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  1. Supervenience Physicalism and the Berry Paradox.Douglas V. Porpora - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1681-1693.
    This paper intervenes in an argument over the number of thoughts that could be thought. The argument has important implications for supervenience physicalism, the thesis that all is physical or supervenient on the physical. If, per quantum mechanics, the number of possible physical states is finite while the number of possible thoughts is infinite, then the latter exceeds the former in number, and supervenience phyicalsim fails. Abelson first argued that possible thoughts are infinite as we can think of any of (...)
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  • How many thoughts are there? Or why we likely have no Tegmark duplicates 10^10^115 m away.Douglas V. Porpora - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (1):133-149.
    Physicist Max Tegmark argues that if there are infinite universes or sub-universes, we will encounter our exact duplicates infinite times, the nearest within 10^10^115 m. Tegmark assumes Humean supervenience and a finite number of possible combinations of elementary quantum states. This paper argues on the contrary that Tegmark’s argument fails to hold if possible thoughts, persons, and life histories are all infinite in number. Are there infinite thoughts we could possibly think? This paper will show that there are. If so, (...)
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