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
Relating fractions to 1
We are told to select the two fractions that are greater than one, so pause this video and see if you can figure out which two of these fractions are greater than one. All right, now let’s work on this together. The main realization here, the main thing …
Ballet Shoes: The Craft Before the Dance | Short Film Showcase
My name’s Tony Collins of Jim to free data. As a young lad, I arrived on the end of ‘69, 1969. I’ve been here ever since and out the lot of it at the old school from where we originated from Leicester Square. This is about three of us left in the firm sti…
Why The Middle Class Are Financially RUINED
What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here and unfortunately, I have some rather discouraging news. Some of this might come as a surprise to you, and some of it might not. But regardless, here’s what we’re dealing with right now in terms of the middle class he…
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…
Warren Buffett: How to Invest Tiny Sums of Money
I think if you’re working with a small amount of money, I think you can make very significant sums. But as soon as you start getting the money up into the millions, many millions, the curve on expectable results falls off just dramatically. So, I just cam…
See the Sparks That Set Off Violence in Charlottesville | National Geographic
The point of the rally is to, number one, protect this statue because this statue is one of many statues that are in honor of the history of Western civilization and European peoples that are being torn down. [Applause] The policies that liberals have put…