Varieties of Supervenience

Supervenience is a concept borrowed from moral philosophy by philosophy of mind to solve the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is actually a set of problems, among which the major ones are the Consciousness problem (Illustrative instance: how can physical states have felt qualities?) and the Intentionality Problem (Illustrative instance: How can physical states be about something, or be directed towards something else?). One of the major physicalist strategies for solving the mind-body problem has been reduction, i.e., the strategy is to argue that the mind is " nothing-but " some physical state. However, many physicalists have found this route very unsatisfactory, so there are also non-reductive physicalist theories of the mind (theories which hold that the physical level is the fundamental level of understanding, but which also hold that the mind cannot be reduced to the brain or any other physical level). Most computational theories of the mind (Newell's SOAR model, Anderson's ACT and ACT* models, and work by Chomsky, Minsky, Fodor and Pylyshyn) belong to this category. Supervenience is appealed to by this kind of physicalist theories to explain the mind-body relation. The structure of the paper is as follows: I first outline two philosophical notions, supervenience and multiple realizability. Then I classify supervenience into two types and describe them. I show that the first type does not solve the mind-body problem. Then I argue that the second, although useful in solving the mind-body problem, is in conflict with the notion of multiple realizability (the thesis that the mind can be instantiated by things other than the brain, which is the philosophical basis of all Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts). Finally, I propose that through the Indian concept of swasamvedana (auto-reflexivity of awareness), this conflict between supervenience and multiple realizability could be resolved. Supervenience Though it was Davidson who introduced supervenience to philosophy of mind, the notion of supervenience considered here is the one laid out by Kim (1993). Here is a non-rigorous definition of supervenience, based on Kim (1993): If A supervenes on B, any change in A is a change in B, but not vice versa, where A and B can be objects, events, or state of affairs. It may be applied to a strictly internalist story about the mind as follows: any change in mental state A is a change in the brain state B, but all changes in brain states are not changes in mental …