An argument from wonderful people

1. Person x appears like they are in the image of God.

2. So, probably, x is in the image of God.

3. If God doesn’t exist, no one is in the image of God.

4. So, God exists.

Does it follow from van Inwagen's answer to the Special Composition Question that all complex things are alive?

The view that all objects are either living or simple appears to be a consequence of van Inwagen’s answer to the special composition question, namely that a proper plurality only composes a whole when the parts have a life together, where a proper plurality is a plurality of two or more things.

But this does not follow. Van Inwagen defines:

1. The xs compose y if and only if “the xs are all parts of y and no two of the xs overlap and every part of y overlaps at least one of the xs”.

Now the view that all non-simples are alive follows from van Inwagen’s answer to the special composition question (SCQ) provided that we have to have:

2. Anything that has proper parts is composed of some proper plurality of its proper parts.

3. Whenever something is composed of a plurality of things that have a life together, it is alive.

Indeed, if we have 2 and 3, then anything that has proper parts is composed of proper plurality by 2, which thus have a life together by van Inwagen’s answer to SCQ, and hence the thing composed of them is alive by 3. On the other hand, if there can be something that has proper parts but isn’t composed of a proper plurality of proper parts, then there is no way to use van Inwagen’s answer to SCQ to argue that it’s alive. Furthermore, if there is something that is composed of a proper plurality of proper parts that have a life together but isn’t alive, then we have another counterexample to van Inwagen.

Neither 2 nor 3 is completely obvious. You might, for instance, think that where you are, there is also a heap of atoms shaped just like you. If, further, you are a presentist and a materialist, you will think the atoms compose you and compose the heap. Moreover, the atoms have a life together. But the heap of atoms is not alive, unlike you. So (3) on that view is false.

For a view on which (2) is false, imagine a world consisting of four objects, A, B, C and D. Object A has B, C and D as proper parts. Object B has D as a proper part. Object C has D as a proper part. There are no other instances of proper parthood. This is a world where the company axiom of mereology fails (since B and C have D as a proper part and no other proper parts). It would be interesting to characterize in some non-trivial way the mereological theories where (2) is true. A sufficient condition is to assume atomism (Gemini Pro noted this). We can define this by saying every object has a simple part. For then if an object has a proper part, it is easily seen to be composed by its proper parts. But atomism is not a necessary condition. Consider a gunky mereological model whose domain is infinite sets of natural numbers and parthood is inclusion—then (2) is true.

We could also escape this worry by weakening the definition of composition by dropping the requirement that no two of the xs overlap. That makes van Inwagen’s answer to the SCQ put a more stringer requirement on reality, and it becomes trivial that everything that has proper parts is composed of them, and (2) becomes a matter of logic. We still need an argument for (3), however.

The Reverse Special Composition Question

Van Inwagen famously raised the Special Composition Question (SCQ): What is an informative criterion for when a proper plurality of objects composes a whole.

There is, however, the Reverse Special Composition Question (RSCQ): What is an informative criterion for when an object is composed of a proper plurality?

The SCQ seems a more fruitful question when we think of parts as prior to the whole. The RSCQ seems a more fruitful question when we think of wholes as prior to the parts.

If by parts we mean something like “integral parts”, we have a pretty quick starter option for answering the RSCQ:

1. An object is composed of a proper plurality of parts just in case it takes up more than a point of space.

I am not inclined to accept (1) because I like the possibility of extended simples, but it is a pretty neat and simple answer. Suppose that (1) is correct. Then we have a kind of simplicity argument for the thesis that the whole is prior to its parts. If the parts are prior to the whole, SCQ is a reasonable question, but doesn’t have an elegant and plausible answer (let us suppose). If the whole is prior to the parts, SCQ is not a reasonable question but RSCQ instead is, and RSCQ has an elegant and plausible answer (let us suppose). So we have some reason to accept that the whole is prior to the parts.

Brain snatching is not a model of life after death

Van Inwagen infamously suggested the possibility that at the moment of death God snatches a core chunk of our brain, transports it to a different place, replaces it with a fake chunk of brain, and rebuilds the body around the transported chunk.

I think that, were van Inwagen’s suggestion is correct, it would be correct to say that we die. If not, then it is a seriously problematic view given the Christian commitment that people do, in fact, die. Hence van Inwagen's model is not a model of life after death.

Argument: If in the distant future all of a person’s body was destroyed in an accident except for a surving core chunk, and medical technology had progressed so much that it could regrow the rest of the body from that chunk, I think we would not say that the medical technology resurrected the person, but that it prevented the person’s death.

