ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we examined a variety of objections to Reductionism’s Impersonal Description thesis, and looked at how Buddhist Reductionist resources might be used to respond to those objections. The success of these responses depends in part on mereological nihilism, the view that strictly speaking there are no mereological sums. When, for instance, the Reductionist explains some allegedly necessary feature of personhood in terms of facts about systems of self-scrutiny, self-revision, and self-control, this can count as a reply to the Non-Reductionist only if we can rule out the possibility that such a system is, strictly speaking, something more than a mere aggregate of interrelated parts. Buddhist Reductionists attempt to do this with their general denial that there are mereological sums. (Parfit takes no stand on this issue.) If there is no such thing as the mereological sum of the causally connected psychophysical elements, then given that the ‘I’-sense is the sense of a single enduring entity whose existence is all-or-nothing, and given as well the availability of selectionist strategies to account for the arising of such systems, an explanation of some feature of personhood in terms of systemic constraints makes that feature less potent as the basis for a Non-Reductionist objection.
