Microphysical state of affairs

It is part of this view that all property instantiations are realized in what I will call microphysical states of affairs. Microphysical states of affairs are ways things are with respect to microentities — ways some of them are, as I will say, propertied and related. The microphysical states of affairs that primarily concern me have particular microentities as constituents. But the specification of such a microphysical state of affairs can also include... 

It seems obvious that a microphysical state of affairs that minimally realizes the instantiation of a property at a time must realize the existence at that... 

But of course there are vast numbers of microphysical states of affairs that do not realize property instances or the existence of subjects of property instances. The question now is, in virtue of what is a microphysical state of affairs a realizer of a property instance ... 

A kind of things is normally associated with a number of kinds of properties such that things of that kind must have some property of each of these kinds. A house must have some height, some width, some mass, and so forth. So, if a microphysical state of affairs realizes the existence of a thing of a certain kind, it must guarantee the instantiation of a number of properties. Will this have the consequence that the realizer of any one of a things property instances will at the same time be the realizer of all of its other property instances, or at least a sizable number of them, and that distinct property instances will not have distinct realizers ... 

But we can avoid this consequence by drawing on the point that the realizer will consist in part of a concrete state of affairs, in part of an existential state of affairs. The concrete state of affairs will be specific to the particular property whose instance is realized and can be viewed as the core of the realization of the instance. The positive part of the existential state of affairs will consist in its being the case that there are, appropriately related to that concrete state of affairs, other microphysical states of affairs that are realizers of instances of a number of other properties, each of these properties being of one of the kinds that a thing of the relevant sort must exemplify. This positive existential state of affairs will obtain in virtue of there existing a number of states of affairs that are partly concrete, each of which will be a total realizer of one of the properties coinstantiated with... 

Putting aside for now the question of what makes a microphysical state of affairs a realizer of the instantiation of some property or other, let us turn to the question of what makes a microphysical state of affairs a realizer of an instance of some particular property, one on whose identity we have some sort of handle. 1 think there is no hope for an answer to this question that does not appeal to the idea that properties are individuated by causal profiles.7 The causal profile of a property is constituted by facts about what instances of that property can cause, or contribute to causing (these are forward-looking causal features of the property), and what such instances can be caused by ( backward-looking causal features of it). If we can also assign causal profiles to microphysical states of affairs, or rather to types of microphysical states of affairs, this should provide a way of saying when a microphysical state of affairs is a realizer of an instance of a particular property. It will be such a realizer if it is of a type of microphysical states of affairs having a causal profile that corresponds in an appropriate way to the causal profile of the property. To fill out the account, we need to say what... 

Suppose that in a particular case the N-realizer of an instance of P includes a microphysical state of affairs Cp that qualifies as a / -core. We can suppose that the possessor of P also has property Q, where Q is of a kind such that any possessor of P must have some property of that kind (as, for example, any possessor of a particular shape must have some mass or other). Let Cq be the Q-core that is also a part of the N-realizer of the / -instance and Q-instance. Now it seems that the P instance could have occurred without the instance of Q occurring, and so without Cq occurring. For example, if P is the property of having a certain shape and Q is the property of having a certain mass, then although the instance of P must be accompanied by an instance of some mass property, it does not seem necessary that it should have been accompanied by an instance of the particular mass property Q. (For example, if some of the matter inside a thing had leaked out, it might have had the same shape but a lesser mass.) And if the instances have different modal properties, so should their total (specific) realizers. We can achieve this as follows. 

It might seem - and I at first thought - that this is a psychophysical identity theory that identifies mental property instances with microphysical states of affairs. But there are at least two obstacles to such an identification. 

But there is one sort of property realizer that mental properties have to have if their instances are realized in microphysical states of affairs. For any type of microphysical state of affairs that can be the maximally determinate realizer of an instance of a particular macrophysical property, there is a property something has just in case its career includes a microphysical state of affairs of that type that realizes an instance of that property. Let s speak of these as properties of macroscopic entities that embed maximally determinate microphysical states of affairs that are property instance realizers - call them microphysical-state-of-affairs-embedding properties, or MSE-properties. If a property is such that an instance of it can be realized in a maximally determinate microphysical state of affairs of a certain type, then the corresponding MSE-property will be among its possible property realizers. Assuming physicalism, mental properties will have such properties as realizers. But so also will all other properties of macroscopic things - or, rather, all other properties that are not themselves MSE-properties. Properties such as shape, mass, electrical charge, are ones whose different instances are realized in microphysical states of affairs of different sorts, and so ones that are realized in a variety of MSE-properties. 

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