Eric T. Olson

This chapter is about the view that we are material things constituted by organisms; this view is advocated by Baker, Shoemaker, and others. Each of us is made of the same matter as an organism, but our persistence conditions or essential properties preclude our being organisms ourselves. This goes together with the general view that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once: constitutionalism. Constitutionalism is supported by arguments involving the persistence of artifacts. It is argued, however, that the view faces the thinking‐animal problem, that it rules out any principled account of when one thing constitutes another, that it cannot explain why our boundaries lie where they do, and that it conflicts with a popular claim about synchronic identity.

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

ABSTRACTMany philosophers say that the nature of personal identity has to do with narratives: the stories we tell about ourselves. While different narrativists address different questions of personal identity, some propose narrativist accounts of personal identity over time. The paper argues that such accounts have troubling consequences about the beginning and end of our lives, lead to inconsistencies, and involve backwards causation. The problems can be solved, but only by modifying the accounts in ways that deprive them of their appeal.

Constitutionalism says that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once. Critics claim that we should expect such objects to be qualitatively indistinguishable. E.J. Lowe thinks this complaint is based on the false assumption that differences in the way things are at a time must always be grounded in how things are at that time, and that we can answer it by pointing out that different kinds of coinciding objects are subject to different composition principles. I argue that he is mistaken on both counts.

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career. has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus---contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity.

Beginning with Locke, most philosophers writing on personal identity have claimed that some sort of psychological continuity is necessary for a person to persist from one time to another. I argue that this "psychological approach" to personal identity faces ontological difficulties that many of its proponents have not appreciated. In its place I advocate a "biological approach" to personal identity: you and I are human organisms, and our persistence, like that of other organisms, consists in narrowly biological facts alone. ;Since its biological functions are distinct from its psychology, a human organism can survive without psychological continuity. Thus the psychological approach apparently entails that you and I are not human organisms. But what are we, if not organisms? And how are we related to "our" human organisms? I consider a number of possible answers: perhaps we are not material objects at all; perhaps each of us is a material object coincident with though numerically distinct from a human organism; perhaps identity is not "absolute" but "relative," and a human organism may be different persons at different times; perhaps you and I do not really exist; perhaps we are temporally extended, "four-dimensional" objects and typically share most of our temporal parts with a human organism. The last option is the most popular, and rightly so. However, I argue that it faces technical problems and that it is wildly at odds with our ordinary beliefs about ourselves. ;After considering a wide range of arguments for the psychological approach, I conclude that most are grounded in confusion and have no force whatever. The best arguments appeal to our intuitive convictions about whether we would survive in various science-fiction stories in which the psychological and biological approaches diverge . Without dismissing these intuitions, I argue that they do not unequivocally support the psychological approach

This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers. I ask what sort of things these computer-generated organisms are supposed to be. I consider four possible answers to this question: The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and they are denizens of an entire artificial world, different from our own, that the programmer creates. I argue that could not be right, that collapses into, and that would make strong alife either absurd or uninteresting. Thus, "virtual" strong alife amounts to the claim that, by programming a computer, one can literally bring bits of its hardware to life

The extended-mind thesis says that mental states can extend beyond one’s skin. Clark and Chalmers infer from this that the subjects of such states also extend beyond their skin: the extended-self thesis. The paper asks what exactly the extended-self thesis says, whether it really does follow from the extended-mind thesis, and what it would mean if it were true. It concludes that the extended-self thesis is unattractive, and does not follow from the extended mind unless thinking beings are literally bundles of mental states

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs.

The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage.

That grass is green, that pigs don’t fly, and that you are now awake are all hard facts. But there is often said to be something soft about matters of identity over time. Is today’s village church the very church that was first built here, despite centuries of repairs and alterations? How many parts of my bicycle do I need to replace before I get a numerically different bike? If a club disbands and years later some of the original members start a similar club with the same name, have we got two clubs, or one club with a discontinuous history? It is tempting to say that there are no hard answers to these questions laid up in heaven. There is no determinate fact of the matter. Those who disagree about such things are arguing about words, not facts. We are free to say what we like.