 Hello my friends and welcome to the 89th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, another fun conversation for you this week talking about metaphysics. We're talking about one area of metaphysics in particular called myriology. Myriology is just the study of parts and whole. So the question is, what is the relationship between a whole object and the parts which compose a whole object? Are there such things as whole objects in the first place? Or really are there only simple substances that don't really have any parts to them? This is another one of those areas that sounds really esoteric and useless, but actually it gets to the heart of a bunch of different issues in metaphysics. Even gets into philosophy of mind, right off the get-go in this conversation we talk a bit about the philosophy of mathematics and geometry because some of the concepts are related. So it's a really fun conversation and one that I wish more people would have. I guess this week is Dr. Andrew Brenner who's a postdoc researcher doing work in metaphysics at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Before we dive into it, if you guys are interested in economics and the methodology of economics, I've got an article coming out next week called the abuse of apriorism in economics that you guys might enjoy. I'm actually an apriorist myself. I think apriorism has an appropriate place in economics, but I also think there are some schools of extreme apriorism which actually kind of abuse the methodology. It's something I've been wanting to write for years. This is actually the topic that got me interested in philosophy was exploring the fundamentals of economics. And so if that's something that you're also interested in, I think you'll enjoy that piece. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Andrew Brenner. All right, Dr. Andrew Brenner, thanks very much for coming on Patterson in Pursuit. I appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. Thanks. I got some abstract questions for you today that too few people talk about. I want to talk to you about composition and basic objects, which sometimes called myriology. And in thinking about some of these topics, I think they're fundamental. They really get at the heart of what types of things exist in the world. Our common sense ideas about how we think what the world is composed of immediately get challenged by basic questions and myriology. I'll give you one example. So I have in front of me a humble red pin and everybody is going to say, okay, yes, there's definitely a pin here in front of me. Everybody knows you can see it. Here is an object. And it seems also true to say, well, this object has parts. It's got kind of the metal part in the middle. It's got the ink part also. It's got this little plastic cap. Okay. We've got parts of the pen and we've got the pen. But the question is, do the parts of the pen exist in addition to the whole pen? Are we talking about multiple things? Is there something over and above the composite parts, the little units of matter and little smaller features? Is that something that is out there and then there's something on top of it, which is the pen all together as one thing? Yeah. Yeah. So one way of characterizing this question is, are there any composite objects, objects with parts, or are there just little partless things? So for example, if you have n, call a partless thing a simple. It's just something without parts. It's like the basic building blocks of matter, for example, if there are any. Right. So if you have n symbols allegedly composing the pen, then you have at least n plus one objects if they compose a pen, right? You have the n symbols and then the pen, right? So the question you're asking is, maybe how many objects do you have right there? The n object, just the symbols? Do you have n plus one or n plus, more than that, objects, the symbols plus the pen? Right. So an immediate other question that comes up is, if we say that there's n plus one, if we say that there's parts and there is also the pen, the question is, OK, well, where is the pen? Like the parts take up space, the units of matter take up space. Does the pen take up additional space? Does it take up no space? Where does it fit? Where could it fit? I mean, I guess it's just located where it's parts are located, right? So it doesn't have a point-sized location, it has an extended location. That's not that bad, right? Well, so each individual part would take up space, but the? Maybe, maybe not, OK. Could there be a part of a pen that doesn't take up space? Yeah, if it's point-sized. So then it has a location, but it's not extended. What does that mean to say something that would have location without extension? It doesn't have a length. So maybe it has zero length, you could say. So how could there be a zero-length thing within a thing that has length? Oh, yeah. So that is a good question. Now, so a lot of these questions were first, as far as I know, addressed by Indian philosophers, like a million years ago, like 1700 years ago, something like that. And Buddhist philosophers say in the view that there weren't any composite objects. They're just little parts, which they call them, sometimes they call dharmas. These little basic building blocks of reality, there weren't composite objects in addition to the basic building blocks of reality. And this is one of the questions, is one of the arguments, at least some Buddhist philosophers would give, if you had extended composite objects, like pens, well, the dharma is the basic building blocks of reality. They're not extended in space. So they don't take up, they have location, but they don't have extension. So they're point-sized. That's an assumption they make. We can question that assumption, right? But if it's true, then how could these point-sized objects that don't have any length or they don't have any length or height or depth or anything like that? How could they make up an object or how could they compose an object, like a pen, which does have length and height and depth? Yeah. I don't know much about that argument. I mean, if you have an infinite number of them, why not, right? If you have an infinite number of them. It sounds like if you're saying, if you have an