Abstract
Physicalism is thought to entail that mental properties supervene on microphysical properties, or in other words that all God had to do was to create the fundamental physical properties and the rest came along for free. In this paper, we question the all-god-had-to-do reflex.
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Notes
Will they really say that all properties supervene on the fundamental physical properties? Some will. Others like to restrict the scope of physicalism in various and sundry ways (for discussion of the scope of physicalism see Montero 2015). But in any event, the definition of physicalism will almost certainly entail that the mental (at least) supervenes on the fundamental physical.
In explaining this argument, we use the term “microphysical” to describe the properties in the physicalist’s supervenience base because this is the favored terminology in discussions of zombieism. We acknowledge, however, that there are numerous problems with understanding the microphysical as the proper supervenience base for physicalism, not the least of which is that it is not now known that there are particles that mediate the gravitational force, and thus gravity could be fundamental but not a microphysical feature of the world (for further discussion see, for example, Hempel (1969) and Montero (1999)).
This is roughly how most who give the “knowledge argument” at least some credence interpret it (see Montero 2007 for an explanation of this typical understanding of the argument as well as a criticism of it). However, Jackson’s (1982) original argument was actually formulated before the supervenience craze and turned on whether all information is physical information; the issue then was whether Mary, who has reaped all the information that it is possible to reap about such things as electromagnetic radiation, how rod cells and cone cells react to light, that a 650 nm ray of light is in what is called the “red” spectrum, yet has never seen color, would learn something new upon seeing a red fire truck. If she would, Jackson argued, there is more information in the world than physical information. And this implies the falsity of physicalism. This formulation of the argument need not depend on assuming that physicalism implies some type of supervenience relation between the mental and the physical. However, many have thought that for the argument to be valid, it needs to show more than there would be a gap in Mary’s knowledge about the color red and, thus, one finds in the literature intricate arguments for how the failure of a priori deducibility of one set of facts from another implies that the one set of facts does not supervene on the other (e.g., Jackson 1986; Chalmers 2009).
Or, to be more precise, pedantic and punctilious, we argue that if the space of possible worlds contains more worlds than the actual world, then physicalism is compatible with the rejection of such supervenience, since if there are no other possible worlds, everything—cats, cows, your immortal soul (if you have one)—trivially supervenes on the physical since if there is only one possible world, all worlds that duplicate our fundamental physical properties (which is only our world), duplicate the cats, cows and suchlike.
And if the question of physicalism specifically concerns the mental, then we are against the view that physicalism entails a supervenience thesis formulated in terms of it, as long as that base does not contain the mental.
Is the failure of such supervenience unfathomable? There are at least some who claim to fathom it: Robin Hendry (forthcoming) in, The Metaphysics of Chemistry and Jaap van Brakel (2000) in Philosophy of Chemistry: Between the Manifest and the Scientific Image both argue that physics underdetermines the nature of chemistry. And, abstracting away from scientific details, Miller (2010) and Bennett (2009), argue that whether any objects assemble to compose a higher level of object cannot be determined on the basis of a priori reflection.
That said, Robin Hendry (forthcoming) does seem to see the failure of chemistry to supervene on the fundamental physical as showing that physicalism is false. However, his argument is premised on the assumption that physicalism entails such supervenience. This is, of course, a reasonable assumption given how often one sees physicalism defined in terms of a supervenience thesis. But we’d like to invite Hendry to considered that supervenience might be a negotiable condition for physicalism. If he were to do this, perhaps he’d be willing to negotiate his conclusion. Similarly, though some emergentists who accept systematic supervenience failures seem to see themselves as physicalists, others seem to see the denial of supervenience relations (of the kind we are arguing should be consistent with physicalism) as inconsistent with physicalism. (For a discussion of an array of emergentist doctrines, see Bedau and Humphreys 2008, Humphreys 2016). All we can ask of this latter group is to consider the reasoning put forth herein. As for emergentists who hold that it is only the mental that is an emergent feature of the world, while all other features of the world are sewn tightly together by supervenience strings, our argument does not imply such a position should count as a form of physicalism, and, in fact, Montero (2013) suggests that it should not. Now, not all emergentists appear to shun supervenience relations between the various levels of reality. And some of these emergenitists might think of themselves as antiphysiclaists. But this we can accept as well since, as many have argued, the existence of systematic supervenience relations between levels is not a sufficient condition for physicalism. However, it has typically been thought of as a necessary condition for physicalism. And that is the view we have been arguing against. Finally, some emergentists might see themselves as antiphysicalists because they deny that there are explanatory relations between levels. Whether physicalism entails that higher level features of the world must be explained in terms of lower level ones is controversial, however, even if we should think of physicalism in terms of explanation, it is not clear that explanatory relations must imply supervenience relations rather than, say, contingent compositional relations.
Do you feel that whether u is physical depends on whether we are able to explain such things as why in u every time we have a good number of H2O molecules, we get water? If so, we invite you to read the final two sentences of the embarrassingly long previous footnote.
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Montero, B.G., Brown, C. Making Room for a This-Worldly Physicalism. Topoi 37, 523–532 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9450-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9450-3