Individuating animals and brains. As far as individuating the relevant entities goes, what an Animalist is looking for is a notion of individuation which prescribes that the fetus in the womb and the old human are the same entity across time. The Brain View proponent too, will want a notion of individuation which allows for the early developing brain in the fetus in the womb to be the same entity as the brain of the old man. The question is whether the Animalist can get a notion of nature and individuation, and consequently of persistence, that simultaneously excludes the Brain Theorist from individuating the brain by the same principles.24 Let us begin with animals. How do we individuate an animal? Given their other metaphysical commitments, it seems that Animalists should be physicalist realists (as suggested by Xxxxxx, 2015).25 This is to say that human beings are presumed to be “ordinary objects”, where ordinary objects are understood to be “composed” from smaller bits of physical matter (pp. 78). This should be quite uncontroversial under modern assumptions of scientific realism. At least at first sight this would appear to endorse a compositionalist thesis about the metaphysics of objects that “the metaphysically basic or fundamental characterisation of an ordinary object specifies the way in which the thing is built up from its parts” (Madden, 2015, pp. 78). From the perspective of compositionalism, we would understand a human be- ing as a collection of certain parts arranged in a certain way. Depending on the chosen degree of granularity, that can be organs arranged in a certain way, cells arranged in a certain way, or atoms arranged in a certain way, etc. But the com- position of organs and cells would be under question in a similar way to how the composition of the whole human organism is under question because they too are organic composites, so we would probably want to default to the relatively safe level of atoms as the fundamental level for our compositional grounding.26 So then, what makes one specific set of atoms a human animal? Unfortunately, by itself, the basic thesis of compositionalism does not appear to make any positive prescriptions about when a bunch of parts actually amount to an ordinary object. When we look at an ordinary object as a given, it is trivial to observe that it is made of smaller physical parts. But when we instead start from the parts and we begin 24My project on personal identity is quite some distance away from a project of developing an indep...
