The underlying methodological suggestion is that, in considering among physical theses, the way we understand and interpret correlative data about appearances may depend on which such thesis we are entertaining.
In his Physical Theses, he stated: "for there is no other or more appropriate way of approaching the subject of good and evil on the virtues or happiness than from the nature of all things and the administration of the universe".
This methodology, however, leaves psycho-functionalism open to the charge that it, like the Psycho-Physical Identity Thesis, may be overly "chauvinistic" (Block 1980b), since creatures whose internal states share the rough, but not fine-grained, causal patterns of ours wouldn't count as sharing our mental states.
If so, then functionalism can stand as a materialistic alternative to the Psycho-Physical Identity Thesis (introduced in Place 1956, Feigl 1958, and Smart 1959, and defended more recently in Hill 1991, and Polger 2011), which holds that each type of mental state is identical with a particular type of neural state.
If this is so, then it may well be that creatures that differ from us in their fine-grain neurophysiological make-up can nonetheless share our neural states, and thus that the psycho-physical identity thesis can claim some of the scope once thought to be exclusive to functionalism.
Note, however, that once the physical Church-Turing thesis is violated, some computational notions cease to be autonomous.
It thus appears that all these models cannot serve as counter-examples to the physical Church-Turing thesis (as far as complexity is concerned) since they all require some exponential physical resource.
In order for the physical Church-Turing thesis to make sense we have to relate the space and time parameters of physics to their computational counterparts: memory capacity and number of computation steps, respectively.
If we understand physicalism as the unqualified thesis that physical properties like mass and charge exhaustively fix all other properties, haecceitistic differences present a prima facie challenge.
Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical.
