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Article 4906 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: <1992Apr3.180407.28679@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 3 Apr 92 18:04:07 GMT
References: <1992Apr2.132116.26024@cs.ucf.edu> <1992Apr2.202206.25306@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Apr3.084449.10635@husc3.harvard.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
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In article <1992Apr3.084449.10635@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>I hate to say "haecceitism with respect to individuals excludes the same
>with respect to their properties" again, but it looks like I must.  Perhaps
>if your knowledge of modal logic went a bit beyond this parrot-like
>invocation (and conflation) of various kinds of necessity, you might have
>realized that Kripke's argument against mind-brain identity trivially lifts
>to bear against the thesis of supervenience.  But, of course, it would
>greatly inconvenience you to actually involve yourself in the substance of
>technical issues, whose language you have used with great facility to
>disguise the hollowness of your fallacious theses.

For the last time, the degree of necessity required of the strong
conditionals in the definition of implementation is physical
necessity, pure and simple.  The criteria for implementation are
truth-functionally dependent on a set of conditionals of the form
"if in maximal state P, and maximal input I is received, then maximal
state Q follows".  The states and inputs here are physically specified,
and the truth-value of the conditional is determined by physical laws.

Kripke's argument certainly does not bear against supervenience, if
this supervenience is construed, as I construe it, as nomic
supervenience.  It bears only against the conceptual or metaphysical
supervenience of qualia on the physical.

-- 
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."


