Let us get back to fundamentals. Lyrics written by Kris McDaniel Kris McDaniel: vocals, keyboards, edrums, hand percussion Ben Bradley: electric guitar, bass guitar Carrie Jenkins: vocals Will Bradley: trumpet Cover art by Carrie Jenkins Humean Supervenience is the metaphysical theory that all the features of our world are determined by the distribution of properties and relations of simple objects. These simple objects stand in no necessary connection to each other. Imagine a pointillist painting of a face. This painting consists of a series of tiny dots of color at various distances from each other. If you want to change the appearance of the face, you have to do something with the dots: delete some of them, or add more to them, or change the colors of the dots, or change how distant the dots are from each other. The existence of the face and the features that it has are functions of what the dots are like and how they are arranged. And no dot stands in any necessary connection with any of the other dots. For example, I can change a dot in the left-hand corner of the painting without changing any other dot in the painting. If Humean Supervenience is true, our world is like this pointillist painting: all the macro features of things, such as our faces, are determined by the features and arrangements of simple things, the analogues of the dots. David Lewis was arguably the most significant metaphysician of the 20th century, and a decent sized chunk of his metaphysical work consists in trying show how we can make sense of wide variety of phenomena, such as causation, morality, consciousness, and meaning, even if Humean Supervenience is true. Copyright 2022 © The 21st Century Monads
