To use the language of supervenience, just as the global features of the picture supervene on the dots, so too everything supervenes on the physical, if physicalism is true.
For, if some worlds differ haecceitistically but are alike with respect to the distribution of physical properties, then, contrary to physicalism, possible worlds or maximal possibilities can be physically indiscernible yet fail to be indiscernible simpliciter.
(As many commentators at the time recognized, this weaker form of naturalism already carried significant philosophical implications, particularly for the possibility of free will.[5]) In the final twentieth-century phase, the acceptance of the casual closure of the physical led to full-fledged physicalism.
But then, according to token physicalism, there must be some physical object for it to be identical with.
Stoljar welcomes this result for he develops his two-pronged analysis of the physical in the service of a defense of physicalism.
We can start with the following intuitive characterization of non-reductive physicalism about the mental: while the mental and the physical are distinct, they aren't on a par the latter enjoys a special priority with respect to the former.
Since the original rationale for embracing physicalism was supposed to be science's discovery that the physical realm is causally closed, this may seem to leave physicalists in an awkward position.
So suppose that, as a first step towards precision, we take physicalism to entail that the only perfectly natural properties are physical properties.[9] (Perfectly natural properties that are actually instantiated the physicalism we are trying to define is meant to be, or least to be allowed to be, a contingent thesis).
After all, applied to W, Jackson's definition says that physicalism is true at W just in case any minimal physical duplicate of W is a duplicate simpliciter.
Moreover, some follow Hofweber (2005) in taking the irreducibility of haecceities and other non-qualitative properties to physical properties to constitute a challenge to more sophisticated conceptions of physicalism.
Likewise, any version of functionalism or physicalism implies that the mental supervenes on, respectively, functional organization and physical makeup.