Objection: The word “death” gets its meaning ostensively from typical cases we label as cases of “death”. In these cases, the heart stops, the parts of the brain observable to us stop having electrical activity, etc. What we mean by “death” is what happens in these cases when this stuff happens. If van Inwagen’s suggestion is correct, then what happens in these cases is the snatching of a core chunk. Hence if van Inwagen’s suggestion is correct, then death is divine snatching of a core chunk of the brain, and we do in fact die.

Responses: First, if death is divine snatching of a core chunk of the brain, then jellyfish and trees don’t die, because they don’t have a brain. I suppose, though, one might say that “death” is understood analogously between jellyfish and humans, and it is human death that is a divine snatching of a core chunk of the brain.

Second, it seems obvious that if God had chosen not to snatch a core chunk of Napoleon’s brain, and allowed Napoleon’s body to rot completely, then Napoleon would be dead. Hence, not even the death of a human is identical to a divine snatching.

Third, I think it is an important part of the concept of death is that death is something that is in common between humans and other organisms. People, dogs, jellyfish, and trees all die. We should have an account of death common between these. The best story I know is that death is the destruction of the body. And the van Inwagen story doesn’t have that. So it’s not a story about death.

What has form?

On the question of what has a substantial form, I have tended to think something similar to van Inwagen’s answer to the question of what wholes there are. Namely, I assign form to:

1. organisms, and

2. fundamental objects in physics that are good candidates for being substances.

Regarding 2, if the correct physics is particle-based (which I doubt, in light of the apparent possibility of the world being in a superposition of states with different numbers of particles), these will be particles, or at least those particles that aren’t part of an organism. If the correct physics is field-based, the substances in physics will be fields (or maybe just one field-like object, namely “the global wavefunction”).

A lot of Aristotelians have substances, with forms, that are intermediate between (1) and (2), such as hydrogen atoms or water molecules or chunks of iron, and maybe astronomical objects like stars or galaxies. While I don’t have a knock-down argument against such substances, I also don’t see any reason to posit them.

My reasons for positing form for organisms and fundamental physical objects are quite different. For organisms, the reasons are largely normative. Parrots and oak trees can flourish or languish; they have ends and proper functions. In the case of humans, the normativity extends much further. Furthermore, we need well-defined boundaries for organisms for ethical reasons—there is reason not to harm an organism, especially but not only a human one—and there need to be well-defined persistence conditions for humans for moral responsibility. Something needs to ground all this. And the best candidate is form.

It is a central commitment of Aristotelianism that all of physical reality is grounded in physical substances and their accidents. But it is false that all of physical reality is grounded in organisms. There was a time when the physical universe had no organisms. So we need other substances. The fundamental objects of physics are the best candidates. They are active and have very clear kind-boundaries. The electromagnetic field is a different kind of thing from the gravitational field (which is just spacetime, according to Einstein). Photons are clearly different from electrons. (Though if it turns out that particle number is indeterminate, then particles won’t be the fundamental objects of physics.)

Granted, it is not obvious (and somewhat counterintuitive) that organisms have well-defined kind-boundaries and identity conditions. And it is not obvious (and somewhat counterintuitive) that fundamental physical objects have norms. But here I just take these to be consequences of the theory. Organisms have well-defined kind-boundaries and identity conditions, but we don’t know where they lie. Fundamental physical objects have normative properties, but I suspect they are perfect instances of their kind, and always do exactly what they should (C. S. Lewis says something like that in Mere Christianity).

Neither of my two reasons applies much to objects like atoms, molecules, chunks of stuff, or astronomical objects. There is no strong independent reason to suppose that they have normative properties in their own right, and their boundaries are, if not quite as fuzzy as those of organisms, pretty fuzzy. How far apart do I get to move a hydrogen atom from two oxygen atoms before I destroy a water molecule? How many sodium and chloride ions do I add to water to change it from water with impurities to a salt solution? (I suppose the concept of impurity pulls in the direction of thinking there are normative properties. But here is a reason to think this is mistaken. If impure water is languishing, then we have reason to distill water independently of any practical benefit to any organism, just for the sake of the water itself. That seems absurd.)

That the reasons don’t apply doesn’t show that there aren’t other reasons to posit substantial forms for these other candidates. But I don’t see such reasons. And so we can apply Ockham’s razor.

The replay argument against agential control

Van Inwagen’s replay experiment is supposed to show that indeterministic free will is problematic. We imagine someone choosing betweeen A and B, then we rewind the state of the universe to just how it was before their choice, and repeat. Van Inwagen thinks that as we continue the experiments, we will get the proportion of choices that are As converging to some number, say 30%, and that tends to make us think that the choices are random rather than something in the agent’s control.

Let’s imagine we’ve actually done this replay a very large number of times. Here are the three possibilities for what we might observe:

• O₁: The proportion of As settled down to some number strictly between 0 and 1.

• O₂: All the choices were As or all the choices were Bs.

• O₃: The proportion of As changed and did not settle down.

