From the ALWS archives: A selection of papers from the International Wittgenstein Symposia in Kirchberg am Wechsel

3.1 O’Connor’s endurantism:

Although according to Ockham’s razor trope ontologies are ‘elegant and simple’ in the sense of getting along with only one kind of entity, O’Connor’s et al.’s construal of human persons appears to be rather complicated: Apart from “maintenance tropes” which are the building blocks of reality in general, temporary emergent tropes guarantee for the existence of our mental life. It seems, however, that this is not enough for accounting for a person’s particularity and unity. O third kind of tropes is needed, namely holistic tropes providing endurance for the trope-complex consisting of physical and mental properties. We can concede to emergentists that the mental-physical divide accounts for the scientific and the manifest image of ourselves and the divide must be accepted with natural piety. The introduction of holistic tropes as realisers of endurance, however, is a postulation which implies a stronger claim than O’Connor’s et al.’s recent account can provide.

The problem of personal identity can be framed as follows: Why are A today (A₁) and A yesterday (A₂) the same person? Basically two answers can be given to this question. According to the simple view A₁ and A₂ is the same person because the notion of ‘diachronic identity’ is primitive and basic. For this reason we cannot explain diachronic identity but we need this notion to explain other things. According to the ‘complex view’ connections of some kind (‘space-time-continuity’, ‘causal relation’ etc.) between A₁ and A₂ account for a person’s identity through time. In this case the identity of A is constructed out of a continuous series of ‘time slices’, A_1, A₂ etc. which perdures through time (see Quante 2002, 29-31).

O’Connor et al. are committed to the endurance theory. While TO prima facie is neutral to the endurance-perdurance debate, we think that – especially when connected with OE – TO must commit to the complex view and therefore to a perdurance theory. Otherwise TO is just a version of substance ontology in a new clothing with implausible premises.

For TO A₁ is a bundle of different tropes, say {T_p, T₁, T₂ … T_n}, while T_p is the thisness-trope (which has a family resemblance to the nuclear trope-bundle in Simon’s TO). If one wants to commit to both, TO and the simple view, she must content that a trope is a three-dimensional entity, like an Aristotelian substance. The concept of TO does allow for this. But difficulties arise when we want to combine all three theses: TO, OE and the simple view.

O’Connor et al. suggest that an emergent trope is caused to exist by lower-levelled tropes. Assuming that the person A₁ is the bundle B₁ (={T_p, T_e, T₁, T₂, T₃ … T_n}), while T_e is a bundle of emergent mind-tropes which are caused to exist by T_p, T₁, T₂ and T₃. Two different kinds of endurance can be imagined: First, T_e is itself capable for endurance, so the diachronic identity of A is not based on the diachronic identity of T_p, but on the diachronic identity of T_e. alone O’Connor et al. will scrap this version of OE for its dualistic character.

According to the second version, T_e is not enough to guarantee the diachronic identity of A₁, so the diachronic identity of A is based upon the diachronic identity of T_p. This concept has some interesting consequences. The thisness-trope T_p is serving as the base for the “thinginess” and for diachronic identity of the bundles B₁ and B₂. When we assume, that T_p is a basic and non-emergent trope², T_p is really the Aristotelian kind, to which B₁ and B₂ belong to. This concept comes very close to the Aristotelian Kind-essentialism, which O’Connor et al. reject. So T_p cannot be a basic, non-emergent trope.

Let us assume that T_p is itself an emergent trope, caused to exist by the tropes, say, T₄ and T₅, both of them truly basic tropes. The same problem, which we encounter while treating the relation between T_e and T_p, arises again. We will get a substance dualism, if T_p can exist independently. So we conclude that T_p in order to be the same trope over time must depend on T₄ and T₅.

By doing so, we have successfully reduced diachronic identity of T_p to the diachronic identity of T₄ and T₅. If we admit that the diachronic identities of T₄ and T₅ are not simple, but consist in some causal relation, this version of diachronic identity will be a complex, but not a simple one. If we assume that the diachronic identities of T₄ and T₅ are simple, we will still have the problem that the ontological constitution of T_e is not non-structural in the sense of O’Connor et al., but it consists, at least partly, in T₄ and T₅. This contradicts with the version of OE as proposed by O’Connor et al. Thus, it seems that it remains an unsolved problem how diachronic identity shall be provided by TO.

