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
Shower Thoughts That Make Me Question Everything
I promise it hasn’t been eight months since I last had a shower. This year has just flown by so quickly that I didn’t get time to gather my thoughts. My shower thoughts: dreams are confusing. Some people believe that they can tell the future; others feel …
Nat Geo Staff Ranks Top 8 BEST Walking Shoes for Men and Women | National Geographic
Heyo! I’m Starlight Williams, a digital editor at National Geographic and your go-to gal for information you didn’t know you needed. Today I’m teaming up with my fellow walking aficionado, Ruben Rodriguez Perez, to talk to you about our picks for the best…
How Big Can a Person Get?
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Ten centimeters - about four inches. This is how much taller on average people are today than they were 150 years ago. Better nutrition and medical care early in life has allowed us to better take advantage of the blueprints wi…
The Unspoken Rules of Society
You wake up in the morning, head outside and you say good morning to your next-door neighbor. You walk down the street and you see a familiar face, so you nodded them to let them know that you acknowledge them. You get into a bus and an old lady walks in …
Zoroastrianism | World History | Khan Academy
So in any discussion of ancient Persia, we quickly talk about the faith of the Achaemenid Empire, and that’s Zoroastrianism. It’s popularized by Cyrus the Great when he establishes the Achaemenid Empire, takes over the Median Empire, the Babylonian Neo-Ba…
2015 AP Biology free response 5
Phototropism in plants is a response in which a plant shoot grows toward a light source. The results of five different experimental treatments from classic investigations of phototropism are shown above. Part A: Give support for the claim that the cells …