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Extended Identities The Reducibility of Non-categorical Properties and their Bearers A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy at The University of Waikato by Paul Donald Charles Hubble 2020 Abstract When we take apart big or complicated things—whether events, processes, systems, objects or states—we find smaller or simpler things. Still, some who purport that everything is physical also want to deny that complicated things are sets of simpler things, their relations, and interactions. But that view leads to some confounding puzzles. By contrast, I defend the view that complicated things are nothing over and above simpler things, their relations, and interactions. The latter are all physical and located in space and time, and so are complicated things, like minds and people, and other things defined by what they could or would do. That includes corkscrews and water soluble things. However, the complicated properties of these complicated things show that, very often, these things are either not quite what we think they are, or they are not wholly where we think they are. Sometimes things aren’t what we thought. There is no lumniferous aether or phlogiston. But often, complicated things elude identification with their sets of simpler things, relations and interactions, not because they don’t belong in predictively successful models of our world, but because they aren’t wholly where we tend to look. Their boundaries are wider and untidy. As it happens, our minds are like that, and so are we. Finally, the fact that the extended identity of things like us comes as a surprise means our self-engineering could be more self-aware, and should be more self-reflective. Acknowledgements For their curiosity, insight and encouragement, I thank all my teachers. At Ryerson University, I especially thank Don Snyder, Elizabeth Trott, Glenn Parsons, and John Caruana. At the Institute for Christian Studies, I especially thank Ron Kuipers and Lambert Zuidervaart. For their tremendous and instrumental work throughout, I thank my su- pervisors, Justine Kingsbury, Dan Weijers, and Nick Munn. It has been a pleasure to work with such a team. I owe a special thanks to Justine, whose guiding wisdom and generosity with time and encouragement I cannot begin to measure. For their effort and input, I thank Joe Ulatowski, and my examiners, Douglas Campbell and Rob Wilson. For financial support, I thank the University of Waikato. For their love and patient support, I thank my friends and family, but especially my wife, Fiona. Scholarship is a truly communal effort. Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 We Are What We Make? . .1 1.2 Thesis Outline . .3 2 The Difficulties with Extended Minds 11 2.1 The First Battle Line . 13 2.2 The Varieties of Externalism . 23 2.3 The Second Battle Line . 27 3 Concepts of Dependence 39 3.1 Synchronic Dependence Relations Sketched . 40 3.2 Bennett’s Resemblance Class of Building Relations . 45 3.3 Rebuilding . 48 4 Puzzles of Synchronic Dependence 63 4.1 Molecules and Minds . 65 4.2 Antireductionism and its Discontents . 66 4.3 A Recipe for Problems . 70 4.4 Prospects for Grounding and Just Enough Determination . 74 5 Antireductionism and Multiple Realizability 83 5.1 The Argument for Antireductionism from Multiple Realizability 85 5.2 A Dilemma for Multiple Realizability, and its First Horn . 88 5.3 The Second Horn and Similarity . 102 6 Similarity and Reduction 112 6.1 Accounting for Similarity . 113 6.2 Variation and Reduction . 122 6.3 Variation and Kind Identity . 126 7 Sloppy Sufficiency and Restricted Constitutionalism 138 7.1 Avoiding Overdetermination . 140 7.2 The Sufficiency Error . 148 iv 7.3 The Ubiquity of the Sufficiency Error . 155 8 Causal and Synchronic Dependence 162 8.1 Causal Taint . 164 8.2 A Plurality of Building Relations . 172 8.3 Parsimony Versus Pluralism . 179 9 The Identity of Synchronic Dependence Relations 184 9.1 Characterizing Dependence Relation Monism . 186 9.2 An Objection from Failed Asymmetry . 188 9.3 An Objection from Failed Extensionality . 196 9.4 An Objection from Differing Relata . 200 10 The Metaphysics of Extended Minds 211 10.1 Revisiting the Unrestricted Constitutionalism Premise . 213 10.2 Brains in Vats . 226 10.3 The Boundaries of the Paradigmatically Mental . 234 10.4 Biting a Little Bloat . 242 11 Core Selves, Dynamic Selves 246 11.1 Dynamic Selves . 248 11.2 Dynamic Bodies . 259 11.3 Shared Tissues and Humane Futures . 269 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 We Are What We Make? We call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens. According to us, thinking, and the mind we credit with thinking, is our distinguishing feature. Art, technology and modern civilization are products of our special minds. These products are modifications of environments we usually consider external to our essential selves. We see ourselves moving freely through these environments as discrete individuals that take our minds with us wherever our brains go. In my view, however, that’s an incomplete concept of our minds and selves. As far as minds are like software, they do not run on brains alone, but on a broader suite of biological, technical, and social constituents. Our particular minds and selves are products of technology as much as they are producers of it. In fact, technologies are much more like tissues than they are like parts of the environment. I have explored this comparison elsewhere (Hubble, 2009), and will not elaborate much further on it here. But briefly, it should first be understood that technology includes not only those novelties the word popularly brings to mind, but also those ubiquitous, ancient and now-mundane materials of human life stretching back beyond memory from more recent mind-altering creations like steam engines, to the Lighthouse of Alexandria, to stone tools for making, controlling and feeding fires; from Calvin Klein to furs; from concrete to adobe; from Gutenberg to papyrus and clay; from the daguerreotype to the paintings at Chauvet. Considered broadly, technologies are like tissues in 2 that they are living investments. They are adaptive assets, metabolic capital, structures whose function is to contribute to human organisms’ homeostasis and reproduction. Life without technology is not an option for our species. As Barry Allen (2004) puts it, Strip [modern sapiens] of tools, artifacts, material culture, and the result is not a naked ape thrown back upon its animal nature. It is an ecologically nonviable entity rapidly heading for extinction. A sheltering fabric of artifacts is an existential presupposition of H. sapiens, as much as fresh water. (p. 207) Our extensive use of technologies is not just a side effect of an otherwise technology-free process of getting smarter. As Clark and Chalmers (1998) put it, It may be that the biological brain has in fact evolved and matured in ways which factor in the reliable presence of a manipulable external environment. It certainly seems that evolution has favoured onboard capacities which are especially geared to parasitizing the local environment so as to reduce memory load, and even to transform the nature of the computational problems themselves. (p. 11) Our present reliance on technology is but the deepest point we have yet reached in a channel that stretches back definitively through our ancestry. Predating our species, stone tools began a techno-biological arms race in which our species ultimately prevailed. In the course of hominin evolution, the brains that survived were ones well suited to such dynamic technological coupling. Our relatively static genome, rather than coding adaptations to the myriad vicissitudes of social and ecological environments, sows the seeds of a rich and flexible neural architecture that can plug into the whole memetically inherited cultural package, social and technical. In short, our brains have evolved in a technological body. That suggests our minds are technological, and that we ourselves are technological. We are partly what we make. We are Homo technologicus sapiens. As I see it, two concerns motivate this comparison of technology with tissue and ultimately understanding technologies as constitutive of human minds and selves. One is the age-old question of how apparently law-abiding material stuff 3 can be so arranged as to have a rich mental life that feels like it intervenes in otherwise deterministic causal chains. I will not be providing a complete answer to that question, but I do think that answering the question of what material stuff is arranged into rich mental lives will make the remaining problem less confusing than it has seemed. Technology, considered as tissue, helps begin to explain the features of our minds and our selves better than do brain-centric conceptions of minds. However, the ultimate motivation for the internalization of technology into our concepts of self is a larger ethical concern, to which I shall return in the final chapter. The concern arises from the observation that Western culture attempts to live out a confusing and damaging paradox.