Abstract
According to the cohabitation account, all the persons that result from a fission event cohabit the same body prior to fission. This article concerns a problem for this account. Suppose Manuel and Jimena are suffering from an equally painful migraine. Unlike Jimena, however, Manuel will undergo fission. Assuming you have a spare painkiller, whom should you give it to? Intuitively, you have no more reason to give it to one or the other. The problem is that the cohabitation account suggests otherwise. According to the account, there are two persons cohabiting Manuel’s body, in which case you should arguably give them the pill, since doing so alleviates the pain of more beings. One response argues that the two persons cohabiting Manuel’s body share one pain. Thus, giving them the pill alleviates no more pain than giving it to Jimena, and therefore you have no more reason to do one or the other. The goal of this article is to show that this response fails.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
To be precise, Briggs and Nolan’s target is Multiple Occupancy, which is the weaker thesis that “two or more distinct, temporally extended persons can completely overlap for a span of time” (2015: 393), but the difference will not matter for our purposes.
My statement of the problem is different from Briggs and Nolan’s because I wish to carve up the space of responses in a different way. Also, I write as though these are different statements of the same problem as opposed to different problems, but there are important differences between them and I would not object if someone preferred to regard them as different problems.
See Parfitt (1997: 213).
Here is one way it could have some moral significance. Suppose that whoever receives the pill today will, two weeks from now, relish in the pleasant memories of the evening, whereas whoever fails to receive the pill will suffer further distress from the painful memory of the evening. One might then argue that you do have more reason to give Manuel the pill, since doing so will bring about more pleasant memories and fewer painful memories than the alternative. To get around this problem, let us simply stipulate that Manuel and Jimena will have their memories of the evening wiped out the next morning.
See Mills (1993) for an exception.
Here I am counting by identity. Following Lewis (1976), the cohabitation theorist could argue that we should instead count by the weaker relation identity-at-t, where persons x and y are identical-at-t iff each has a stage at t, and all and only stages of x at t are stages of y at t. As Briggs and Nolan argue (2015: 403), however, this move does not provide a solution to the problem.
Monton and Goldberg (2006) argue that every person overlaps with infinitely many thinkers, in which case More Experiencers is arguably false. This may solve the present problem, but it leads to a problem of infinitarian paralysis (Briggs and Nolan 2015: 397–402; Johnston 2016: 21–23). At any rate, here I assume that ordinary human persons do not overlap with infinitely many thinkers.
One reflex reaction is: “So much the worse for the cohabitation account!” While I think this reaction is ultimately justified, the problem is not exclusive to the cohabitation account. Analogous problems have been raised for Baker’s (2000) constitution view of human persons (Zimmerman 2002: 317); four-dimensionalism (Johnston 2016: 23–4; cf. Olson 2010; Taylor 2013); as well as for various responses to the problem of the many (Simon 2017; cf. Hudson 2001: ch. 1, §5; Unger 2004; Smith 2007; Zimmerman 2010, 2011). Thus, the problem is worth discussing even if one rejects the cohabitation account.
For what it is worth, my preferred approach is to reject the cohabitation account in favor of Sider’s stage-theoretic account (1996, 2001: §5.8), which—setting aside certain complications—allows us to say that there is only one person to your right, and hence to reject More Experiencers. Though similar to the first response considered above, I do not regard the stage-theoretic account as a version of the cohabitation account, and hence I do not consider this a response to the problem so much as a concession.
Simon (2017: 454) makes essentially the same point.
As Sutton points out, supervenience is usually defined in terms of properties rather than objects—see Sutton (2014: 624, fn. 5) for her reasons to use a non-standard notion of supervenience. Also, Sutton uses an individual variable (‘x’) to define supervenience, but she often uses a plural description to pick out an object’s supervenience base—e.g., ‘the calories’ (2014: 623), ‘the parts’ (2014: 625), ‘the cells’ (2014: 625)—which is why I prefer to use a plural variable (‘xs’) instead.
These statements do not quite capture the target views. If we thought that we should count by quantity of pain, then given a choice between one 30-dolor pain and two 20-dolor pains, we should think there is more moral reason to alleviate the latter. As stated though, this does not follow from Quantity of Pain because the statement speaks of individual pains, not pluralities thereof, and is therefore silent on how much reason there is to alleviate two 20-dolor pains. To get the intuitive results, we must assume that, other things equal, the amount of moral reason to alleviate some pains (plural) is given by aggregating the amount of moral reason to alleviate each of those pains. In what follows, I take this assumption to be implicitly built into both Quantity of Pain and Number of Experiencers.
Thanks to Catherine Sutton for bringing this case to my attention. I take the following observations from Dominus (2011).
Thanks to an anonymous referee from the Philosophical Quarterly for raising this objection.
The appeal to animalism might seem strange here. After all, the claim that dicephalus cases involve a single organism is often supposed to make trouble for animalism—see Campbell and McMahan (2016). However, there is trouble only if dicephalus cases involve two persons, something that animalists can deny.
See Olson (2016: 300) for an intriguing possibility.
As Andrew Bailey points out, it seems possible to combine animalism with a psychological account of personal identity into something he calls “psychological animalism” (2015: 874). Psychological animalists may face pressure to identify each brain-recipient with Manuel.
