Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

and making decisions based on it. This would seem to maintain personal responsibility and justify the way all of us regard ourselves as some kind of thinking beings.

The opposing view to dualism is called ‘physicalism’. This is the view that mental events can be completely explained in terms of physical ones, usually events in the brain. Physicalism is a kind of ‘monism’, which is the view that there is just one substance to the universe — in this case, of course, the physical. However, physicalism usually includes what might be termed the ‘normal’ parameters of physics, such as space and time, fields and forces along with matter itself. If physicalism is true then two physically identical people would also be identical in all other respects and thus, identical in terms of their thoughts, feelings and emotions. But ‘cognitative externalism’ suggests environment also plays a role in identity — so two otherwise identical people would be different because of their environments. This takes us back to the comparisons of things and somethings in Chapter 2. We could ask, what is it about a creature that makes it a ‘someone’ rather than a ‘something’? In other words, what difference does consciousness make? Two things come to mind. Someones have a body rather than just being a body. And someones have agency — or at least the illusion of agency. We can act on the world. So, for someones, two new types of relation are added — relations that mere somethings do not have. We own our bodies, whilst somethings just are bodies. We act on the world, whilst somethings are just acted upon. We could say that the definition of a

102