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Persons think. Bodies, temporal parts of persons, and brains might also think. They have the necessary neural equipment. Thus, there seems to be more than one thinker in your chair. Critics assert that this is too many thinkers and that we should reject ontologies that allow more than one thinker in your chair. I argue that cases of multiple thinkers are innocuous and that there is not too much thinking. Rather, the thinking shared between, for example, persons and their bodies is exactly what we should expect at the intersection of part sharing and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. I end by responding to the overcrowding objection, the personhood objection, the personal-pronoun reference problem, and the epistemic objection.

Are a statue and the lump of clay that constitutes it one object or two? Many philosophers have answered 'two' because the lump seems to have properties, such as the property of being able to survive flattening, that the statue lacks. This answer faces a serious problem: it seems that nothing grounds the difference in properties between colocated objects. The statue and lump are in the same environment and inherit properties from the same composing parts. But it seems that differences in properties should be grounded. For this reason, philosophers including Mark Heller, Dean Zimmerman, Theodore Sider, Trenton Merricks, and Eric Olson have rejected the answer 'two'. I offer a solution to the grounding problem, in order to revive the traditional account. I argue that extrinsic relations contribute to the supervenience base of many kinds or sorts, and these extrinsic relations ground differences between colocated objects, such as statues and lumps of clay, human beings and lumps of tissue, and planets and masses of matter. The same collection of parts can stand in more than one extrinsic relation, with each relation grounding the composition of a distinct kind of object. In cases in which this happens, the properties of each object differ from the properties of other objects that share the same parts.

Maturation of somatic embryos of Pinus strobus L. was evaluated on media containing various types (agars and gellan gum), brands and concentrations of gelling agents in the presence of 80 µM ABA and 0.09 M sucrose. The media were characterized with respect to gel strength, water potential and water availability. Embryogenic tissue and somatic embryos cultured on medium with various concentrations of gellan gum were used to determine their water potential (Ψ). Regardless of the type of gelling agent used, gel strength increased with gelling agent concentration and was critical to the maturation response. High gel strength was associated with reduced water availability from the medium to the cultures. The water potential of gelled maturation medium remained constant between 0.4 and 1.0% gellan gum. It is concluded that the embryogenic tissue was exposed to varying amounts of water at the onset of and during the culture period, and that the amount of water in the culture environment in turn influenced the maturation response. Cotyledonary somatic embryos derived from gellan gum medium of high gel strength had a lower Ψ than somatic embryos matured on medium of lower gel strength. Once somatic embryos developed to the cotyledonary stage on the maturation medium, they were transferred to the germination medium. The germination frequency and the number of morphologically normal germinants were higher for somatic embryos matured on medium of high gel strength. Raising the concentration of the gelling agent in the maturation medium may be an alternative to the use of solutes to restrict water available to the embryogenic cultures.

The full data set of the NEMO-3 experiment has been used to measure the half-life of the two-neutrino double beta decay of \\[^{100}\\]Mo to the ground state of \\[^{100}\\]Ru, \\[T_{1/2} = \\left[ 6.81 \\pm 0.01\\,\\left( \\text{ stat }\\right) ^{+0.38}_{-0.40}\\,\\left( \\text{ syst }\\right) \\right] \\times 10^{18}\\] year. The two-electron energy sum, single electron energy spectra and distribution of the angle between the electrons are presented with an unprecedented statistics of \\[5\\times 10^5\\] events and a signal-to-background ratio of \\[\\sim \\] 80. Clear evidence for the Single State Dominance model is found for this nuclear transition. Limits on Majoron emitting neutrinoless double beta decay modes with spectral indices of \\[\\mathrm{n}=2,3,7\\], as well as constraints on Lorentz invariance violation and on the bosonic neutrino contribution to the two-neutrino double beta decay mode are obtained.

The possibility to probe new physics scenarios of light Majorana neutrino exchange and right-handed currents at the planned next generation neutrinoless double β decay experiment SuperNEMO is discussed. Its ability to study different isotopes and track the outgoing electrons provides the means to discriminate different underlying mechanisms for the neutrinoless double β decay by measuring the decay half-life and the electron angular and energy distributions.

Using data from the NEMO-3 experiment, we have measured the two-neutrino double beta decay (\\[2\\nu \\beta \\beta \\]) half-life of \\[^{82}\\]Se as \\[T_{\\smash {1/2}}^{2\\nu } \\!=\\! \\left[ 9.39 \\pm 0.17\\left( \\text{ stat }\\right) \\pm 0.58\\left( \\text{ syst }\\right) \\right] \\times 10^{19}\\] y under the single-state dominance hypothesis for this nuclear transition. The corresponding nuclear matrix element is \\[\\left| M^{2\\nu }\\right| = 0.0498 \\pm 0.0016\\]. In addition, a search for neutrinoless double beta decay (\\[0\\nu \\beta \\beta \\]) using 0.93 kg of \\[^{82}\\]Se observed for a total of 5.25 y has been conducted and no evidence for a signal has been found. The resulting half-life limit of \\[T_{1/2}^{0\\nu } > 2.5 \\times 10^{23} \\,\\text{ y } \\,(90\\%\\,\\text{ C.L. })\\] for the light neutrino exchange mechanism leads to a constraint on the effective Majorana neutrino mass of \\[\\langle m_{\\nu } \\rangle < \\left( 1.2{-}3.0\\right) \\,\\text{ eV }\\], where the range reflects \\[0\\nu \\beta \\beta \\] nuclear matrix element values from different calculations. Furthermore, constraints on lepton number violating parameters for other \\[0\\nu \\beta \\beta \\] mechanisms, such as right-handed currents, majoron emission and R-parity violating supersymmetry modes have been set.

The double-beta decay of 82Se to the 0+1 excited state of 82Kr has been studied with the NEMO-3 detector using 0.93 kg of enriched 82Se measured for 4.75 y, corresponding to an exposure of 4.42 kg y. A dedicated analysis to reconstruct the gamma-rays has been performed to search for events in the 2e2g channel. No evidence of a 2nbb decay to the 0+1 state has been observed and a limit of T2n 1/2(82Se; 0+gs -> 0+1) > 1.3 1021 y at 90% CL has been set. Concerning the 0nbb decay to the 0+1 state, a limit for this decay has been obtained with T0n 1/2(82Se; 0+g s -> 0+1) > 2.3 1022 y at 90% CL, independently from the 2nbb decay process. These results are obtained for the first time with a tracko-calo detector, reconstructing every particle in the final state.