Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Van Inwagen's ear

Van Inwagen holds that:

  1. All and only things whose activity constitutes a life (properly) compose a whole.

  2. Whether a plurality of things composes a whole depends only on their internal relations.

He considers a counterexample to (1) and (2) of the following sort. Let the xs be the particles in van Inwagen outside the right ear.

  1. If van Inwagen were to have lost the right ear, the activity of the xs would have constituted a life (his life) and composed a whole (namely, van Inwagen).

  2. But in fact, the activity of the xs does not constitute a life, but only partly does so, along with the activity of the right ear particles.

  3. However, the internal relations between the xs were he to have lost his right ear would have been the same as they are now.

This is a problem: for by (4) and (1), the xs do not compose a whole, but by (3) they would have had he lost his right ear, and by (5) they would have had the same internal relations then, which contradicts (2).

Van Inwagen attempts to escape this problem by denying (5), saying that the internal relations between the particles in his body in the vicinity of the right ear would be affected by the ear not being there. For they would no longer experience forces from the ear particles.

But let d be the closest distance between a right-ear particle and a van Inwagen particle not in the right ear (i.e., one of the xs). But now if God were to suddenly annihilate the right ear, then it seems that none of the xs would be in any way affected until influences traveling at the speed of light could bridge the distance d. I.e., until d/c (where c is the speed of light) had passed, the xs would be without the ear just as they are with the ear. Hence, if we specify that the time of severance in (3) is less than d/c ago, van Inwagen’s response seems to fail.

One might try to get out of this by invoking (non-Bohmian) quantum mechanics, and saying that all particles have fuzzy positions, and the ear particles overlap positionally with the non-ear particles, so that the disappearance of the ear particles affects the non-ear particles instantly. But the instant part of the effect is slight. We can imagine that the disappearance of the ear is so orchestrated as to never split any molecules or atoms. But particles in different molecules are fairly localized to their respective molecules, and the effect of the tails of the wavefunction on what is going on in a neighboring molecule will presumably be negligible.

Of course, a negligible effect is still an effect. But we could imagine a third scenario: van Inwagen loses his ear, and God miraculously tweaks the movements of the xs in a slight and biologically negligible way during the d/c period so that they behave just as they do in the actual world where the ear is attached. In that scenario, the xs would compose van Inwagen, but they would have exactly the same internal relations as they do in the actual world.

1 comment:

Heath White said...

Tangentially related, I thought this article was thought-provoking:
https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2019/09/vessels-of-others.html

It is pretty close to true, so suppose it is true, that (a) My body cannot live without any gut bacteria, though it can live without any particular gut bacterium, and (b) The bacteria in my gut cannot live without being in another creature's gut, though no particular host creature is essential.

Assume further that both my body and the bacteria are alive.

Does my living body include the gut bacteria as parts? How many living things are there?
What is the right thing to say about these kinds of symbiotic cases ... which, as the article points out, are not rare but rather the norm in nature?