To be clear, this is all on the assumption that Jean-Claude’s case involves only one being in pain—if it involves two, Number of Experiencers no longer commits supervenience theorists to the claim that whether the doctors should give the medication to Jean-Claude or Sylvester depends on whether Jean-Claude’s pains have the same supervenience base.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee from this journal for suggesting this version of the response.
This is very close to what Friesen calls ‘the consensus view’ (2013: 49), except the consensus view adds a further necessary condition, namely that all the constituent experiences of a phenomenal field must have a common subject.
The label ‘mereological essentialism’ is sometimes used for this very thesis, but as we have seen, that is not how Dainton defines it.
Cf. Olson on the view that persons are logical constructions (2007: 131).
Thanks to Hille Paakkunainen for discussion.
References
Bailey, A. (2015). Animalism. Philosophy Compass, 10(12), 867–883.
Bayne, T. (2010). The unity of consciousness. Oxford University Press.
Baker, L. R. (2000). Persons and bodies: A constitution view. Cambridge University Press.
Boyle, A. (2020). Conjoined twinning and biological individuation. Philosophical Studies, 177, 2395–2415.
Briggs, R., & Nolan, D. (2015). Utility monsters for the fission age. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 96(2), 392–407.
Campbell, T., & McMahan, J. (2010). Animalism and the varieties of conjoined twinning. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 31(4), 285–301.
Chappell, R. Y. (2015). Value receptacles. Noûs, 49(2), 322–332.
Dainton, B. (2005). Stream of consciousness: Unity and continuity in conscious experience (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Dominus, S. (2011) Could conjoined twins share a mind? The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved June 4, 2021 from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html
Friesen, L.K. (2013). The structure of consciousness. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Hershenov, D. B. (2013). Who doesn’t have a problem of too many thinkers? American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(2), 203.
Hudson, H. (2001). A materialist metaphysics of the human person. Cornell University Press.
Johnston, M. (2016). The personite problem: Should practical reason be tabled? Noûs, 50(4), 617–644.
Kaiserman, A. (2019). Stage theory and the personite problem. Analysis, 79(2), 215–222.
Langford, S. (2007). How to defend the cohabitation theory. Philosophical Quarterly, 57(227), 212–224.
Lewis, D.K. (1976). Survival and identity. In A.O. Rorty (Ed.), The identities of persons (pp. 17–40.) Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lockwood, M. (1989). Mind, brain and the quantum. Blackwell Publishers.
Mills, E. (1993). Dividing without reducing: Bodily fission and personal identity. Mind, 1802(405), 37–51.
Monton, B., & Goldberg, S. (2006). The problem of the many minds. Minds and Machines, 16(4), 463–470.
Noonan, H. W. (2003). Personal identity. Routledge.
Olson, E. (2010). Ethics and the generous ontology. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 31(4), 259–270.
Olson, E. (2007). What are we? A study in personal ontology, New York: Oxford University Press.
Olson, E. (2016). The role of the brainstem in personal identity. In A. Blank (Ed.), Animals: New essays (pp. 291–302.) Munich: Philosophia.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (1997). Equality and priority. Ratio, 10, 202–221.
Perry, J. (2002). Identity. Hackett Publishing Company.
Robinson, D. (1985). Can amoeba divide without multiplying? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 63, 299–319.
Sider, T. (1996). All the world’s a stage. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74(3), 433–453.
Sider, T. (2001). Four-Dimensionalism. Clarendon.
Simon, J. A. (2017). The hard problem of the many. Philosophical Perspectives, 31(1), 449–468.
Smith, D. P. (2007). Vague singulars, semantic indecision, and the metaphysics of persons. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74(3), 569–585.
Sutton, C. S. (2014). The supervenience solution to the too-many-thinkers problem. Philosophical Quarterly, 64(257), 619–639.
Taurek, J. M. (1977). Should the numbers count? Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6(4), 293–316.
Taylor, A. P. (2013). The frustrating problem for four-dimensionalism. Philosophical Studies, 165(3), 1097–1115.
Tye, M. (2003). Consciousness and persons: Unity and identity. MIT Press.
Unger, P.K. (2004). The mental problems of the many. In D. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Vol. 1 (pp. 195–222.) Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Zimmerman, D. (2002). The constitution of persons by bodies: A critique of Lynne Ruder Baker’s theory of material constitution. Philosophical Topics, 30(1), 295–338.
Zimmerman, D. (2010). From property dualism to substance dualism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 84(1), 119–150.
Zimmerman, D. (2011). From experience to experiencer. In M.C. Baker & S. Goetz (Eds.) The soul hypothesis (pp. 168–196.) London: Continuum Publishing.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Mark Heller, Kris McDaniel, Michael Rieppel, Daniel Nolan, Ned Markosian, Byron Simmons, Isaiah Lin, Carolyn Garland, Hille Paakkunainen, and attendees of my 2018 Pacific APA talk, especially Catherine Sutton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Javier-Castellanos, A.A. Should the Number of Overlapping Experiencers Count?. Erkenn 88, 1767–1789 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00427-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00427-4