Eric T. Olson

Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split‐personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split‐personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals.

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