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
Intermolecular forces and vapor pressure | Intermolecular forces | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
So we have four different molecules here, and what I want you to think about is if you had a pure sample of each, which of those pure samples would have the highest boiling point, second highest, third highest, and fourth highest? Pause this video and try…
DIY High Speed Video Camera - Muybridge Style - Smarter Every Day 5
[Music] Hey, it’s me, Destin. The idea, here at Smarter Every Day, is to make you smarter. I guess it was 1872, the governor of California tried to solve the age-old question: When a horse runs, are all four of its hooves off the ground at any point in tr…
Why Robinhood Blocked Gamestop. (Full Explanation)
We made the decision, uh, in the morning to limit the buying of about 13 securities on our platform. So, to be clear, uh, customers could still sell those securities if they had positions in them, and they could also trade in the thousands of other securi…
Did I quit med school? | How I'm spending my days living alone in Rome 🇮🇹 LIFE UPDATE
[Music] foreign [Music] Good morning everyone! Today is another day, and I’m going to take you guys along with what I do in the day because a lot of you guys have been asking: “Don’t you have med school? What are you doing today? What are you doing with …
Vitalik: Ethereum, Part 2
Vitalik, I want to ask you a little bit about how your role has evolved since it began in Ethereum. So, in the very beginning, before all of this, of course, you were once the uppity young entrepreneur. It’s been, what, six, seven years now? You’ve moved …
What Actually Causes Dandruff?
Hey! This episode was sponsored by Head & Shoulders. A hundred and twenty-five million years ago, in what is now China, dinosaurs walked the earth, and a few species of small feathered dinosaurs climbed trees. This is Sinornithosaurus. Although they c…