Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

something is: Body plus way of being in the word (relation). And the definition of a someone is: My body, my agency plus my way of being in the world. This idea is more fully developed in Chapter 11 and seems to be in line with the concept of externalism, cited above.

Today, science seems to suggest that if we make something complex enough then it achieves life and consciousness by default. There is no need for some added ingredient. But, just as it was relationship that played the crucial role in distinguishing things and somethings, could we not also deploy relationship in distinguishing someones? The relations involved for things are just a given — an immediately obvious fact about the way the world is. But could not the same thing be said for those relations we added for someones? Are we not immediately conscious of owning our bodies, and having agency in the world? In fact, isn’t this more obvious to us than the way the world outside of us is structured?

So there is an equally compelling narrative for the wholeness and relatedness of reality, in the sense of building relationships with other people, nature, places and things. As instanced above, there is cognitive externalism as well as ‘extended mind’ theories, and the ‘spread mind’ theory of consciousness from Riccardo Manzotti (The Spread Mind and Consciousness and Object. An excellent review is given by Tim Parks in his Out of My Head.) It’s worth noting ‘dasein’ — German for existence, or ‘being there’ — the idea that being in the world is characterised by affective relationships with surrounding people and objects. This idea, as

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