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Metaphysics

Reading Response #3 Eric Olson & Animalism

In his essay "An Argument for Animalism," Eric Olson argues that we people who live here on this planet are animals. To be more precise, Olson claims that "each of us is numerically identical with an animal. There is a certain human organism, and that organism is you" (pg. 348). Olson acknowledges that this idea has long been eschewed by traditional philosophy and its most influential practitioners and he also points to at least one very controversial consequence of this view: if we are animals, then it would follow that it is not on fact the case that we endure through time via the persistence of some mental continuity. If my cerebrum were to be successfully implanted into a new body such that all of my memories and thoughts went along with it to this new location, then, so long as it is true that I really am animal, it would nevertheless be the case that I myself was not transported along with that cerebrum to that new body because I am an animal and no animal was moved during this relocation. In order to back up this claim, Olson produces his "thinking-animal argument" in which he argues that "(1) there is a human animal sitting in your chair. (2) The human animal sitting in your chair is thinking. (3) You [and you alone] are the thinking being sitting in your chair. Hence, you are that animal" (pg. 354). Olson believes that the premises of this argument are all non-controversial or that, at the very least, the alternatives to them are deeply implausible. And if all of these premises are true, then together they establish animalism. I would like to resist Olson's argument here by questioning what I believe is its most controversial premise: (2) the human animal sitting in your chair is thinking. Olson seems to assume that the human animal sitting in my chair is a material or physical entity.

Therefore, this premise asserts that a physical entity is engaged in the activity of thinking. But as Olson himself points out, there is a long philosophical tradition which argues that thought is immaterial and that thinking things are likewise immaterial in nature. If it is true that only an immaterial entity can think and that the human animal sitting in my chair is material in nature, then it would have to be the case that that animal is not the animal that is doing the thinking which I experience as my own whereas I, on the other hand, must be an immaterial entity of some sort that is somehow related to this animal. Olson argues that it needs to be shown that a material entity cannot think. There are two plausible arguments which I know of that try to establish the immateriality of thought. First, there is the notion that thought is intensional in nature; whenever I have a thought, that thought is about something. However, a physical object cannot be 'about' something and hence cannot be intensional in nature. Secondly, even though we can describe the manner in which light waves interact with eyes and the way in which molecules in the air vibrate against an ear drum, it seems that there is some unbridgeable gap between these physical descriptions and the actual subjective experience that I experience when I see the color red or hear a loud noise. It would seem to be the case that these experiences are not reducible to descriptions given by the natural sciences but rather stand apart as something wholly different and immaterial in nature. But if it is the case that thoughts are immaterial, then it needs to be explained how a physical object, like a brain, can be capable of generating or housing them. When one attempts to turn stone into bread, at least bread and stone are both material in nature; here the task seems infinitely more difficult. And if it is the case that thoughts are the products of immaterial minds, then they cannot be the product of a material animal.