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
Gideon v Wainwright
[Instructor] Now we’re gonna talk about an important Supreme Court case that reinforced the idea that states have to provide the same rights when people are arrested and accused of a crime, as are guaranteed in the United States Constitution. And that c…
Multiplying whole numbers by 10 | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
Multiplying by 10 creates a really neat pattern with numbers, so let’s try a few out and see if we can discover the pattern. Let’s try to figure it out. We’ll start with one that maybe we already know. Let’s start something like 2 * 10, and maybe we know …
Grant Cardone: The 401K IS A SCAM?!
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So, I was watching this good old uncle Grant Cardone the other day, and I came across a video he made: “What is a 401(k)?” I figured, you know what? Let’s give it a shot; let’s see what he thinks, and maybe I can lear…
AP US history long essay example 3 | US History | Khan Academy
This is the third video in a series about tackling the long essay question on the AP US History exam. Now, in the last video, we were kind of weighing the evidence about the New Deal, considering the ways in which the government, the economy, and race, c…
Just Let Go | The Philosophy of Fight Club
Life is short. It’s ending one minute at a time. Why waste it on fulfilling other people’s expectations? This is just one of those questions presented in a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk named Fight Club. The film version of Fight Club, directed by Dav…
Conservation of angular momentum | Torque and angular momentum | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy
Let’s talk a little bit about the conservation of angular momentum. This is going to be really useful because it explains diverse phenomena in the universe. From why an ice skater’s angular speed goes up when they tuck their arms or their legs in, all the…