infinite number of zeros, eventually you get a one. If you have an infinite number of things that take up exactly zero space, it seems like you couldn't get an object that takes up any space. I don't know. Maybe not. I mean, like if you have a line, the line seems to have length. And I mean, maybe that's exactly, maybe I'm just saying what I'm saying here is question-begging, right? You couldn't have a line in addition to the point. Right, right. Yeah, I think that lines are made up of parts that have space, that take up space. Oh, okay. Yeah, you could also say that. Maybe you would reject this assumption we're starting with that there are these base building blocks of reality that don't have any extension, even if they have location. I don't know what to say about all this. I mean, this seems like more of a question for geometry or mathematics. Right, certainly. It definitely gets right to the heart of the philosophy of mathematics in general. It's one of those questions that it kind of crosses over, right? Because it's something that's about pure geometry. It's about mathematics. It's also about reality in the world, you know? Yeah, well, but it's also one of these questions that seem to be paradoxical questions about the nature of space. Like the sort of question Zeno came up with in ancient Greece, right? These paradoxes, how many calories across the stadium? First he has to cross the first half. First he has to cross that and the first half of that for that. Right. You can never get started. So these questions like that are connected to the sort of question we're talking about right now. How can a pen have extension if it's made up of parts which aren't extended? Right. And I'm not very confident saying anything about any of that stuff. But it's totally right that this is one of the sort of challenge you just mentioned. Assuming if pens exist and they're made up of these point size extension-less basic constituents of reality matter, right? How could they make up a pen which has extension? That's exactly the sort of challenge Buddhist philosophers, at least some gave. And I don't know any names off the top of my head because it's sort of fun sources and I don't know enough about this subject. But I feel like the only reason we brought that up is because you were saying something about the pen and then I got a sidetrack. Yes. So one question was that if you have the zero-dimensional point, could it compose objects to take up space? But that was, yeah, that wasn't kind of an aside. That was about the more general question, which is, is the object something in existence in addition to the part? So as far as I can tell, there's only two answers. Yes or no. So why don't we kind of talk about both possibilities? So what does it mean to say the object is something that exists in addition to all of the parts which compose it? Yeah. So the way I characterized this question earlier is in terms of the number of objects we have, if you have any simple objects, objects without parts, and you're asking, do they compose a further object? You're asking are there n objects or are there at least n plus 1 objects in this particular region where you hold the pen? One little complication here is some people think there are composite objects like pens, but they're just identical with their parts. So if you have a composite object like a pen, you can still say there's only n objects there, even if it's composed of n parts because the pen is just identical with all of the parts. So this view is called composition as identity for obvious reasons. And I think a lot of people, when they first hear it, might think that sounds intuitive. I'm not sure. It's actually radically counterintuitive because they are saying one thing is identical with a bunch of things. Yeah. In fact, it seems like that's definitely not the case because this is one thing. This is a bunch of things. It seems like they're different. If A is identical with B, all of A's properties, B is going to have all those properties too. If Andrew, my name is Andrew Brenner, if Andrew is identical with Brenner, then if Andrew is five foot eight, Brenner is five foot eight. If Andrew is hungry, Brenner is hungry. Any properties Andrew has, Brenner has. So if the holes or the composite is identical with the parts, any properties the composite has is going to be properties that the parts have. But it seems like the composite has properties that the whole, sorry, the composite has properties that the parts don't have. The composite thing, the parts are many things. So leaving that complication aside for a second, let's assume that if there are composite objects, if there's a pen, then there's at least N plus one objects there. The N parts of the pen plus the pen. So I don't think there are any composite objects. If you have N simple objects and partless objects, then there's just N objects there. They never compose anything else. They never make a bigger thing. And this has some counterintuitive consequences too. It seems like all the big objects we interact with all the time are just not actually there. There aren't any tables. My laptop's on a table right now. There aren't any tables. There are just like little partless objects, little symbols, maybe. I mean, I'm not going to say what there is. That's a complicated question. Maybe there's just, maybe it's particles, maybe it's fields, maybe it's strings, maybe it's something else, whatever. I just don't think we have very good reason to think there are composite objects. Yeah, because that takes us from parts to this further object, the composite object composed of those parts. And that just seems gratuitous. So let me ask you a couple of things. So for the first point you made or the first example that you gave about the whole being identical to the parts, I'm really not sure that is a coherent concept for another reason. I begs the question, it's saying that there is such a thing as an object here and there is such a thing as the parts here and they're actually the same thing. It seems like it's making a distinction and then it's saying there's no distinction. It seems kind of logically contradictory. Am I missing something there? Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be contradictory in that way. So if I say Superman's here, Clark Kent is here. Oh, and Superman is this Clark Kent. There's nothing contradictory. Oh, so is the claim that it's that a composite object is another way of referencing individual units? It's just another name for individual units. Or maybe not the individual units, but all of those parts taken together. Well, that's the part that seems contradictory. So to say all of them taken together would be something definitely different than all of them individually or referencing them individually. So if you have part one, part two, part three, and you have a pen composed of all those parts, the pen isn't identical with part one. It's not identical with part two and it's not identical with part three. It's identical with part one and two and three taken together. So if you have an identity statement, A equals B, A is identical with B. In this case, you would say Y is identical with the X's. So you'd have an equal sign with a singular term on one side, a plural term on the other. One thing on one side, multiple things on the other. And that sounds weird, right? Well, but if you do that, I think isn't that necessarily saying that there's an additional object here? If you can reference something that is in that particular arrangement or that particular number of bits, and at some point you get to that threshold and now you have an object that you're talking about, it seems like that you're saying this is not identical to just the individual units. I mean, people who endorse this sort of view would just deny that. They'd say it's like Superman and Clark Kent. If you got Superman, you also got Clark Kent, but it's not an additional thing, right? It's just two names of the same thing. So that's what they say in this case. You got pen and you got parts, and pen refers to the same thing that parts do. Okay. Well, so let's go back to the other question here. And I agree with you that I don't think composite objects, I don't think composite physical objects exist. Maybe there are other types of composite objects, I'm not sure. But it does have a bunch of really counterintuitive conclusions. Like you said, there are no pens. I mean, there's one sense in which you can reference a pen if you're just talking about individual units in a particular location in space that aren't unified together. Okay, maybe we can talk about pens that way. But when we really analyze, oh man, there's no, you know, I've got a water bottle here, there's no water bottle, there's no pen, there's no microphone, there's no laptop. That seems very unpalatable. But if you get over maybe some of the intuitive distaste for that, there's other deeper questions that I find really hard to explain, which is something like, if this isn't an object, this pen here is not an object, and there's just units of whatever make it up, let's say units of space, then why is it the case that all seems to be kind of unified together? It behaves as if it's one thing. It doesn't just kind of fall apart. It's like there's relations, particular relations between the individual units which compose this object. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, so, so yeah, so just to be clear, when we say, you know, there's no pen, you don't mean they're hallucinating when you look down at your hand, what you're holding in your hand, like there's nothing there. There's stuff there, there are things there, it's just not a pen, it's a bunch of little things. They just don't compose a bigger thing. That's not a crazy thing to say, right? It's not like composite objects are, it's not like there's a conspiracy theory. It's just kind of our brain's work a certain way. They see a bunch of little things. They don't realize our brain, we can't visually distinguish all the little parts of the pen, right? Like subatomic particles or whatever. So our brain, you know, in order to help us get by and in order to help us interact with the world, our brain's like, well, that's one object of pen. And here's another object of table, right? So this is just a quirk in the way our brains work, right? And maybe of language too. Maybe of language, yeah, yeah. Now, why do the little parts hang together? Yeah, right? I mean, I don't know, as a physicist, right? Why do little parts hang together, right? They're like attractive forces, they're repulsive forces. Sometimes, you know, maybe you can say, why do the parts hang together? Because you glue them together. Because you put glue there, right? So you can give a simple explanation is that it's not like they need to make up this weird occult further object in order to... Well, maybe not though. So let's take the glue example. Why would it be that glue, which is just other parts, it's an individual unit that's not an object itself, why would that result in a unity of physical space-time units? So a more fundamental is if you're appealing to forces and maybe laws, where are the laws? Are the laws something in the system? Are the laws additional objects outside the system? Well, I mean, we get to questions about what are laws of nature and then we're like off the deep end, right? We're getting into like difficult territory. But I mean, the simple answer here is just maybe there are little bits of matter, subatomic particles, maybe something smaller or whatever. That's not my job. That's physicists will tell us what's there, right? And they behave a certain way. Sometimes they attract each other. Sometimes they repel each other. And sometimes the behavior of these little objects turns out they move together, right? Like a school of fish, right? You don't need to posit this school of fish. There's just a bunch of fish when they swim together, right? Or you don't need to flock of birds. It's just the birds. They just happen to be moving together right now. You could say the same thing about your pen. There's no pen. It's just a bunch of little things and they move together, right? Ask the physicists why they behave that way. There's no deep metaphysical puzzle here. There's just a question about fundamental physics. Why do little bits of matter behave as they do? Okay. I think it does get into some bigger metaphysical questions when you're talking about patterns in nature. Does the pattern