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
Associative and commutative properties of addition with negatives | 7th grade | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is evaluate this pretty hairy expression. We could just try to do it; we could go from left to right, but it feels like there might be a simpler way to do it. I’m adding 13 here, and then I’m subtracting 13. I have a n…
Is Meat Really that Bad?
Food is arguably the best thing about being alive. No other bodily pleasure is enjoyed multiple times every day and never gets old. It’s an expression of culture, our parents’ love, and a means of celebration or comfort. That’s why it hits a special nerve…
The Seventh Amendment | US government and civics | Khan Academy
Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy. Today, we’re learning more about the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to juries in civil cases when the value in controversy is greater than twenty dollars. To learn…
What's in Peanut Butter? | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 7)
What’s in here? What does it do, and can I make it from scratch? Ingredients for the purposes of peanut butter: peanuts are just peanut oil and then all the stuff in here that is not peanut oil. So, things like sugars, starches, and proteins. When you bl…
why Japanese people are so healthy and long living? 🇯🇵
The average life expectancy in Japan is 84 years according to the OECD. Japanese women can expect to live to the age of 87, 6 years more than their counterparts in the U.S. Japanese men can expect to live to 81, five years more than their American peers. …
Christopher Columbus part 2
Hey Becca, hey Kim. All right, so you’ve brought me here to talk about Columbus and the origins of Columbus Day. So, what’s the deal with Christopher Columbus? Was he a good guy? So, that’s a great question, Kim, and it’s something that historians and pe…