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
Example diving a unit fraction by a whole number
So let’s see if we can figure out what one-third divided by five is. And I’ll give you a hint: try to draw out one-third of a whole and then divide it into five equal sections. Pause this video and try to do that. All right, now let’s try to work through…
A day in a life of someone who is taking a break from med school during Covid in Japan Vlog🇯🇵📸
Hi guys! Today I’m going to be showing you guys what my typical day in Japan looks like. At my grandparents’ house, breakfast is at 7 a.m., so I wake up at 6:50. This is literally me in the morning. My grandpa prepares breakfast for us. I can’t imagine a …
Why Black Holes Could Delete The Universe – The Information Paradox
Black holes are the most powerful things in the universe, strong enough to rip whole stars into atom-sized pieces. Well, this is scary enough. They have an even more powerful and dark property: they might delete the universe itself. Black holes in a nuts…
Kirchhoff's current law | Circuit analysis | Electrical engineering | Khan Academy
Up to now, we’ve talked about, uh, resistors, capacitors, and other components, and we’ve connected them up and learned about OHS law for resistors. We also learned some things about series resistors, like we show here the idea of Kirchhoff’s laws. These …
Building The World's Best Image Diffusion Model
I think we thought the product was going to be one way, and then we literally ripped it all up in a month and a half or so before release. We were sort of like lost in the jungle for a moment, like a bit of a panic. There’s a lot of unsolved problems basi…
How to Overcome Yourself | Nietzsche’s Superman
When you hear the word ‘Superman,’ you might think of Henry Cavill with superhuman abilities wearing a tight blue outfit and a red cape. But this superhero, originally from American comic books published by DC Comics, is not the original Superman. In fact…