Abstract
If we are physical things with parts, then accounts of what we are and accounts of when composition occurs have important implications for one another. Defenders of restricted composition tend to endorse a sparse ontology in taking an eliminativist stance toward composite objects that are not organisms, while claiming that we are organisms. However, these arguments do not entail that we are organisms, for they rely on the premise that we are organisms. Thus, sparsist reasoning need not be paired with animalism, but could instead be paired with other accounts according to which we are composites. The embodied mind account—a version of the brain view—is one such account. Replacing the premise that we are organisms with the premise that we are embodied minds, in arguments that otherwise parallel those supporting animalist sparsism, yields an account according to which composite objects include thinkers, but perhaps nothing else. Since animalism has implausible implications about scenarios which are handled better by the embodied mind account, this approach is preferable to animalist sparsism. Furthermore, the role of mental features in sparsism makes embodied mind sparsism the more reasonable conclusion. Meanwhile, adopting sparsism allows the embodied mind account to dodge objections that may not be as easily avoided by it or other versions of the brain view if not paired with sparsism. These include objections about brains that are not persons, inorganic part replacement, and another form of part replacement that might seem to allow one to get a new brain.
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24 December 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01888-1
Notes
Olson (1995) also presents his own arguments against the existence of some of the troublesome entities for animalism.
Given Merricks’s stance that we are only contingently animals, some may say he is no animalist. Belshaw (2011: 401) and Nichols (2010: 261), for example, each describe animalism as including commitment to the claim that we are essentially animals. However, Olson (2007: 26) disagrees, saying only that whether we are essentially animals depends on whether human animals are essentially animals.
For example, no questions arise about statues coinciding with lumps if neither statues nor lumps exist.
I say they compose when giving rise to the capacity for thought, as opposed to saying they compose when giving rise to thought, since I do not suppose persons go out of existence when asleep or when knocked unconscious. Even when we cease thinking temporarily, the capacity for thought remains.
Arguing that souls (if there are such things) must be individuated by centers of consciousness, McMahan objects that the two centers of consciousness present after commissurotomy would entail two souls, and thus two persons, where there is actually just one person. So, while he thinks that the soul view must count persons by counting centers of consciousness, he apparently does not think the same is true of the embodied mind account.
See Oyowe (2013) for further discussion of this point.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank David Hershenov for providing a great deal of helpful feedback on multiple versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer(s) at Philosophical Studies for all of the useful comments I was given.
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Dowland, S.C. Embodied mind sparsism. Philos Stud 173, 1853–1872 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0581-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0581-3