something that exists in addition to the phenomena that's moving in the world? But it's a good segue to another question that's related to this. Are we talking only about physical things? Is this a universal claim that all there exists are symbols? Is that in every possible metaphysical realm? For example, if I'm talking about consciousness, is consciousness itself as simple when I observe my visual field, I got all these little bits, they seem to kind of be unified together into one experience. So what do you think about that? I mean, yeah, for me, it's a universal claim. I don't think that composition ever happens. I don't think little things ever compose bigger things. As to the question, are there just symbols? I'm a little more hesitant to say what there is, right? So I don't think we have any reason to think there are composite objects. And I think like Occam's razor simplicity considerations make us think there probably aren't any composite objects, just gratuitous hypothesis. But it doesn't follow that there have to be symbols, actually. You might have been talking that way for convenience sake. Maybe there's stuff, for example. So we have the English language has singular terms, like the dogs. Sorry, not singular terms. We have count nouns, right? Like I have four dogs and count dogs. And we have mass terms like water or stuff. You can't say I have four stuffs. You say like four pounds of stuff or something like that. So for all I know, maybe reality isn't made up of little things. It's simple. Maybe it's made up of stuff, like undifferentiated stuff. In that case, you wouldn't say there are symbols, right? Because there aren't things. There's stuff. I'm sorry, this is a little abstract. No, that's fine. My basic point is just I'm not going to make these bold claims about ultimately what does exist. I just want to focus on one. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. And maybe there are further options besides things and stuff. Some people think there's structure where structure isn't a thing and it's not stuff. I don't really understand what that view. I don't really know what that that's all about, but some people claim this is a coherent third option, right? People call it ontic structural realists, for example. I've never been able to make sense of that. But anyway, that's like a potential third option for what does exist. So, yeah. Another focus probably does exist. I want to pursue that line of inquiry. If there's just stuff, what's stuff? What that means to say there's undifferentiated stuff. And let me give you something I'm consciously experiencing and then I'd like to hear your analysis of it. So, if it were the case that all that existed were undifferentiated stuff, I have a hard time explaining the phenomenon in my visual field. Because if I just think about, let's say that these are objects or these are somethings, I've kind of got a window over there with some trees out there. There are green parts of my visual field and brown parts of my visual field and red parts of my visual field. Surely that is real differentiation in the world, right? Yeah, sorry. When I said undifferentiated, I just meant the stuff isn't broken into different things. The stuff may be green over here and red over there. So it's differentiated in that respect. But if you have the properties of over here and over there, isn't that some kind of real differentiation between them? Yeah, but not differentiation in the sense I was trying it. I was getting after, right? Differentiation in terms of there are individual things and one of them is red and one of them is green. Maybe there's green stuff and there's blue stuff. There aren't green things and blue things and red things. And this distinction comes up in our language, right? So we have count nouns like dog and glass. Sorry, glasses and figures. Dogs and phones, right? And then we have mass terms like water and stuff and air. So we're familiar to some extent with this distinction in everyday life, which is normally not brought to our attention. So yeah, there may be, for all I know, this undifferentiated stuff. I just mean there aren't individual things. There's still stuff. And different stuff has different properties. Like some stuff is red and some stuff is blue, right? So would it be some parts of the stuff is red and some are like some... I'm having a hard time with this. So let's just focus just on visual field. Could it be possible to say that there is only one thing there? It's just stuff. And that wouldn't be one thing. It's just stuff, right? I'm sorry. I feel like you might be getting off topic from composition, to be honest. I was just trying to explain earlier why I'm not confident. Oh yeah. I want to see what does exist, right? Because there's actually like options we normally don't even think about. Like maybe there aren't things. There's just stuff. But you're right. This is like a confusing subject because we're normally not used to thinking of the world that way, right? There are things. There's not stuff. Yeah. But just to clarify, to say there's just stuff, that doesn't mean there's one thing. There aren't any things, right? There's just stuff. In other words, if we were going to give an entirely perspicuous or accurate description of the world, we would just use mass terms like water and air. These are just examples of mass terms, right? But you can't count them. You can't say there's three airs, right? He says there's like five pounds of air or something like that or five meters, five square meters, whatever. So when I say the world might be made of stuff, I'm just saying maybe that's the way the world is. And again, maybe we're getting a little off topic. I think it's still about composition, though, because when you say is there stuff, is there things in the stuff? I mean, is there parts of the stuff? Can I carve up the stuff? It's still about, like, and if you can carve it up, are the parts existing in addition to the stuff or is there one blob of cookie dough and then you carve them off into individual cookies or did they exist in addition? Yeah, so there could be both things and stuff, I guess, right? And there could be things which compose, sorry, stuff which composes things, right? Maybe there's like a