Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

idea may be countered by the thought that 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 ideas 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 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 9.

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,

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