Immaterialist Solutions to Puzzles in Personal Ontology

© 2017 Kristin Seemuth Whaley IMMATERIALIST SOLUTIONS TO PUZZLES IN PERSONAL ONTOLOGY BY KRISTIN SEEMUTH WHALEY DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Daniel Z. Korman, Chair Professor Robert McKim Associate Professor Shelley Weinberg Assistant Professor NoëlSaenz ABSTRACT What are we? Despite much discussion in historical and contemporary philosophy, we have not yet settled on an answer. A satisfactory personal ontology, an account of our metaphysical nature, will be informed by issues in the metaphysics of material objects. In the dissertation, I target two prominent materialist ontologies: animalism, the view that we are numerically identical to human organisms, and constitutionalism, the view that we are constituted by, but not identical to, human organisms. Because of the problems that arise from endorsing these ontologies, I instead advance immaterialism, the view that we are essentially immaterial. In Chapter 2, I discuss how animalists must respond to a widely-discussed metaphysical puzzle, the problem of the many. This puzzle prompts some to endorse revisionary ontologies of material objects, and I argue that the animalist cannot appeal to these revisionary ontologies to solve the puzzle as it arises for personal ontology. In addition, solutions that don't involve a commitment to revisionary ontology will be unavailable to the animalist: I argue that if animalists make use of non-revisionary solutions to the problem, they must abandon the most successful argument for their view. Absent their most successful argument, animalists will need to motivate the view in some other way. Some new arguments for animalism have been proposed, and I argue that they fail to give us reason to endorse animalism over competing ontologies. Without a strong argument, we should not prefer animalism over the other, more attractive, views. In Chapter 3, I show how constitutionalists face a different problem: explaining how the person is not the very same thing as the human organism, despite sharing the very same parts and occupying the very same physical space. We think that the person and the organism are different things because they have different modal profiles { the human organism can survive permanent loss of psychological life, but the person, presumably, cannot. Con- stitutionalists must then explain what grounds the difference in modal profiles, but such an explanation is hard to come by. This is an instance of the grounding problem, which is notoriously intractable. While the grounding problem is a well-known challenge to consti- tutional accounts of objects, I demonstrate that this puzzle is even more threatening when applied to persons. Some \solutions" to the problem fail to solve it at all, and solutions that might get the right result for ordinary objects require accepting that there are a multitude of persons where we ordinarily take there to be only one. We should not accept a personal ontology that requires a commitment to that multitude. I argue that the threat of the grounding problem is so great that we must reject the constitutionalist personal ontology. We will see from these puzzles in personal ontology that materialist solutions are either unsuccessful or yield unacceptable consequences. This should prompt us toward consider- ing, instead, immaterialism. According to immaterialism, persons are not material objects, and the immaterialist can then provide solutions to the puzzles that threatened materialist ontologies. In Chapter 4, I outline these immaterialist solutions and show that the puzzles cannot be reinstantiated successfully against the immaterialist. I then discuss different avail- able varieties of immaterialism and argue in defense of my preferred version. Ultimately, I ii argue that we are simple, immaterial entities that come into existence at the proper func- tioning of the brain. Endorsing this view of personal ontology permits us to adequately respond to metaphysical puzzles and retain judgments about persons that should be most important to us. In particular, the immaterialist has the resources to avoid the problem of too many thinkers and retain the judgment that there is exactly one person in circumstances where we take there to be just one. The immaterialist also has the resources to plausibly ana- lyze thought experiments, such as cerebrum-swap cases, that threaten materialist ontologies. All things considered, it remains to be seen which personal ontology has the most evidence in its favor. In the context of debates that arise from material object metaphysics, however, evidence weighs in favor of immaterialism. Materialist personal ontologies are saddled with unacceptable responses to metaphysical puzzles, and endorsing materialism about persons requires taking on a very high cost: Either there are far more of us than we ordinarily take there to be, or there are no persons { far fewer of us than we ordinarily take there to be. Some might argue that these are the only acceptable options, so cost be damned. But we cannot afford to be so cavalier about our personal ontology. Instead, I advance immaterialist solutions to puzzles in personal ontology and propose that, in the interest of saving ourselves and everyone we love, we should seriously consider accounts according to which we are immaterial entities. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to all my immaterial loved ones for supporting me in the process of writing this dissertation. This project would not have been possible without the outpouring of en- couragement I received. Many thanks to my dissertation committee, who engaged with my project and prompted me to pursue challenges from directions I did not anticipate. Their questions and insights have helped me become a more careful thinker and opened my eyes to new areas of inquiry. Thanks, in particular, to Robert McKim, for whom I was fortunate to work as a research assistant and whose work is inspiring. I am also grateful to the Philosophy Department for financial support as well as graduate students and faculty members for their conversations about this topic. There aren't enough pages for me to adequately thank Dan Korman, the model of a sharp philosopher, thoughtful advisor, and excellent person. His continual support, intellectual challenges, professional guidance, and constant willingness to offer advice enabled me to pursue my goals with confidence. Special thanks, also, to Keith Yandell, who played a significant role my early philosoph- ical studies while at UW-Madison. He, as both teacher and advisor, established a solid foundation for me to continue in philosophy, and I will always be grateful for his influence. And thank you to my friends and family. I'm grateful for the teachers and fellow yogis at Ashtanga CU for our shared practice, Katie Francis for our shared library dates, and Clara Bosak-Schroeder for our shared breakfasts. They have all helped me keep my focus and motivation. Thank you to my parents, who have encouraged me to argue my case for as long as I've been able to talk. Finally, thank you especially to my husband, David, who in innumerable ways made it possible for me to finish this degree. And even if it turns out that I'm wrong and you're all material, thank you all the same. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction . 1 1.1 The Importance of Personal Ontology . 1 1.2 Outline of the Project . 4 Chapter 2 Puzzles for Animalists . 6 2.1 Introduction . 6 2.2 A Puzzle that isn't the Puzzle . 11 2.3 The Thinking Animal Argument . 21 2.4 The Problem of the Many and the Dilemma for Animalists . 27 2.5 The Animal Ancestors Argument . 51 2.6 The Animal Interests Argument . 58 2.7 Conclusion . 63 Chapter 3 Puzzles for Constitutionalists . 65 3.1 Introduction . 65 3.2 Monism, Pluralism, and the Grounding Problem . 67 3.3 Range of Possible Solutions . 69 3.4 The Grounding Problem and Personal Ontology . 77 3.5 Hylomorphism and the Grounding Problem . 87 3.6 Multitudinous and Non-Multitudinous Hylomorphism . 94 3.7 Conclusion . 102 Chapter 4 Immaterialism Solves Puzzles . 104 4.1 Introduction . 104 4.2 Immaterialism Solves the Problem of the Many . 106 4.3 The Simplicity of the Person . 123 4.4 Immaterialism Solves the Grounding Problem . 139 4.5 Some Costs of Immaterialism . 145 4.6 Surviving Death . 152 4.7 Conclusion . 166 References . 168 v Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 The Importance of Personal Ontology What are we? Among many other things, we are thinkers, conscious beings, and persons. In ordinary circumstances, we are good at identifying how many of us there are: there's just one of us writing this dissertation and one of us sitting in your chair reading it. Further, we know for certain that we exist, regardless of whether we're certain that anything else exists. But despite certainty that we are, most of us don't have a robust sense of what we are. A satisfying answer to this question, beyond triviality, will be simultaneously respectful of our ordinary judgments about ourselves and philosophically respectable. Historically, we find accounts according to which we are souls or minds, or at least have such things as parts. Plato defended the existence of an immaterial soul, separable from the body, which is responsible for our intellectual nature.1 Aristotle believed that a human is a compound of soul (form) and body (matter) but denied that the soul can exist independently of the body.2 Saint Thomas Aquinas defended an Aristotelian account, although he diverged from Aristotle in allowing the possibility of the soul's existence independently of the body.3 Descartes, for whom `Cartesian dualism' is named, held that the mind and body are distinct substances.4 In contemporary philosophy, it has become more favorable to defend accounts according to which we are material objects, devoid of immaterial souls or immaterial minds.

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