The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 52, Spindel Supplement

2014

REFLECTIONS ON PERSIMALS
Marya Schechtman
ABSTRACT: Steven Luper offers richly-textured arguments against the Embodied Part
View developed by Jeff McMahan and offered as an answer to the too many
thinkers problem. One of the major objections he raises is connected to McMahans
claim that the mind, and so the person, is to be identified with the part of the brain in
which consciousness is directly realized. This view has the implausible consequence,
Luper argues, that persons do not and cannot think or reason or have desires or
interests. While this is indeed a worrisome consequence, it is not clear that McMahan
is committed to the understanding of what constitutes the part of the brain in which
consciousness is directly realized that Luper attributes to him. Making reference to
McMahans Theory of Time-Relative Interests, I develop an alternate way of reading
this phrase, one which avoids the difficulties Luper raises. I acknowledge that my
understanding yields a view that, while formally consistent, is unattractive in a variety
of ways. I suggest, however, that this should not be taken as a reason to favor
animalism, since animalism has its own difficulties, which are not entirely unlike those
faced by the Embodied Part View.

Steven Luper offers richly-textured arguments against the Embodied Part

View, developed by Jeff McMahan, and offered as an answer to the too
many thinkers problem. On the strength of these arguments, together with
some considerations aimed at defusing the intuitions that fuel mentalism,
Luper urges the modest conclusion that animalism can hold its own against
the mentalist approach. In this response, I will keep to the similarly modest
aim of showing that mentalism can also hold its own against animalism. The
bulk of my comment will be aimed at offering answers to some of Lupers
arguments on behalf of the Embodied Part View. While I think these answers
are formally viable, I also think they leave us with a view that is not terribly
Marya Schechtman is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and
associated with the Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience there. She is the author of The
Constitution of Selves and numerous essays on personal identity and related topics. Her new book,
Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life, is forthcoming in spring of
2014.
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 52, Spindel Supplement (2014), 163170.
ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12070

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appealing in ways I will describe. I do not take these concerns to give us much
reason to embrace animalism, however, because I think animalism has problems of its own which are not dissimilar to the problems of the Embodied Part
View. I will give a very brief, and admittedly underdeveloped, description of
those problems at the very end.
Luper offers two major kinds of objection to the Embodied Part View. The
first follows from his assumption that if possessing property F is what constitutes being of fundamental kind K, then nothing that possesses F can exist
without it . . . (141) (once an F, always an F).1 If the capacity for consciousness makes me the fundamental kind of thing I am, then this capacity is
essential to anything that possesses it, and so it cannot be a contingent feature
of an organism. This in turn seems to imply that either an organism has the
capacity to think essentially, or it is inherently unable to think, and either of
these alternatives will be problematic for mindism (the view that personhood,
or persimalhood, consists in being a mind). This is an important and powerful
argument, and although I believe it can be addressed, my focus in what
follows will be on the second main objection (or family of objections) aimed
specifically at McMahans Embodied Mind Account which, as Luper reads it,
identifies the mind, and so the person and persimal,2 with the part of the brain
in which consciousness is directly realized, what Luper calls the Con.
Identifying the persimal with the Con, Luper argues, yields many strange
implications; for instance, that a person may turn out to do little or no
thinking and to have no interests, desires, or drives. These implications are
deeply unpalatable, and they do seem to follow if the person is identified with
the CON as Luper understands it. I am not entirely certain, however, that
McMahan does (or at least that he must) make this identification. Some things
he says do invite such a reading, but he also says much to suggest an
alternative. My strategy here will be to develop that alternative and to show
how it avoids Lupers objections.
To do this it will be useful first to take a few steps back and look at the
development of the Embodied Mind Account. Much of this development
occurs in the course of McMahans criticism of traditional psychological
continuity theories. In this context the focus is not so much on what a person
is but on the (obviously related) question of what is required for the continuation of a single person over time. McMahan takes it as a methodological
principle that an account of personal identity should, so far as possible, make

Unless otherwise noted, page numbers will refer to Luper 2014.

Since for McMahan the persimal is a person (understood as a mind), I will use the terms
person and persimal interchangeably in discussing McMahans view.
2

