Supervenience and Neuroscience
Thursday, December 28th, 2006Supervenience and Neuroscience. Draft. Comments welcome.
ABSTRACT: I assume physicalism and argue against non-reductive physicalism on the following grounds. Extant forms of non-reductive physicalism spell out their commitment to physicalism in terms of a notion of supervenience incapable of ruling out obviously unappealing scenarios that I call “doubled-qualia” and “mental-mental-supervenience.” Such scenarios involve multiple minds supervening on all and only the same physical properties. Such scenarios can be ruled out by a natural extension of the supervenience thesis that I call “fine-grained supervenience.” I argue further that the combination of non-reductive physicalism with fine-grained supervenience leads to a regress. I argue further still that if the regress is to be avoided, the form of reductive physicalism most preferable is one in which mental properties reduce to neural properties.
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Related posts: Doubled Qualia; A Regress for Non-reductive Physicalism; Fine-grained Supervenience, Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Future of Functionalism