glob of stuff, but they compose a pen. I love it. It's possible. Sure. I'm just saying, how am I supposed to know, right? Again, that kind of seems like the sort of thing maybe physics will figure that out one day. I hope other people appreciate that there, this is an excellent sentence you just said and a lot of people might kind of roll their eyes at philosophy, but actually there's so much packed into this. The claim is maybe there are things and stuff. If you just think about that, maybe there are things and stuff. I love it, but it's true that it's a lot of meat packed into those words that seem ambiguous and seem like, well, what are you talking about? Well, actually, this is a really big deal. But we can go back a little bit more to composition in particular. So let's say it's the case that in addition to parts, you have holes. These are holes. There's a separate type of thing. There's another issue that I struggle with this, which is illustrated by the sororities paradox. So you might ask the question, when is there an object in addition to the parts? So let's say that there's such a thing as an object like a heap of sand, and there are such things as objects like grains of sand. Okay. So let's say these are two separate objects. So if I were to try to create a heap of sand by moving one grain of sand over here, one grain of sand over here, now we just have three grains of sand, but it's not a heap yet. You keep going and you keep going. It mustn't it be the case that at some point, the addition of one grain of sand brings a heap into existence? Isn't that kind of an inescapable thing you must accept if you think that there are such things as composite objects? Maybe. I mean, I think most people who believe in composite objects are going to have to deal with this. Some people might just bite the bullet and say, yeah, once you add that one more grain of sand, this whole new object comes into existence, a heap. Before you just had a bunch of grains of sand, now you've got a big heap. Other people might say the composite object already existed. It wasn't a heap until you arranged its parts and pushed them together. I haven't thought of that one. That's another option. That's one way of avoiding vagueness. In fact, the view I had in mind there is called universalism, compositional universalism, myriological universalism just means any objects compose another object. My shoes and the Eiffel Tower they compose an object. You and your microphone compose an object. My shirt and Barack Obama compose an object. In this game, what the universalist would say about that heap example is just that composite object already existed. It's sand parts were scattered across the beach and you brought them together. You turned that composite object into a heap, but it already existed. You existed well before you were conceived. Your parts were scattered all over the place. Now they're put together so you can be a functioning human being. One day you'll die and decompose and your parts will be scattered across the globe. You'll still exist. You'll just be this weird scattered object. This is a view you might have. I just don't think that's the normal everyday common sense view. The normal everyday common sense view is going to have to deal with these sorts of questions. What happens if you believe in sand castles? When did that sand castle come into existence? Because you can add each grain of sand really slowly. It sounds really counterintuitive to think there's some grain of sand that made this object come into existence. When the wind blows, it pops out of existence. That's weird. On the other hand, it sounds weird to say it's either vague that it exists. How could it be vague whether something exists? It's either there or it isn't. These sorts of puzzles crop up all over the place. You can run it in reverse. You can start with the sand castle and remove the grains of sand one by one. At some point, whatever composite object was there, you might think it doesn't exist anymore. When did it go out of existence? You remove the grains of sand one by one or do it with a human body that you've used? I like this line of reasoning as a criticism of the idea of the existence of composite objects. I think that's correct. I think it's much more sensible to say a sand castle is a word that we use to reference some particular area of space with units of matter that are arranged in a particular way. It's about a concept. That way, if the wind blows and some sand particles move, it's all the same sand castle in the sense that it's still a concept in my head. It's not something that's necessarily tied with one-to-one correspondence with the state of objects in the world in all circumstances. But then I put on my devil's advocate hat and I say, okay, what about living things? This is another famous example. If there are no composite objects, are there any living creatures? It seems like, if we were to apply the Saraites paradox to say a lizard, and the lizard has parts, he's got organs or whatever, it seems like when you take an organ out, you remove one particular part, you're actually taking a lizard out of existence. It seems like lizards are unified things that operate somehow as a coherent whole versus just the operation of the liver or the scales on the lizard. So what's going on there? Yeah, I think the exact same puzzles come up when you talk about living things. The difference between a living thing and most of the other things we interact with is just the living thing, the parts in question interact with each other in a very special way. It's kind of this big homeostatic chemical reaction. What that means is a big chemical reaction, shaped like a lizard. It's gaining and losing parts all the time, and it's self-maintaining. So the big chemical reaction takes in food. It incorporates that material to help the chemical reaction keep going. It excretes material. It doesn't need anymore. So I don't think there's anything metaphysically special about that sort of chemical reaction. You can still say there's just a bunch of little parts. Just a bunch of little things arranged. The jargon is arranged lizard-wise. In other words, arranged like a lizard would be arranged. Like its parts would be arranged if there