 18th November 2007, so soon after publication.
Footnote 20: Footnote 28: Footnote 29: Footnote 30: Footnote 31: Footnote 32: Footnote 33: Footnote 34: Footnote 35: Footnote 36: Footnote 37:
  • See Chapter 7, Section 6.
  • This was the standard view for millennia, and is probably still RC doctrine, so deserves some consideration.
Footnote 38: Footnote 39: Footnote 40:
  • I disagree with this evaluation, and have footnoted where I think the ‘minor view’ is important.
Footnote 44:
  • Or maybe four: inspired by Geach (1997: 310), someone might propose that the animal and its brain are the same thinker, even though they are different material things. Animal and brain are not numerically identical, but neither are they numerically distinct. The proposal is that there is no such thing as numerical identity without qualification, but only a lot of “sortal-relative” identity-like relations. This is a variant of the way of funny logic of §7.4. I find it more or less unintelligible. Consider that one thinker that your animal body and your brain are, on this proposal. How big is it? No satisfactory answer to this question appears to be possible. But surely a material object has to have some size.
  • See "Geach (Peter) - Reference and Generality (Selections)".
Footnote 56:
  • This comment hardly belongs here … but – before I forget – does Olson ever complain about the weight of statues?
  • Analogous to the Thinking Animal problem, there’s a weight problem. Why don’t statues weigh twice as much as the clay that constitutes them (or the person than the animal, for that matter?
  • Isn’t this all a bit of a reductio of Olson’s arguments – given that supporters of the CV must have thought of this (as they have, by their ‘having properties derivatively’ arguments?
Footnote 57: Footnote 58: Footnote 59: Footnote 60: Footnote 61:
  • I suppose someone might say that animals are mereologically simple. That may have been Aristotle’s view, and Lowe’s Brobdingnagian atomism (§7.8) is close to it. Combining this with compositional nihilism might enable animalists to dispense with the troublesome entities. It’s a pretty wild idea, though.
Footnote 63: Footnote 64: Footnote 67: Footnote 68: Footnote 69:
  • More precisely, things compose something if and only if they are either functionally united or they and all their parts are rigidly bonded. It seems that two organisms firmly glued together would be rigidly bonded, yet no one but a universalist, and certainly not Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, would want to say that they would compose something. Another caveat: for technical reasons that we needn’t go into, Hoffman and Rosenkrantz do not actually attempt to give a theory of composition, and the view stated here is extrapolated from their discussion of other matters. I believe that it accurately reflects their intent, however.
Footnote 70:
  • This paragraph has been re-worked in the book.
Footnote 73:
  • It is probably more accurate to say that they deny the existence of lumps of wet clay, because their particles would not be rigidly bonded. But the example, and those that figure in other arguments for constitutionalism, can be modified so as to involve only rigidly bonded particles.
Footnote 74:
  • If you have doubts about whether elementary particles really persist, think of atoms.
Footnote 75: Footnote 77: Footnote 79:

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