Chapter 9. Seamount
265 In rare and fascinating cases, physically conjoined twins: I have in mind especially Tatiana and Krista Hogan. They are described in Tom Cochrane, “A Case of Shared Consciousness,” Synthese, 2020.
265 Could the mind, as a feature of life on Earth: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) explores this theme.
265 Here is a broad distinction between kinds of living things: I discuss this distinction in my Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), and apply it to the evolution of the mind in “Individuality, Subjectivity, and Minimal Cognition,” Biology and Philosophy, 2016. For discussion of the spatial and temporal dimensions of this topic, I am indebted to Rebecca Mann and her forthcoming PhD dissertation, “Complex Individuality: The Spatial, Temporal, and Agential Dimensions of the Problem of Biological Individuality.”
268 The “immortal jellyfish,” Turritopsis: See Stefano Piraino et al., “Reversing the Life Cycle: Medusae Transforming into Polyps and Cell Transdifferentiation in Turritopsis nutricula (Cnidaria, Hydrozoa),” Biological Bulletin, 1996.
270 Thinking all this through, Parfit came to see: See his Reasons and Persons (1984). The glass tunnel passage is from chapter 13.
271 Nagel opposes Parfit’s view of survival and death: This material is from his book The View from Nowhere (1986).
272 One reply to this argument applies an idea from another philosopher, Bernard Wil- liams: “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in his Problems of the Self (1973). Thanks to Christine Korsgaard for alerting me to this discussion.
276 Some parts of the poem: This is the original 1865 version. Later versions have small changes, including deleting the word “beautiful” in the line that begins “My dead absorb.”
PENSIVE, on her dead gazing, I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate, on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battle-fields gazing;
As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d:
Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried—I charge you, lose not my sons! lose not an atom;
And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood;
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly,
And all you essences of soil and growth—and you, O my rivers’ depths;
And you mountain sides—and the woods where my dear children’s blood, trickling, redden’d;
And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all future trees,
My dead absorb—my young men’s beautiful bodies absorb—and their precious, precious, precious blood;
Which holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give me, many a year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence;
In blowing airs from the fields, back again give me my darlings— give my immortal heroes;
Exhale me them centuries hence—breathe me their breath—let not an atom be lost;
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial, sweet death, years, centuries hence.
276 Whitman also tried to have some things both ways: This discussion of Whitman’s attitudes to death draws on David Reynolds, “Fine Specimens,” The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2018.
(Back to the main page for online notes.)