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the limits of the person coincide with the rational limits of egoistic
concern, and he argues that psychological continuity theories fail to meet this
requirement.
To show this he uses two kinds of casesone to demonstrate that psychological continuity is not necessary for rational egoistic concern and one to
demonstrate that it is not sufficient. An example of the former is the dementia
case to which Luper alludes toward the end of his paper. Someone at the early
stages of dementia has reason to care about the wellbeing of her future,
demented self, McMahan says, even though she will not bear complex psychological connections to that person (2002, 55). An example of the latter
kind of case is teletransportation of the sort Parfit describes, in which an
organism is destroyed and a molecule-for-molecule replica with qualitatively
identical psychology is created out of new material. Intuitively, McMahan
says, someone would have no more grounds for egoistic concern about the
wellbeing of a teletransported replica than about anyone else (2002, 57).
On the basis of these kinds of cases McMahan concludes that for a person
to continue, what is required is that her capacity for conscious experience
continue, and while this does not require higher-level psychological connections (as the dementia case shows), it does require that the brain in which
consciousness is realized continuesand continues to be capable of realizing
conscious experience (as teletransportation shows). He then adds the qualification that is crucial to Lupers objections: What is important is the continuation of the same consciousness. But not all parts of the brain are involved
in the generation of consciousness. The areas of the brain whose survival and
functional integrity are important are those areas, whichever they may be, in
which consciousness is directly realized (McMahan 2002, 67).3
My alternative reading of McMahan is based on a different understanding
of what it is for a part of the brain to be an area in which consciousness is
directly realized than Luper offers. To explain and motivate this alternative
I need one more piece of McMahans view, his Theory of Time-Relative
Interests (TRI). While McMahan holds that continuation of the capacity for
bare sentience is both necessary and sufficient for the continuation of the
mind (and hence of the person), he also acknowledges that the mental life of
most mature persons does not take the form of bare sentience but involves a
great deal more, including the various forms of psychological connection and
continuity that are said to determine identity according to the psychological
continuity theory. Although we have some reason for egoistic concern for the
future whenever there is continuation of consciousness, he says, the basis for

Interestingly, McMahan offers this as a parenthetical comment.

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this concern is both greater and deeper when these complex continuities are
present. A creature with no kinds of psychological continuity would have very
little reason to be egoistically concerned about its future, and the moral
difference between that creatures surviving and its being replaced by a
similarly contented creature would be minimal. By contrast, the psychological unity within the lives of persons such as ourselves gives our lives as wholes
a moral and prudential significance that the mere sum of our experience lacks
. . . (McMahan 2002, 76).
The significance of TRI for present purposes is that it suggests there are
different kinds of minds with different kinds of internal structure. Although all
minds have in common that they include the capacity for consciousness, and
although any mind can continue so long as that capacity is preserved, not all
minds are constituted throughout their careers only by bare consciousness.
The claim is not merely that psychological capacities can change over time,
but that the development (and possible loss) of the kind of complexity found
in typical adult human minds is not best understood as a situation in which a
static entity (a mind or consciousness) gains and loses capacities, but rather as
a situation in which the entity itself changes and becomes more or less
complex.
A rough analogy may help convey what I mean by this. Think of a piece
of music performed by an orchestra. It may begin with a very simple theme
played, say, on the flute. As the piece progresses, this theme may get developed and transformed, returning in various more complicated forms played
by different instruments or groups of instruments. These variations need
contain no note-for-note repetition of the opening notes of the flute. In the
end the piece may resolve back into the simple theme played by solo flute.
The transformation of the theme into a more complex, multi-instrument
variation in the middle is not accomplished by the mere addition of notes to a
persisting and unchanging tune, but by its transformation. We can read TRI as
implying that in a similar fashion when complex psychological capacities
come on line, they are not simply added to a continuing simple consciousness,
but, rather, they transform it into a different kind of consciousness.
There is, admittedly, only so far this analogy can gobrains and psychological lives differ from orchestras and music in many important ways. It can,
however, help us to see an alternative to Lupers reading of McMahans
understanding of what constitutes the part of the brain in which consciousness is directly realized. On this alternative, consciousness can differ in its
structure and make-up at different times in a persons life and may therefore
be realized by different parts of the brain at different times. The part of the
brain in which consciousness is directly realized includes all of the regions
involved in generating conscious experience and not just the part that is active

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whenever there is any conscious experience at all (if there is such a part). In
the typical adult brain there will be many different regions of the brain
involved in realizing consciousness, and the mind comprises all of these.
There remains, however, a question about just how much of this expansive
mind must continue to function for it to continue to exist, and this is where
emphasis on minimal consciousness comes in. McMahans view differs from
narrow versions of the psychological continuity theory (which hold that the
continuation of the person requires the same brain to continue to support
psychological connectedness and/or continuity) in allowing that not all of the
parts of the brain that are involved in realizing adult consciousness need to
continue for the person to continue. If the parts of the brain in which
complex, adult consciousness is realized are damaged or cease to function but
enough of the functional brain to support minimal consciousness remains, the
person continues to exist.
There are thus two different senses in which some part of the brain might
be unnecessary for generating consciousness. There are presumably some
brain structures which always act in a supportive role and are never directly
involved in generating conscious experience. (As an example here McMahan
singles out the reticular formation, which he says apparently contributes
nothing to the contents of consciousness . . . [McMahan 2002, 85].) Then
there are other structures directly involved in realizing consciousness when
they are functioning, but without which it is nevertheless possible to have
some minimal form of consciousness. My suggestion is that it is only when a
part of the brain is unnecessary to consciousness in the first sense that it fails,
in the relevant way, to be a part of the brain in which consciousness is
directly realized and so to be a part of the mind. The Mid is unnecessary
only in the second sense, and so on this reading it is, when it exists, internal
to the mind and so to the person (or persimal). The fact that the mind can
survive its loss does not mean that it is not truly a part of the mind any more
than the fact that a human organism can survive the loss of its left kidney
means that the kidney is not truly part of the organism. Whether or not this
is the reading McMahan intends, it is at least consistent with his general
approach and seems to avoid the bulk of the difficulties that follow from the
assumption that the mind is always the Con and nothing more. On this view
a persimal can do all of the thinking and have all of the interests, drives, and
desires that we usually associate with such beings, but it need not have all of
this to be the thing it is.
Luper does consider the possibility that a defender of the Embodied Part
View might try to avoid his objections by expanding McMahns notion of
what a mind is to include other capacities in addition to consciousness. He
argues, however, that this gambit will not work. The problem he sees arises