3.2 O’Connor’s understanding of living beings

As already mentioned before, the status of thisness-tropes is rather unclear. It seems that only emergent individuals have one. The only emergent individuals O’Connor et al. are explicitly committed are human persons:

“Biological life, so poorly understood in the early twentieth century, was the favorite target of earlier emergentists. Now, of course, the epistemic situation is dramatically different. With the chemical basis of life being further charted with each passing year, there is no positive reason for us to suppose that emergent factors are essentially involved” (O'Connor & Wong 2005, 674).

Such a view of emergence taken together with the ontological position that complex objects lacking emergent features (which according to O’Connor et al. living beings most likely do) are “no more objectively there than an arbitrary scattered object that one might choose to name” (O’Connor / Jacobs 2003, 550) leads to the conclusion that the only composite beings in a robust sense are human beings. Systems lacking emergent features, “however much they may appear to be unified to the uneducated eye, are individual objects only by a courtesy born of practical concerns.” (O’Connor / Jacobs 2003, 547)

In this concept the only real composite entities in a world of loose mereological sums of particulars would be human persons. Such a view would exceed van Inwagen’s argument that the only existing material beings are either living organisms or simples, because according to O’Connor et al. ultimately only human beings and simples exist. Apart from the fact that such a view has an extreme revisionary character it seems to contradict to biological facts as well. There are good reasons to distinguish between living beings and “arbitrary scattered objects”. In terms of their inner structure and composition even though actions and reactions of living beings might to a large extend be understood as results of given microscopic processes and external conditions. O’Connor et al. show sympathy for such a disintegrating view of those living beings without emergent features, This could be the result of an overestimation of the explanatory force of reductionism plus a misconception of living being’s metabolism and boundaries. O’Connor et al. are not explicit of whether processes are part of their trope ontology but certain formulations suggest they have processes in mind when talking about interactions among tropes. If living beings are just bundles of tropes interacting on a micro-level and thereby “producing” for the uneducated eye the illusion of substantial unities, so O’Connor’s et al.’s view comes very close to Zimmermann’s equation of living beings with processes like tornades and waves: “(…) upon careful thought, the similarities between the activity of certain self-perpetuating events like tornados and hurricanes, on the one hand, and the ‘homeodynamic’ processes involved in biological life, on the other, might make us reconsider a facile dismissal of this (…) suggestions.” (Zimmermann 1995, 91)

In this case living organisms are understood as mere processes. Even if it might be right to see an analogy in the persistence of a tornado and in the persistence of an organism since in both cases the persistence is based on a constant exchange of particles, the entity which persists is in each case a different one: The form of a tornado is merely the sum of all micro-particles constituting it. Due to the sum of these micro-particles and their interactions the tornado might appear as a persisting object with determinate boundaries. The boundaries of a tornado, however, are nothing else than the boundaries of the sum of the tornado’s micro-particles. In the case of living beings, instead, metabolism and metabolic transfer take place through an already existing boundary of the organism’s body. A distinction between an organism’s body and metabolic processes has to be hold up for an adequate understanding of this facet of reality. We do not want to dwell longer at this point but it seems to be indispensable to interpret living beings as ontologically different from mere compounds of micro-particles.

For O’Connor et al. it might be quite difficult to bring “biological unities” back into the picture once the decision was made that the world’s main ontological category are simples. Then one has the task to bring biological organisms and human beings back to the fore. If one, as O’Connor et al. are, is reluctant to postulate a variety of emergent levels, then the “dual” solution of simples and emergent human individuals seems to be the only viable way. Dualism within human beings might be avoided by this approach but another form of dualism lurks: A dualism between human beings and the rest of the world. As true individuals we are desperately alone among an indefinable sea of particles. All the other things we assume there are with our common sense are just pragmatic posits out from these masses of simples because of contingent human interests and purposes.