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Article 5089 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
Message-ID: <1992Apr14.064644.16892@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 14 Apr 92 06:46:44 GMT
Article-I.D.: bronze.1992Apr14.064644.16892
References: <1992Apr4.015204.10671@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Apr4.175511.24556@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Apr7.183603.10809@husc3.harvard.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
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In article <1992Apr7.183603.10809@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>Regardless of the dubious relevance of Parfit's position on personal
>identity to the issue of reducing functionalism to behaviorism, it should
>be clear to you that the lack of rigid personal identity, as determined by
>functional organisation, ipso facto denies you the opportunity to
>estabilish truth-conditions for the strong conditionals in question.

Of course one has to distinguish the identity-conditions for the
minds from those of the physical basis of the implementation
(c.f. the copper/statue distinction, here mirrored by both the
object/system and object/mind distinction).  But in any case I am
certainly not denying the existence of trans-world identity, simply
denying that there is always a fact of the matter about it.  I take 
Kripke's position, more or less, that one doesn't need to establish
identities across qualitatively specified worlds to establish the
truth of these conditionals; rather, the identity is given in the
antecedent specification of the worlds.  Again, there's no more
difficulty with these conditionals than with the conditional about
the lamp.

>I am not sure just what you are saying here; if you are implying that
>"mere" nomological supervenience in conjunction with a full ontological
>commitment to the ranges of the existentially quantified variables of the
>formal expressions of the supervenience laws in question can be
>meaningfully distinguished from metaphysical supervenience, then, on the
>face of it, you are making a ridiculous claim.  I don't see just how your
>dualism could help you out of this predicament, other than by reducing your
>supervenience theses to mere parallelism.

Nomic supervenience is trivially distinct from metaphysical
supervenience, because nomic necessity is different from metaphysical
necessity.  A universe physically identical to ours but lacking
conscious experience is a conceptual and a metaphysical possibility,
but not a nomic possibility, on my view.  So consciousness nomically
supervenes on the physical, but does not conceptually or metaphysically
supervene.

I'm a dualist for more or less the same reason as Kripke, i.e.
because of the possibility of the experienceless replica universe.
Of course most materialist functionalists will respond to Kripke's
argument by denying this possibility (or else by denying the
reality of consciousness, as Dennett does, so we're already
in the experienceless universe).

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