were any lizards. Even with something like humans. So we would say all that a human is is just those parts moving around. It's as parts arranged human-wise. Yeah, or better, there's no humans. It's just parts arranged human-wise. It's still useful to talk in terms of humans. It helps us get by. It helps us talk about the world. But there aren't any humans. Now let me clarify it. Maybe you think this means I don't exist. Because if I existed, I would be human being. What else would I have? I'm not a lizard, right? So I actually don't agree with that. I'm pretty sure I do exist. So I'm not sure what to say about this. One natural view is maybe I'm like a soul. A partless soul or something like that. And that solves the problem really easily. That's compatible with compositional nihilism, the view that there are no composite objects. Because maybe a soul doesn't have parts. So that's a view you might have, and then that's compatible with this idea that there are no composite objects. I'm just not really sure I see much reason to think that's right. On the other hand, I think there's reason to think there are no composite objects. On the other hand, I have reason to think I exist. So what gives? It seems like one of those things has to give, right? Either I exist, or I'm a composite object, or I'm a simple object. It seems like those are the three options. Usually, maybe I'm stuck, right? You can make sense of that. And to be honest, I'm not sure what to think about all that. So I think you write these metaphysical puzzles, can be applied to living organisms, including human beings. And that might have really big implications for personal identity, especially to I exist. I'm not sure what to say about all that, to be totally honest. So let me throw an idea out there. This is where I'm leaning on these questions, but I don't like it, but I just accept it. I'm in a position I don't particularly like, which is something like a metaphysical pluralism, that there are different categories of existence. So the reason there's a unique exception between physical objects, or ordinary objects, tables and chairs and pens, and seems to be a difference between humans, and when you say I, do I exist, is because there's consciousness. The consciousness is not something that is in the same category as ordinary objects. It's non-physical, non-spatial, it's non-composite. I guess that's another way of talking about souls. I'm not sure. It doesn't seem like consciousness plays by the same parts in general. It seems to be some unique phenomena. That's not just a unit of matter in a particular state moving around. So I think one relevant question here is, can there be consciousness without somebody who is conscious? That is a hard one. Everybody agrees consciousness comes out of the brain somehow, or the body does certain stuff. I think that's true. I think there's lots of people who disagree with that. Who? Name one person. Historically? That it comes out of the brain? Everybody knows if you bonk somebody in the head, consciousness goes away. Well, everybody would agree that the brain states are correlated with mental states. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Consciousness has something to do with what happens. Everybody agrees with that. Even dualists who think the mind is separate from the brain, still thinks the mind is certain things in the mind are caused by certain things in the brain. Why did I bring that up? One interesting question is here, relevant here is, can there be consciousness without somebody who is conscious? For example, one of my conscious mental states is that I'm hungry. I'm hungry right now. I'm not that hungry, it's just an illustration. Can there be hunger without somebody who's hungry? Right. Earlier I mentioned Buddhist philosophers who tended to defend compositional nihilism. There are no composite objects. One reason they were comfortable with that view is that they don't even run into people anyway. They don't even run into these problems. They'd say, yeah, there can be hunger without anybody who's hungry. There can be mental states without anybody instantiating those mental states. There can be consciousness without somebody who is conscious. That sounds totally wrong to me. There's no hunger unless somebody's hungry. There's no, like, red visual experience unless there's somebody having that red visual experience. Right. So, this is relevant to what you were saying earlier because you might think. Yeah, go ahead. This might be one reason to think there are composite objects. Right. So I think Peter Vanden Wagen, a philosopher, basically gives something like this kind of argument. If compositional nihilism were true, then there would be consciousness without anybody who is conscious. Right. Let's leave out that soul view. Let's assume we can roll that out. But that's wrong. There can't be consciousness without somebody who's conscious. So I guess there are composite objects after all because there has to be somebody who has these like mental states who sees red visual experiences, who's hungry. Right. And the natural candidate is some composite objects. Maybe like your brain, your brain is hungry. Maybe like some animal, some organism sitting where you're sitting right now. That's a composite object. Right. So some people think, yeah, these considerations about consciousness and how consciousness works gives us some reason to think there are composite objects because it's like the best way to make sense of consciousness. If you deny that there are composite objects, you're probably going to be led to this totally counterintuitive position that there can be these conscious mental states like hunger without anybody who has those mental states and anybody who is hungry. That does connect with what you have in mind, right? I hope I didn't take too long to understand. Oh, very much so. This is a conversation I've had a couple of times on the show, actually. And this is exactly the problem I struggle with because I've spoken with some Buddhists and I've spoken with a meditation practitioner who's telling me about this. And I have a hard time understanding how you can have experience without the experiencer. And I have a hard time understanding what the experiencer