| 5018 | Even if tightly united, mind and body are different, as God could separate them [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Even if we suppose God had united a body and a soul so closely that they couldn't be closer, and made a single thing out of the two, they would still remain distinct, because God has the power of separating them, or conserving out without the other. | |
| From: René Descartes (Principles of Philosophy [1646], I.60) | |
| A reaction: If Descartes lost his belief in God (after discussing existence with Kant) would he cease to be a dualist? This quotation seems to be close to conceding a mind-body relationship more like supervenience than interaction. |
| 5924 | Identical objects must have identical value [Ross] |
| Full Idea: If a thing possesses any kind of intrinsic value in a certain degree, anything exactly like it must in all circumstances possess it in the same degree. | |
| From: W. David Ross (The Right and the Good [1930], §IV) | |
| A reaction: This is the earlier notion of supervenience in philosophy, before it was applied to the mind. So a perfect duplication of the Mona Lisa will be worth as much as the original? A perfect clone of your partner is as good as the original? |
| 16041 | Supervenience of the mental means physical changes mental, and mental changes physical [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: The supervenience [of mental characteristics on the physical] might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or an object cannot differ mentally without altering physically. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970], I) | |
| A reaction: This is the first occasion on which Davidson introduced his notion of supervenience. Supervenience is often taken to be one-way. The first implies physical causing mental; his second implies that mental causes physical. |
| 3477 | If mind-brain supervenience isn't causal, this implies epiphenomenalism [Searle] |
| Full Idea: There are constitutive and causal notions of supervenience. Kim claims that mental events have no causal role, and merely supervene on brain events which do (which implies epiphenomenalism). But it seems obvious that mind is caused by brain. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think the whole discussion is doomed to confusion because it is riddled with a priori dualism. There is no all-or-nothing boundary between 'mind' and 'brain'. Kim's views have changed. |
| 3531 | Mental events can cause even though supervenient, like the solidity of a piston [Searle] |
| Full Idea: That mental features supervene on neuronal features in no way diminishes their causal efficacy. The solidity of the piston is supervenient on its molecular structure, but this does not make solidity epiphenomenal. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: Searle's examples never seem to quite fit what he is saying. Molecules and solidity are supervenient because they are identical (solidity is the presence of certain molecules). Solidity doesn't have causal powers that molecules lack. |
| 3476 | Mind and brain are supervenient in respect of cause and effect [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Mind is supervenient on brain in the following respect: type-identical neurophysiological causes have type-identical mentalistic effects. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: An interesting statement of what might be meant by 'supervenience'. Searle's version implies necessity in the link (but not identity). I take him to imply that a zombie is impossible. |
| 3478 | Upwards mental causation makes 'supervenience' irrelevant [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Once you recognise the existence of bottom-up, micro to macro forms of causation, the notion of supervenience no longer does any work in philosophy. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure if the notion of supervenience ever did any work. Davidson only fished up the word because none of the normal relationships between things seemed to apply (and he was wrong about that). |
| 2309 | Non-Reductive Physicalism relies on supervenience [Kim] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers saw in mind-body supervenience a satisfying metaphysical statement of physicalism without reductionism. This widely influential position is now known as "nonreductive physicalism". | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Mind in a Physical World [1998], §1 p.008) | |
| A reaction: If two things supervene on one another, then we should be asking why. Occasionalism and Parallelism are presumably not the answer. Coldness supervenes on ice. |
| 2311 | Maybe strong supervenience implies reduction [Kim] |
| Full Idea: Maybe strong supervenience is inconsistent with the irreducibility of the supervenient properties to their subvenient bases. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Mind in a Physical World [1998], §1 p.012) | |
| A reaction: If two things are really very very supervenient on one another (superdupervenient?), then you have to ask WHY? If there isn't identity, then there is surely a highly lawlike connection? |
| 3362 | Supervenience says all souls are identical, being physically indiscernible [Kim] |
| Full Idea: If one accepts the supervenience of mental on physical, this logically implies that there can only be one Cartesian soul, because such souls are physically indiscernible, and hence mentally indiscernible. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Philosophy of Mind [1996], p. 10) | |
| A reaction: Not very persuasive. Brains are certainly discernible, and so are parts of brains. Egos might be mentally discernible. I don't find my notion of personal identity collapsing just because I espouse property dualism. |
| 3413 | Zombies and inversion suggest non-reducible supervenience [Kim] |
| Full Idea: The main argument for the physical supervenience of qualia, then, is the apparent conceivability of zombies and qualia inversion in organisms physically indistinguishable from us. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Philosophy of Mind [1996], p.171) | |
| A reaction: Since neither zombies nor qualia inversion for identical brains seem to me to be even remotely conceivable, I won't trouble myself with the very vague concept of 'supervenience'. |
| 3510 | Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is a necessary condition for physicalism, but it is not sufficient. Epiphenomenalism rules out mental variation without physical variation, but says mental properties are quite distinct from physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: I take full epiphenomenalism about mind to be incoherent, and not worth even mentioning (see Idea 7379). Papineau seems to be thinking of so-called property dualism (which may also be incoherent!). |
| 3511 | Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The argument for supervenience rests on the principle that any mental difference must be capable of showing itself in differential physical consequences. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: With our current knowledge of the brain, to assume anything less than this sort of correlation would be crazy. |
| 2995 | Supervenience gives good support for mental causation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mind/brain supervenience is the best idea anyone has had so far about how mental causation is possible. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 30) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that mind brain identity was a much better idea (see Idea 3440). Supervenience seems to prove that 'mental causation' occurs, but doesn't explain it. |
| 7865 | Supervenience can be replaced by identifying mind with higher-order or disjunctional properties [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I would argue that any benefits offered by the notion of supervenience are more easily gained simply by identifying mental properties directly with higher-order properties or disjunctions of physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: Those who talk of supervenience seem to me to have retreated into a mystery that is not far from substance dualism. We want the explanation of a supervenience. If you accompany me everywhere, I think you are stalking me, or are tied to my ankle. |
| 4080 | If mental supervenes on the physical, then every physical cause will be accompanied by a mental one [Crane] |
| Full Idea: If the mental supervenes on the physical, then whenever a physical cause brings about some effect, a mental cause comes along for the ride. | |
| From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 2.17) | |
| A reaction: This is why supervenience seems to imply epiphenomenalism. The very concept of supervenience is dubious. |
| 2395 | Zombies imply natural but not logical supervenience [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It seems logically possible that a creature physically identical to a conscious creature might have no conscious experiences (a zombie)…so conscious experience supervenes naturally but not logically on the physical. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: "It seems possible" isn't much of an argument. This claim by Chalmers has been a great incentive to reassess what is or isn't possible. Can a brain lack consciousness? Can a tree fall over silently? Can cyanide stop poisoning us? |
| 17277 | If mind supervenes on the physical, it may also explain the physical (and not vice versa) [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is not enough to require that the mental should modally supervene on the physical, since that still leaves open the possibility that the physical is itself ultimately to be understood in terms of the mental. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: See Horgan on supervenience. Supervenience is a question, not an answer. The first question is whether the supervenience is mutual, and if not, which 'direction' does it go in? |
| 6158 | Supervenience of mental and physical properties often comes with token-identity of mental and physical particulars [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: One often finds a supervenience thesis concerning the relation between mental and physical properties combined with a token identity theory concerning the relation between mental and physical particulars. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This brings out the important clarifying point that supervenience is said to be between properties, not substances. The point is that supervenience will always cry out for an explanation, preferably a sensible one. |