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
Cynthia Nixon on Playing Nancy Reagan | Killing Reagan
Nancy Reagan is a fiercely devoted champion lover guard dog of her husband. She’s a political person, not so much in that she’s an issues person, but that she feels the temperature in the room. She can feel who’s on her side and who’s on her husband’s sid…
For Syrian Refugees, He Is a Friendly Face in a Strange New Land | Short Film Showcase
I think that facing death changes people, which is what happened with me. Before this experience, I was a completely different person with a completely different dream. My last dream, which was to treat cancer, and right now my dream of changing the world…
The Most Advanced Civilization In The Universe
[Music] Earth and civilization, as we know it, has come a long way in the past 200,000 years and has experienced a multitude of changes. In that time, the human species has only existed for a mere 0.0015 percent of the immense 13.7 billion-year age of the…
Divergence formula, part 1
Hello everyone. So, now that we have an intuition for what divergence is trying to represent, let’s start actually drilling in on a formula. The first thing I want to do is just limit our perspective to functions that only have an x component, or rather w…
Dividing mixed numbers example
Let’s see if we can figure out what four and four-fifths divided by one and one-half is, and I encourage you to pause the video and see if you can figure it out on your own. And I’ll give you a hint: see if you can rewrite these mixed numbers as what is s…
Rock Climbing: Taking the Fun Outdoors | Get Out: A Guide to Adventure
My name is Megan Martin. I am a professional rock climber, and today we’re going to talk about transitioning from the gym to the crack. One of the main reasons someone would want to transition from climbing in the gym all the time to climbing in a crack i…