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in cases like dementia where complex capacities are lost, leaving behind
a minimally conscious being. If this minimally conscious being is not
simply the organism (and the mindist has reason to deny that it is), we are
left with the ontologically-profligate conclusion that there are now three
entities, the organism, the psychologically-complex persimal, and the
nearly-person, who remains after higher psychological functioning is lost.
I hope it will be clear that the reading I have offered does not require us to
draw this conclusion. According to the proposed solution Luper entertains,
the mind is necessarily the conjunction of the Con and whatever other parts
are specified, and so it cannot survive the loss of any of these parts. Since
the view I have described explicitly denies that all of the parts of the brain
that make up the mind at some particular time must continue to be present
and functioning for the mind to continue, it does not run into these
difficulties.
To this extent, then, I think that by employing the alternative reading of
McMahans Embodied Mind View I have described, it is possible to avoid the
difficulties Luper raisesat least those related to identifying the persimal with
the Con. This strategy is not without its costs, however. On the picture I have
painted the mind is a strange kind of object and a strange kind of part. If we
think vaguely of the brain, or some circumscribed region of the brain, as a
kind of material soula tidy unified enclosure within which all functions
related to thought, consciousness, and psychology are containedit sounds
fairly plausible to think of that region as the mind and also as a part of the
organism. But on the alternative reading I have described the mind is not
likely to be a discrete and well-defined region of the brain at all. Instead it is
going to involve a variety of subsystems which may or may not be definitely
located and/or contiguous.
On this view the mind sounds more like a collection of integrated subsystems that play a key role in the overall functioning of an organism than like
an entity, and it is a part of the organism not in the relatively straightforward way in which an organ is, but rather in something like the way the
digestive and circulatory systems are parts of the organism. If the mind is a set
of functions carried out or generated by various regions of the brain (and
possibly beyond), the claim that beings like us are most fundamentally minds
loses a great deal of its original intuitive pull. I do not think that these
observations are decisive against an approach that combines the Embodied
Part View with the Embodied Mind Account, but once we start trying to cash
out the mind in biological terms, the suggestion that the relevant entity is the
organism as a whole and that mind is just a name for one of the many sets
of capabilities typically possessed by such entities begins to sound more
appealing.

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We should not be too quick, however, to take these observations as providing reasons to endorse animalism. Mentalism does indeed have problems,
and it undoubtedly has problems that animalism does not. Animalism has
problems of its own, however, and it may ultimately provide no more graceful
of an answer to the question of what persimals most fundamentally are than
does mentalism. To say that we are organisms sounds eminently reasonable
so long as we stay at the level of everyday speech and common understanding
(but then saying we are minds also sounds pretty good at this level). The task
we have set ourselves, however, is not just to say something plausible about
ourselves but to provide a metaphysics of persimals. This requires, among
other things, that we be able to answer the question about what is required for
the continued existence of a single persimalthe question that McMahan
addresses with the Embodied Mind Account.
According to animalism a single persimal continues so long as a single
organism continues. This tells us very little, however, unless we know what an
organism is and what is required for one to persist. We know that an organism
persists as long as its life continues, but if this is to have content, we need to
know what it is for a life to continue. This is not obvious. Luper, for instance,
does not think that a living organism can be pared down to a brain but notes
that van Inwagen does. Neither alternative is very satisfying. Saying that an
organism can continue as just a brain may be a defensible position, but it is
implausible in very much the same way that my reading of McMahans view
is. If we say that an organism cannot continue as a brain, however, we still
need a principled way of saying just what an organism can be pared down to
before it is no longer an organism and so ceases to exist, and it is hard to see
how we will find such a principle.
Crucially, it will not be forthcoming from the biological sciences. Biology
may illuminate how the various systems that make up a living thing work
together to support one another and what happens when one or more is
compromised, but it cannot tell us which, preserved on its own, should be
counted as a continued life or as an organism for the purposes of answering the
kinds of ontological questions at issue here. Metaphysicians will need to
provide answers in the difficult and marginal cases, and they are not likely to
do so in a way that is intuitively appealing. To provide the kind of precision
and unity, metaphysical inquiries into the nature and identity of persimals
demand that we will have to move very far from commonsense, and importantly, from what is natural to either psychology or biology, and this will be
so whether we are mentalists or animalists. There are different conclusions
that one can draw from this fact, but we should not overlook the possibility
that the metaphysical framework which has become standard for thinking
about questions of our identity may not be the one best suited to our nature.

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REFERENCES
Luper, Steven. 2014. Persimals. Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Supplement 52:
14062.
McMahan, Jeff. 2002. The ethics of killing: Problems at the margins of life, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.