Concluding Remarks

Abstract

This chapter draws together the previous chapters’ ideas and considers one remaining question: If mental combination is possible, why have so many people thought it impossible? Why does combining minds seem so strange and perplexing? The chapter argues that the idea is hard for us partly because of contingent facts about human (and more broadly vertebrate) anatomy, and partly because of the way that common conceptual confusions and uncertainties about consciousness and composition interact with each other. Because of these uncertainties, any answer to the major objections against mental combination will seem to miss something important, and only by developing more than one combinationist theory can combinationism be defended at all.