Abstract
Animalism offers a more attractive account of the human person than the Embodied Mind Account. If people are not animals, but small proper parts of animals, then there is a threat of spatially coincident thinkers. This will likely have to be avoided at the cost of the sparsest of ontologies, one in which there are no larger entities that can become reduced to the size of the brain or cerebrum-size thinker. This will be a rather implausible ontology as such thinkers will not fit well into the natural world, meet traditional independence or unity criteria for being substances, nor provide a compositional principle with causal glue.
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Notes
Parfit labels it the Embodied Part View and favors a Lockean variant he names the Embodied Person View. Similar defenses of persons as proper parts of animals are found in Dowland (2016) and Reid (2016). Persson argues that the Embodied Mind Account avoids the too many thinkers problem but is reluctant to endorse it as the correct account of personal identity 1999, 521). Hudson (2001) offers a four-dimensional version of the Embodied Mind Account.
Dowland (2016) is the rare defender of the Embodied Mind Account to recognize this problem.
Dowland endorses such elimination while McMahan and Campbell earlier briefly consider and reject a version of such eliminativism (2010, 289).
Ingmar Persson writes of the Embodied Mind Account strategy “the practice of attributing psychological properties to animals is of a piece with an exceedingly common pattern. We observe that something exercises some power, e.g., that a liquid or a gas poisons or intoxicates us. Only much later do we discover that it does so in virtue of containing a certain chemical—that is, that the applicability of these predicates to it should be construed derivatively from the applicability of them to the chemical (1999, 523–524).
If the Animalist just claims animals cease to exist when they cease to function, then the Embodied Mind Account theorist is helping himself to the same strategy. But there are Animalists who claim the reason that the corpse is not identical to the living body is due to the different manner in which the living and dead acquire, retain, and replace parts (Hershenov 2009). There is no analogue in the Embodied Mind Account. The irreversibly comatose are still acquiring and retaining cerebrum atoms in the manner the functioning cerebrum did and so philosophical advocates of the Embodied Mind Account cannot appeal to mereological facts to resist identifying functioning and non-functioning cerebra.
The brain stem still controls life processes and maintains sleep–wake cycles, brain reflexes, blinking, facial muscle tone, etc.
An undamaged cerebrum will not be conscious if its brainstem is defunct.
Furthermore, even after the animal increased in size beyond its allegedly thought-generating parts and became a derivative thinker, it is not clear that such derivative thought would not really be genuine thought. It is typically believed that the animal digests in virtue of its digestive system non-derivatively digesting, but we do not then claim that the animal does not really engage in digestion. Nor do we claim that a digestive disease is not really a disease of the larger human animal. Therefore, why then deny that derivatively thinking is really thinking? Hence, the problem of too many thinkers is not avoided by claiming the animal thinks derivatively.
McMahan and Campbell would claim that the part of the brainstem involved with awareness (reticular formation) can be disentangled from the brainstem parts involved with controlling autonomous processes integral to animal life. Then the life capacity controls could be incapacitated but the thought generation remains (2010, 294). This might allow thought without life processes. I will return to my doubts later about the prospects of thought without life processes.
It is unsatisfactory because it does not offer a compositional principle for non-thinking parts, merely allows them to exist as they do not cause too many thinkers problems for the embodied mind view.
There is a vast literature trying to work out the proper sense of independence. Attempts are many and each is launched believing predecessors have not successfully climbed the ramparts to reach their goal.
This might be denied by advocates of the brain death criterion. If a brain is necessary for our continued existence then it would seem that we did not exist before we acquired a brain. Matters are complicated if Condic (2016) is correct that the organism can switch central integrators at birth—the brain taking over for the previous central integrator, the placenta.
I did not even mention the dependence of candidate substance on physical laws. If the forces of the universe were different, the atoms composing our bodies might be pulled apart or contract and there would be no living creature. Perhaps there would not even be any atoms.
What follows is not meant to be loyal to the letter of Koslicki’s account of unity.
Koslicki observes that even an independence criterion for substances will probably need a unity condition to distinguish substances from non-empty sets, committees, heaps, and aggregates.
The universalist believes any two or more objects have a sum (van Inwagen, 74).
Van Inwagen claims “parthood essentially involves causation” (1990, 81). He finds it helpful to approach the Special Composition Question as if it were a practical rather than a theoretical question and ask “What would one have to do or – or what one could do – to get the Xs to compose something” (31). This focuses us on “What multigrade relation must the Xs (be made to) bear to one another in order for them to form a whole” (31).
Perhaps the cerebrum will gradually wither somewhat with non-use.
van Inwagen actually believes that universalism is not really an answer to the Special Composition Question because it sums overlapping objects and composition does not. (79). The “Xx compose Y” is an abbreviation for “The Xs are all parts of Y and no two of the Xs overlap and every of y overlaps at least one of the Xs” (van Inwagen, 29). Nevertheless, van Inwagen insists that we must take universalism seriously since it is at odds with all the moderate solutions to the Special Composition Question.
Universalists might distinguish substances from other composited on the basis of independence, unity, or naturalness.
The famous transplant intuition that persons can be relocated when their cerebrum is severed and moved from one body to another or from one body to a vat reflects the same idea motivating the amputation or destruction of the animal’s parts surrounding the cerebrum.
Hopefully, this primitive account of electronics can be replaced with an sophisticated and accurate account that is still analogous.
This should serve as the basis of a response to the so-called Remnant Problem or the Creation and Destruction Problem. They only get off the ground if the detached cerebrum could think on its own. Descriptions of these problems are available in Parfit (2012), 13; Olson Forthcoming).
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Hershenov, D. Thinking Animals or Thinking Brains?. Acta Anal 36, 11–24 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00432-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00432-2