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
Government Shutdown Imminent, Rates Spike, Stocks Collapse
Back here at home, time is running out to avoid a government shutdown. Billions of Americans could go without paychecks, including members of the military. The country is headed for a shutdown, and everyone should prepare as such. Big guys, it’s Graham h…
Cosine equation solution set in an interval
In a previous video, we established the entire solution set for the following equation. We saw that all the x’s that can satisfy this equation are a combination of these x’s and these x’s. Here, the reason why I’m referring to each of them is numerous x’s…
Ron Conway at Startup School 2013
Good morning! Good morning! Mic, mic works. Okay, well, thanks for coming, Ron. We’re delighted to have you here, and we’re going to jump right into things. Um, I wanted to talk about Twitter first because Jack Dorsey is coming here later, and they’re go…
Flipping and compressing a graph
The graph of y is equal to the absolute value of x is reflected across the x-axis and then compressed vertically by a factor of 8⁄3. What is the equation of the new graph? All right, so let’s think about this step by step. If I start, and I’m just going …
Celsius Made His Thermometer Upside Down
DEREK: How did Celsius define his scale? MICHAEL: Uh… He took the temperature water freezes at and said that’s zero and then he took the temperature it boils at and says that’s a hundred. And he figured a hundred was a good amount of demarcations to make…
Invasive Species 101 | National Geographic
(birds tweeting) [Announcer] Rapidly growing, consuming, adapting, they conquer. Jeopardizing local economies, threatening human health, and devastating entire ecosystems. [Man] As whole rows of cherished landmarks are condemned, brought home to town-dw…