When counting conscious subjects, the result needn’t always be a determinate whole number

The number of conscious subjects in a given entity might not always be a determinate whole number. On a wide range of naturalistic views, the processes underlying consciousness are complex enough to make it implausible that conscious subjects must always arise in countable, whole-number quantities. Whole-number-countability may be an accident of typical vertebrate biology. The fact that we cannot imagine what it is like to be 7/8 or 1.34 conscious subjects does not count against the possibility; either the imaginative demand is self-contradictory (imagine what it is like to be an entity that does not have a single, determinate what-it-is-like) or imaginability is not an appropriate test of possibility, as with bat echolocation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Could there be 7/8 of a conscious subject, or 1.34 conscious subjects, or an entity indeterminate between being one conscious subject and seventeen? Such possibilities might seem absurd or inconceivable, but our ordinary assumptions on this matter might be radically mistaken. Taking inspiration from Dennett, we argue that, on a wide range of naturalistic views of consciousness, the processes underlying consciousness are sufficiently complex to render it implausible that conscious subjects must always arise in determinate whole numbers. Whole-number-countability might be an accident of typical vertebrate biology. We explore several versions of the inconceivability objection, suggesting that the fact that we cannot imagine what it’s like to be 7/8 or 1.34 or an indeterminate number of conscious subjects is no evidence against the possibility of such subjects. Either the imaginative demand is implicitly self-contradictory (imagine the one, determinate thing it’s like to be an entity that there isn’t one, determinate thing it’s like to be) or imaginability in the relevant sense isn’t an appropriate test of possibility (in the same way that the unimaginability, for humans, of bat echolocation experiences does not establish that bat echolocation experiences are impossible).