For familiar libertarian reasons, it seems that O₂ would be evidence against the hypothesis that the choice is in the agent’s control: they both support the hypothesis that the agent is compelled or nearly compelled, either by their character or by external forces, to choose as they did.

Van Inwagen claims that observation O₁ is evidence against the hypothesis that the choice is in the agent’s control. For Bayesian reasons, given that O₁, O₂ and O₃ are exhaustive and mutually exclusive, and that O₂ is also evidence against the agent’s control, the only way this could be is O₃ favored the agential control hypothesis (unless our prior probability of O₃ is equal to 1, which it’s not).

But I don’t think observation O₃ would favor the agential control hypothesis. There are two reasons for my judgment.

First, let’s subdivide observation O₃ into two suboptions.

• O_3a: There is some discernible pattern to the As and Bs that precludes the proportion of As from settling down, e.g., ABBAAAABBBBBBBBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...,

• O_3b: It’s just a complete mess and the proportion doesn’t settle.

Now, O_3a is a strange option. A pattern initially may seem like evidence of control. But once we recall that the experiment involved a rewinding of the universe’s state, we can see that any pattern that is not just all As or all Bs cannot be the result of agential control, since control of a pattern across time would require memory, and we have assumed that any memories are wiped. So, given the rewinding, we know that any pattern—other than the patterns that do not require memory, namely the patterns in options 2 and 3, is a fluke. Thus, 4a shouldn’t be evidentially different from 4b.

What about O_3b? Well, O_3b is more of a mess than O₁. A mess is, if anything, more random than a sequence with a probabilistic structure, and hence if anything less indicative of agential control. Thus, O_3b is either neutral with regard to the hypothesis of agential control or even evidence against it. And O_3b is in the boat by the above remarks. Thus, O₃ is either neutral with regard to agential control or evidence against it.

Second, the reason van Inwagen thinks O₁ goes against the agential control hypothesis is because it favors the hypothesis that we simply have a probabilistic structure of independent identically distributed random experiments: I will call this the “iid hypothesis”. Now, suppose we observe option O₃, and let’s consider the specific observed sequence. Let r be the final observed proportion of As. This is some number strictly between 0 and 1 (otherwise we would have O₂). Of course, because we are in option O₃, we didn’t actually observe convergence to r, but still there was some final proportion. Whatever that number r is, van Inwagen thinks that if we had observed convergence to r, that would have been evidence against the agential control hypothesis, because it would have indicated a probabilistic random structure. But now observe that on the iid hypothesis, if there are m of the As and n of the Bs in a sequence, and the probability of A is p, then the probability of the sequence is p^m(1−p)ⁿ. Note that this does not depend on the order of the As and Bs in the sequence. Hence when we keep fixed the proportion of As in the sequence, any particular sequence that looks like it converges to that proportion and any particular sequence that simply happens, after some swings, to end at that proportion are equally likely. Further, the main competing hypothesis with the iid hypothesis is that no meaningful probabilities can be attached to the situation. In that case, we cannot say anything about whether O₁ or O₃ is more likely. Thus, any particular sequence we could get that exhibits O₁ does not favor the iid hypothesis any more than any particular sequence we could get that exhibits O₃.

Let us recapitulate. Option O₃ either is neutral on whether there is agential control or is some evidence against it. Option O₂ opposes agential control. Thus, option O₁ must either be neutral on whether there is agential control or be some evidence for agential control. And so van Inwagen’s replay argument does not work.

Top-down mereology and the special and general composition questions

Van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question:

• (GCQ) What are the nonmereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the xs to compose y?

from the Special Composition Question:

• (SCQ) What are the nonmereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the xs to compose something?

He thinks that the GCQ is probably unanswerable, but attempts to give an answer to the SCQ. Note that an answer to the GCQ immediately yields an answer to the SCQ by existential quantification over y.

There are two main families of mereological theories:

• Bottom-Up: The proper parts explain the whole.

• Top-Down: The whole explains the proper parts.

Van Inwagen generally eschews talk of explanation, but the spirit of his work is in the bottom-up camp.

It’s interesting to ask how the GCQ and SCQ look to theorists in the top-down camp. On top-down theories, the xs that compose y are explained by or identical to y. It seems unlikely to suppose that in all cases there would be some relation among the xs that does not involve y which marks the xs out as all parts of one whole. That would be like thinking there is a necessary and sufficient condition for Alice, Bob and Carl to be siblings that makes no reference to a parent. Therefore, it is likely that any top-down answer to the SCQ must make reference to the whole that is composed of the xs. But if we can give such an answer, then it is very likely that we can also give an answer to the GCQ.

If my plausible reasoning is right, then on top-down theories either:

1. An answer can be given to the GCQ, or

2. No answer can be given to the SCQ.