is. But what they've consistently said is it's kind of a matter of awareness. It's like a matter of if you practice meditation long enough, you will see that it's only experience taking place without the experiencer. I haven't had that experience of not having a perspective to my experience or being a being experiencing something. And so I just have to keep practicing meditation to be like maybe I could get some insight on this. Yeah, I've never really understood that either because this is allegedly an insight people have sometimes in their meditating. They realize there's just these experiences, there's nobody having the experiences. Right. And this is a point which is frequently made next year. Buddhist philosophy is a point David Hume made in Western philosophy. David Hume was like a Scottish philosopher two or three hundred years ago. And he said something like this, right? If you introspect, you find a bunch of mental states. You find like hunger and pain and happiness, whatever. But you don't find anybody who's hungry. You don't find anybody who's sad or happy or angry or whatever. And I think I heard somewhere that this other philosopher, Thomas Reid, he responded, David, you know, Hume, you're looking in the wrong place, right? Of course, you're not going to, if you're looking for a person, you're not going to find them if you're looking at hunger, if you're looking at like mental states. And you need to look to the person having those mental states, the person who is hungry, right? That sounds totally right to me. What can you say about that person? What is its nature? Well, that's it. I mean, that's a further question. I'm a little full next. I don't know. I don't know either. This is one of those areas where I really have hit a wall and my working solution in acting in the world is that, there's like I said, metaphysical pluralism, that there must be a being in addition to the consciousness or there is a being who is experiencing and it's just something like a soul. That's the situation I feel like I'm forced into. Wait, why? Why do you use the word pluralism to describe that again? Oh, I use the word pluralism because it's more than dualism. So there are some people that split the world between mind and body as if those are the only mental stuff and physical stuff, those are the only two categories. I think there are other categories. I'm at least open to the possibility of there being something like abstract objects or very specifically like the metaphysical status of the laws of physics. We talked about a little bit. I don't think it's physical themselves. I don't think they take up space. I don't think they're mental. I don't think they're an idea. I don't think they're in another category. Oh, okay. I see. It still sounds like dualism, even if you wouldn't want to use the word dualism to describe it. If it were dualism, though, but I would have to fit the laws of the universe into a mental category, which I don't... You could do, but I don't like that idea. That would be something like... I think what that leads to is something like the laws of the universe are ideas in the mind of God or something like that, if they're mental in nature. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe we're just getting hung up on the word dualism. We're looking for two ways, this way of demarcating reality, so there's two main categories. But are you endorsing a view where you exist, I exist, but we're not physical? It's like that's close enough to dualism. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty much dualism. You know, I think most philosophers objection, so that's not a very popular view. I think most of the objections aren't very good, but I also think most of the arguments for it are not very good. So I might be in a similar boat with you, where I'm mostly flummoxed. I think this view that I exist, but I'm not a physical object or anything like that. I think it should be investigated further. I don't think it should be dismissed as quickly as a lot of contemporary philosophers dismiss it. But there's also just not very... I personally think there aren't very good arguments for it either. So this is what's frustrating. It's what I think... For a long time I called myself a reluctant dualist, but I call myself a pluralist because of the problems with laws of matter. But I actually agree with this. I think that the arguments for it can be very dubious, but you can still arrive at it through process of elimination. You kind of back yourself into a corner and it's like, well, I guess this is what follows, it seems. Yeah, that sounds promising. Maybe that's what I shouldn't do. Because I can't think of another view that sounds plausible. Where I'm at right now is just like, I'm pretty sure I exist. And maybe I just haven't thought of the right answer to the question, what am I? What's the nature of personal identity or personal ontology? And why would I expect to know? If I do exist, pretty sure I can know that. Why should I expect to know much about personal identity? Maybe humans are just dumb and we haven't figured it out, but I'm open to that. There's a very related problem with composition and talking about personal identity, which is when you talk about what we think of as facets of you, we might say that you have a personality. That's a way that people talk. But is that true? Does that mean that what you are is a composite object and you're made up of personalities and memories and past experiences? Or are we just talking about a point of consciousness and that's the only thing that it doesn't have the property of having a personality or anything like that? