Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

science seems to think that adding complexity results in things like life and consciousness happening by default — there is no emergence as such, just greater and greater complexity. This is a peculiar view that we will be returning to in subsequent chapters.

From the discussion on ‘things’ and ‘somethings’ in Chapter 2, we might say that there is no such thing as ‘matter by itself’, or what we might just call a particle by itself. There is always substance plus ‘way of being in the world’. The Aristotelian soul is kind of an extension of this context, to include ‘someones’ in the definition, that is, creatures with agency, as well as just things and somthings.

Returning also to our discussions from Chapter 2 about finding an ultimate substrate to existence, it might be said that a property of the soul is to act as a substrate that grounds substance into literal being. In other words, that the soul is the substrate on which body and mind depend. But does soul also ‘supervene’ on body and mind? In other words, does the soul rely on the structure of our embodied selves in order to function — or to exist at all? Perhaps the best way of looking at this is to say that we need to take all three aspects of soul together — body, mind and way of being in the world — and treat them as one — not trying to isolate any of them as a separate ‘object’.

Such a way of looking at things at least allows a substrate that is not, in any sense, supernatural. But the reliance on context is probably not one that physicalists are likely to welcome. Having the Aristotelian soul as a substrate is, of course,

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