Dear Glenn,You are enunciating the 'thing-ist' view rather nicely. Leibniz says that however intuitive it may be it is logically incoherent. He produces the principle of identity of indiscernibles, which in a sense says what you conclude with : '' somehow thinking that the difference depends upon your recognition of it.' except that it is a matter of what is in principle possible. So if in principle there is no possibility of discerning a difference between two entities they are identical. This generates some very counterintuitive effects - as for there being no fact of the matter 'which electron' is occupying an orbital. It seems that there are no 'instances' that have dynamic properties, just instances of dynamic properties. Leibniz wins out because early quantum theorists discovered that the empirical evidence proves that he is right. If you cannot in principe distinguish two 'particles' then they behave as if the same particle - with a quite different maths from two particles. I am not up on anti-matter but I am pretty sure that there is no intrinsic difference from matter. Negative and positive charge are just conventions.

So we have to throw away completely our traditional idea of things with properties. And once you do that everything suddenly becomes much more consistent and elegant. Things and properties belong to a crude popular view of the world that works in everyday life but not in modern physics and not in any consistent metaphysics. What I learnt when I became a philosophy student after retirement from science was that most philosophers refuse to make the move from the intuitive position. There seems to be a belief that if words are used by ordinary people and Aristotle in a certain way that must be the correct way. What one learns in science is that one has constantly to re-adjust one's concepts and word meanings as one learns clearer models of the world.

The most egregious example of this is the insistence that it is 'a person' that sees or knows. Science going back to Hippocrates has made it pretty clear that it is very unlikely that there is any entity that can ascribed both a relation of seeing and a relation of knowing. There is no such thing as a person that sees and knows, so the Mary story is built on sand. There is no such thing as 'a robot' that might see and know. These are pseudo concepts once one gets down to a fine enough grain to be relevant to the discussion in hand. Insisting on hanging on to traditional usages for words just leads to endless circular nonsense.

Yes, I strongly suspect that an 'I' is a consciously experiencing dynamic unit in a single dendritic tree - of one not many neurons. It is probably confusing to say that an I experiences being a dendritic tree because what the I experiences is everything else rather than its own nature. There would of course be thousands or millions of such 'I's in the brain of the human body called Jo Edwards or Glenn Spigel. That may sound strange but as I see it the joy of academic discussion is the fact that one can so often be proven totally wrong in one's ideas and thereby move on to much more interesting ideas. Present day philosophers seem more interested in putting up barricades to ensure they never change their views. It seems so boring.