Mereological Nihilism and Personal Ontology

Mereological nihilists hold that composition never occurs, so that nothing is ever a proper part of anything else. Substance dualists generally hold that we are each identical with an immaterial soul. In this paper, I argue that every popular objection to substance dualism has a parallel objection to composition. This thesis has some interesting implications. First, many of those who reject composition, but accept substance dualism, or who reject substance dualism and accept composition, have some explaining to do. Secondly, one popular objection to mereological nihilism, one which contends that mereological nihilism is objectionable insofar as it is incompatible with the existence of people, is untenable

Pruning to Increase Taylor Dispersion in Physarum polycephalum Networks

How do the topology and geometry of a tubular network affect the spread of particles within fluid flows? We investigate patterns of effective dispersion in the hierarchical, biological transport network formed by Physarum polycephalum. We demonstrate that a change in topology - pruning in the foraging state - causes a large increase in effective dispersion throughout the network. By comparison, changes in the hierarchy of tube radii result in smaller and more localized differences. Pruned networks capitalize on Taylor dispersion to increase the dispersion capability.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 11 pages supplemental materia

How to be a Mereological Anti-Realist

Peter van Inwagen's "special composition question" asks, more or less, "what must some objects be like in order for them to compose another object?" In this paper I develop and defend a theistic anti-realist response to the special composition question, according to which God decides when composition occurs. While I do not endorse this theistic mereological anti-realism, I think that it is worth developing. I argue that this theistic mereological anti-realism is preferable to extant non-theistic variants of mereological anti-realism, and that theistic mereological anti-realism receives some motivation from several other sources