Olson asks a good question in this book, and he offers a solid, critical consideration of the best answers to it. The result is a readable, informative and even compelling consideration of the stances one might take regarding our basic metaphysical nature. I'll say a little about the question (which is taken up in the first chapter), the various answers (which are considered in the bulk of the book – chapters two through eight), and something about Olson's concluding thoughts (which make up the final chapter).
The question, as the title suggests, is a metaphysical one: ‘What are our most general and fundamental features? What is our most basic metaphysical nature?’ (3) Olson explains the meaning of the large question of the book's title by breaking it down into fractionally easier, smaller questions. What are we made of? Matter or something else? Partly matter? If we are made of matter, which bits or parts of it are us? Are we our brains or our central nervous systems? Are we our skin and whatever lies within it? Do we have material parts? Do we have temporal parts? Do we have an earlier half or just such things as top and bottom halves? What makes something a part of us? Do we have parts? Are we concrete particulars? Abstract universals? Material substances? Immaterial substances? Maybe states of something else? Could it be that there is nothing that we are? Answering such questions would tell us something about what we are.
The book's main question is distinguished from its loud-mouthed and more familiar siblings: problems attending personal identity. We might be forced to narrow down the list of viable answers to the question of what we are if we take a stand on certain questions having to do with what it is to be a person, what evidence bears on the question of who is who, and what it takes for us to persist through time. Answering those questions, however, does not settle the matter of our basic metaphysical nature. Olson makes the reasonable point that many philosophers, even good ones, mistakenly think they have a view on our fundamental features when they only have a view on, say, our persistence conditions. Suppose one concludes that identity over time consists in physically realized psychological continuity. Maybe that implies we're not souls or organisms, but it leaves many other possibilities up for grabs.
The views are considered one by one, chapter by chapter. Each chapter consists almost exclusively in an exposition of the main position followed by arguments for and against, usually accompanied by a consideration of little sub-views introduced in an effort to squeeze out of some problematic constraint or other. The main views are animalism, constitutionalism, the brain view, the temporal-parts view, the bundle view, immaterialism, and nihilism.
Animalism is the straightforward claim that each of us is numerically identical to a certain biological organism, a particular member of Homo sapiens. Constitutionalism holds that we are nonanimals, maybe persons, coinciding materially with but not identical to human animals – a bit like a statue as opposed to the lump of clay which coincides with it. The brain view consists in variations on the claim that we are brains or parts of brains or maybe the whole of a central nervous system, anyway just the part of our animal bodies which thinks. The temporal-parts view – Olson warns that it might ‘sound like Greek’ (99) to the uninitiated – holds that we are four-dimensional, persisting concrete objects composed of temporal parts. The bundle view says that we are composed of mental states. It lines up nicely with common intuitions about persistence but turns into something awful the more one tries to understand what does the thinking. An offshoot which takes it that we are programs running on brainy hardware appears satisfyingly doomed. The thought that we are souls does not come off as badly as one might expect, and Olson's treatment of it includes a fascinating discussion of various paradoxes for materialism having to do with acquiring and losing parts. Nihilism is the view that we do not exist, and Olson, admitting that ‘this chapter has given me more trouble than any other’, (183) ties its success or failure to its ability to paraphrase otherwise reasonable statements about us without the ‘us’, as well as our ability really to buy into it.
The entire discussion is reassuringly armchair – ‘neuroscience’ does not appear in the index, and there's no jumping up and down about recent empirical studies. There are no errors in the other direction either. There is not much discussion of teleportation or the results of extravagant and unlikely neurosurgery. Olson only briefly discusses such things after someone else brings them up and because the argument requires it. His focus is on clear definitions, reasonable premises, likely conclusions, tough objections and promising replies.
Each view is scrutinized, but perhaps one might object that Olson is not entirely even-handed. Some minor views are marched out, permitted a brief, final statement, positioned against a wall and riddled with objections. In the hands of another author, such treatments might seem too quick. However with Olson one has the feeling that if a view is given rough treatment, it probably deserves it. When Olson says he does not ‘properly understand’ (172) Thomistic hylomorphism, maybe it is the view, not the author, which is the trouble.
Even if the reader did not know that Olson has defended animalism elsewhere, he or she will have spotted the preference long before the final chapter, where Olson tells us, ‘I will let my hair down and say what I myself am inclined to think’ (214). His preference might lead him to see the so-called ‘thinking-animal problem’ as more of a problem than it really is. It goes like this: ‘If there is a human animal located where you are, and it thinks just as you do, it is hard to see how you could be anything other than that animal’ (211). Olson takes it that the thinking-animal problem is an argument for animalism and an objection (of varying strength) to all the other views. He raises it throughout the book. Olson's animalism might colour his take on things here.
Do you have to accept what gets the thinking-animal problem going in the first place, namely the thought that there really is a human animal located where you are that really does think just as you do? If you dodge that, it is not hard to see how you could be anything other than that animal. If I think I'm a soul or a brain or a nothing or a bundle or even something which just happens to coincide materially with my animal body right now (but might be elsewhere, maybe rebooted in another body), then maybe there isn't or need not be a human animal located where I am that thinks as I do. I certainly could be something other than this animal, particularly if I have grounds for doubting that I exist wherever and whenever it does. There are ways to make such thoughts uncomfortable, and Olson presses them throughout the book, but if I stick to my guns, the thinking-animal problem might not bother me as much as Olson thinks it should.
If it is possible to think that Olson's views get in the way of an entirely neutral treatment of some conceptions of what we are, his willingness to take a stand certainly enhances the final chapter, which is probably the best bit of the book. Olson says what he thinks, and the discussion is free and interesting. The brain view is right out because ‘there is no reason to believe it’ (214). The bundle view goes to one side because the idea that bundles of thoughts can think is a ‘conceptual mistake’ (214). Immaterialism is given the boot because it is ‘impenetrable to reason’ (214). Constitutionalism is no good because it is ‘deeply implausible and, above all, unprincipled’ (214). We are left, unsurprisingly, with animalism and, surprisingly, nihilism and the temporal-parts view.
Olson's final stab at adjudicating between them and replying to problems for animalism is rough going but rewarding. At the end of the discussion he presents us with this ‘bold conjecture: there is an intimate connection between the question of what we are and the question of when composition takes place or what material objects there are’ (229). If we make some headway on the nature of composition (partly, specifying the conditions under which small things make up bigger things), we might get closer to answers about our fundamental nature. Certain takes on composition nudge us towards certain conceptions of what we are, and vice versa. This is an interesting proposition, and as far as I can tell it is a new conceptual connection in an old neighbourhood. It just might make answering the book's main question a little easier – a nice surprise at the end of a rewarding account of what we are.
