You are Simple

I argue that, unlike your brain, you are not composed of other things: you are simple. My argument centers on what I take to be an uncontroversial datum: for any pair of conscious beings, it is impossible for the pair itself to be conscious. Consider, for instance, the pair comprising you and me. You might pinch your arm and feel a pain. I might simultaneously pinch my arm and feel a qualitatively identical pain. But the pair we form would not feel a thing. 1 Pairs of people themselves are incapable of experience. Call this The Datum. What explains The Datum? I think the following exhaust the reasonable options. (1) Pairs of people lack a sufficient number of immediate parts. (2) Pairs of people lack immediate parts capable of standing in the right sorts of relations to each other and their environment. (3) Pairs of people lack immediate parts of the right nature. (4) Pairs of people are not structures (they are unstructured collections of their two immediate parts). (5) Some combination of (1) – (4). Finally, (6) pairs of people are not simple. I defend (6). I argue that none of (1) – (4) is individually sufficient to explain The Datum. Then I argue that no combination is sufficient. I conclude that (6) best explains The Datum. Although my paper has the structure of an argument, its real aim is merely to make credible a position that is rarely taken seriously by contemporary philosophers, namely, that conscious beings must be simple. 2 The argument itself has escape routes. Indeed, I do not expect the confident materialist to find it persuasive. Still, it has value. At the very least, it serves as a stalking horse for the materialist. The argument involves a long, slow, development of an intuition pump that is designed to give the reader a 1 As Chisholm says, " You could want the weather to be colder and I could want it to be warmer; but that heap or aggregate which is the pair of us (that thing that weighs 300 pounds if you and I each weigh 150 pounds) does not want anything at all " (1991, p. 172).