yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Supervenience


2m read
·Nov 8, 2024

One of the questions was, "Um, how is it that logic supervenes on our brains?"

And I think it's a good question.

Um, I think it's a question that we're not currently in a position to give a full answer to.

Um, for that, our understanding of how the brain and the mind are interrelated needs to be, uh, much more advanced than it currently is.

Um, but I think by way of analogy, I can give you an idea of how, uh, a materialist conception of the mind—how it, how it can, how it approaches this question.

Anyway, so to take the example of a computer, um, we know exactly, uh, the parts that make up a computer, and we know exactly what happens in those parts in order for the computer to do the things it's expected to do.

Ultimately, what happens inside a computer is electrons move around.

That's all it is at a basic level, and yet we're happy to say things like the computer calculates, uh, a sum, an equation, or the computer displays a web page.

And yet we don't feel the need to posit some kind of immaterial entity or immaterial knowledge or symbol or something from another realm that somehow is injected into the computer that enables it to do these things.

We know exactly what's in a computer, what happens in a computer, and we also know that in a manner of speaking, the result is greater than the sum of its parts.

The ability to calculate or to display a web page supervenes on the fundamental activity of electrons in a computer.

And what the materialist worldview says, or at least the version that I'm familiar with, is that in a similar way, the electrical and chemical activity inside the brain gives rise to Consciousness, thought, abstract Concepts, etc.

So logic, as in our internal representation of the most general features of the reality in which we find ourselves, logic in that sense supervenes on the physical.

I hope that makes it a bit clearer.

More Articles

View All
a productive day in the life vlog
Hi guys, it’s me, Ruri. So yeah, I just woke up. I head to the bathroom, I took a very cold shower, and now I’m doing my skincare routine. After doing my skincare, I’ll make myself some coffee and start studying. Peace. Oh, why does my hair look this weir…
Is It Okay to Touch Mars?
[Music] Hey, Vauce! Michael here. No rocks from Mars have ever been brought back to Earth, and no human has ever touched anything on Mars. But that’s about to change. National Geographic has asked me, and Jake, and Kevin to talk about Mars because they ha…
Top 10 Most Expensive Perfumes In The World
[Music] The top 10 most expensive perfumes in the world. Welcome to alux.com, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. Hey there, Alexers! It’s time to really talk about luxury and fine taste. It’s not often we encounter products that ar…
Identifying scale factor in drawings | Geometry | 7th grade | Khan Academy
So right over here, figure B is a scaled copy of figure A, and what we want to do is figure out what is the scale factor to go from figure A to figure B. Pause the video and see if you can figure that out. Well, all we have to do is look at corresponding…
The Crux Episode 4 | Full Episode | National Geographic
Growing up, I watched the Olympics when they were in Vancouver, and I thought, wow, it would be really cool to be one of those athletes one day. But I never thought it would actually come true. It did on the first Olympics ever, which is like even more sp…
Here’s how I made $65,000 PER MONTH in Real Estate in 2017 (Income Breakdown + Strategies)
So for the $480,000 that I made from the first two income sources, plus the $300,000 in appreciation, that comes out to about seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars in 2017, which works out to be about sixty-five thousand dollars per month in real esta…