While Googling myself the other day I found that my paper Fine-grained supervenience, cognitive neuroscience, and the future of functionalism was referenced in the Wikipedia entry on functionalism, which is nice. Also nice is that the paper’s central argument (that functionalism entails mental-mental supervenience, which violates physicalism) is discussed at some length. However, that argument is presented as a major player in the formulation of certain versions of functionalism, which, though flattering, can only be possible if time-travel is actual.
Anyway, here’s an excerpt from my paper:
[A]ccording to the bullet-biting functionalist, Searle’s rote rule following does give rise to genuine Chinese-understanding even though Searle himself seems not to understand Chinese. Likewise, the functionalist claims, Block’s nation’s walkie-talkie facilitated activities instantiate a mental event over and above the mental events of the individual citizens.
Such functionalist responses constitute an advocacy of mental-mental supervenience, which is to say that they allow for the possibility of a situation in which one mind or set of mental facts supervenes on another.
[...]
The possibility of mental-mental supervenience, however, poses a serious threat to theorists subscribing to the conjunction of the supervenience thesis and functionalism, because the possibility of mental-mental supervenience leads to a reductio ad absurdum of that conjunction. The key to the reductio is the fact that the possibility of mental-mental supervenience contradicts the supervenience thesis. Briefly, the supervenience thesis states that no mental differences can obtain without physical differences obtaining, but the possibility of mental-mental supervenience is the possibility of mental differences obtaining without physical differences obtaining.
Hey, Pete, now I need to go read your paper — especially since it will have was (is that the right form for the future past?) so influential! I’m not sure I get your argument. Maybe you could post a link?
There’s a trivial sense in which every set of facts supervenes on itself (no change in the A’s without a change in the A’s), but that obviously shows nothing important. Supervenience is in some sense cheap and commonplace and instantiated in multiple nested layers. So I’m not seeing how mental-mental supervenience is incompatible with also having mental physical supervenience — if that’s even what you’re saying.
Hi Eric,
There’s a link to the paper from the first mention of it in the post. I’ll need to be more obvious when I post links for now on. (I think I’d been making a bad assumption about how things appear to different browsers.)
The gist of mental-mental supervenience is when one set of mental facts M1 supervenes on some distinct set of mental facts M2. If physicalism is supposed to also be true, then M1 and M2 would both supervene on the same set of physical facts. However, this would entail that there is no physical difference in virtue of which M1 and M2 differ, which violates the main idea of physical supervenience.
Cheers,
Pete