Russell Standish writes: > Why do you say this? Surely physical supervenience is simply > supervenience on some physical object. Physical objects are spread > across the multiverse, and are capable of reacting to all > counterfactuals presented to it. > > Inside views are local - but the whole shebang must be spread across > the Multiverse.
I suppose it depends on your definitions. As I suggested, supervenience in a single world model means that consciousness depends on local physical activity, and not on causally unconnected events. In a multiverse, actions in parallel worlds are causally unconnected to actions here. It seems rather odd to say that the supervenience thesis says that whether my computer is conscious depends on what is happening in some remote parallel universe. I also think there are problems with this notion that objects are spread across the multiverse, and in particular that all counterfactuals are tested. It's not clear to me that we can unambiguously define the counterpart to this particular object in an arbitrary multiverse. For very "near" or "similar" multiverses it may seem unproblematic, while for extremely "far" or "different" multiverses there will obviously be no counterparts. There would probably be a gray area in the middle in which an object was related to one in our universe but perhaps not exactly the same. This exposes a difficulty with the notion that all counterfactuals are tested. In the first place, many thought experiments aim to refrain from testing counterfactuals - Maudlin's is of this nature. Something has to go seriously wrong with Maudlin's scenario for counterfactuals to be tested. In the second place, many counterfactuals may be bizarre and unlikely, so that the circumstances under which they are tested may require extremely strange events. These situations would suggest that such counterfactuals will only be tested in relatively remote parts of the multiverse, parts quite different from our own. And then we have to ask, is it really the "same" machine that is being tested? And by "same" here, I think we mean more than just "designed the same" or "isomorphic" - we mean that it has some kind of shared identity, that in some sense this *is* the machine we see in our universe, just exposed to different inputs. Given the problems I mentioned with this notion of identity across the multiverse, it's not clear that this concept makes sense. Hal Finney --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---