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this is just a case where our language confuses us. We have these words like personality. And it's personalities and now, I guess there's this thing of personality, right? Because a person is something. And this is just a case where our everyday language isn't very perspicuous, right? Like, you know, maybe you describe my personality as like, I'm an angry person, right? Well, you don't have to say there's this thing of personality and angry personality. You can just say Andrew is angry, right? He's frequently angry. That way you're just talking about me. You're not saying there's this further thing of personality. There's just Andrew and he's just an angry person. So I think this is just a case where like, if we're really careful about the way we talk, we won't confuse ourselves by using nouns that don't actually refer to anything as personality, right? So I think that's really all that's going on in that case. I agree. And for the most part, I think I agree. The last thing I want to talk about is on this concept is this idea of unification. This is something that I've talked about a little bit in some of the work that I'm doing where... So here's a question to go back to the central issue of symbols and plurals. So we've got the individual grains of sand and let's say there's a heap in addition to the individual grains of sand. The question is what is the thing that unifies all of those individual things into one thing? So I think if you think about that question, like is it a force? Is there some law of nature which says that whenever this many grains of sand are assembled in this way, that now there's a metaphysical glue that brings them all together into one object. I think a much more sensible way of thinking about... Answering this question is to say the mind, our minds, our conceptual system is the glue. The thing that unifies plurality into something that is one object is our idea. To the extent there is an object that exists in addition to the little parts, it's the mental object. It's that we're thinking about it as some unique thing. So there are the individual units of sand and then in addition to the individual units of sand there is an idea of there being a heap of sand. That sounds right if what you're saying is just we reify these non-existent composite objects. This is a bunch of little objects that don't have parts and our brains are designed to group objects together because it helps us get by. So for example, in cognitive science there's this thing called the chunking mechanism where this is exactly what our brain does. You look at a bunch of birds flying in the sky and your brain can't keep track of all those individual birds. So it's like, oh, there's a flock of birds there. And then all of a sudden your brain is tracking your visual experiences as there's this big amorphous blob-like object in the sky, a flock of birds. So this is something our brain does all the time. It reifies objects, puts objects together because it helps us use our cognitive resources in a more efficient manner, right? It helps us get by. I think that sounds like what you're saying, right? That's totally right. Although we have to be careful how we describe this sort of view. We don't want to make it sound like we have these magic powers where we're actually creating these composite objects with our minds, right? Because some people have different... But since you are, right, the idea itself is some unique thing. I mean, you know, but you're not actually creating a new object. Like if I draw Superman, I'm like, that's Superman, right? That doesn't mean I've actually created a person named Superman. But you've created an idea in your head, right? I believe there's a fiction, a Superman fiction, right? Well, isn't that something, though? Oh, well, now we get into issues about, like, what about what are, like, mental objects, right? Okay, so maybe that'll be our next conversation. What are mental objects? I don't believe in that stuff either. I mean, it was just me. So you don't think there are ideas? No. This is just another case where our language confuses us. We have these nouns, ideas. I guess these nouns refer to something. Well, no, it's just like I... a more perspicuous way of putting it would just be to replace the nouns with adverbs, right? And then it sounds goofy, but it's right. So, like, I don't have an idea. I... I idealize. Or I think. You can just say I think, right? And then you're not talking about this mental object and idea. You're not reifying this thing, right? It's just me, and I'm thinking. So maybe then what an idea is, if we're trying to be concrete, is just another way of talking about some part of our experience. So, like, there is a particular mental state existing, or... there is at least one mental state of a particular type that exists, something like that. Well, no, so I was just trying to offer a strategy to avoid talking about things called mental states, right? And this sounds pedantic, right? But if we're trying to... if we're really concerned with what ultimately exists, right? Then we want to describe the world using our most perspicuous language possible. And then if you have nouns, those nouns better refer to something, right? So, like, that's why I was just offering a strategy of eliminating any nouns that refer to things which might not actually exist. So in this case, mental state, you don't have to believe in things, mental states. It's just me, and I'm thinking, right? But there's more going on, right? It would be an... an unnecessarily abbreviated description of things that exist to just say it's you and your thinking. Because with... you have an internal experience. Is an internal experience something that is... like, you can correctly describe phenomena in the universe by talking about your internal experience? Um... uh... I mean, again, I think if we get really fancy with our adverbs, then we can fully... we can describe how I'm thinking without using nouns that don't actually refer to anything, like, uh... like, fictional objects or mental states or anything like that. Um... and, uh... I mean, this doesn't have anything to do with composition. Right, I feel like we're getting off into the... a sidetrack on it. It was a really interesting question. I mean, this is, uh... really important that this relationship between the language in the world and nouns in the world, and if we can... if... how we are to accurately talk about features of our experience. You know, I don't have a good answer here, but it's... it's definitely worth investigating, but probably not on this episode. Yeah. All right, well, uh, I really appreciate your time. This has been an awesome conversation. Um, I've certainly enjoyed it, and I'd love to have you back on the show and talk about these issues. Sure. Yeah, I enjoyed it.