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
Creativity break: How do you apply creativity in algebra | Algebra 1 | Khan Academy
[Music] So if you’re trying to communicate a complex topic such as mathematics or a mathematical problem to the general public who might not be familiar with the specifics behind that problem, there are many different ways to help you get that concept acr…
Determining whether values are in domain of function
We’re asked to determine for each x value whether it is in the domain of f or not, and they have our definition of f of x up here. So pause this video and see if you can work through this before we do it together. All right, so just as a bit of a review,…
Why Elephants May Go Extinct in Your Lifetime | National Geographic
Elephants are in trouble. We lose about 100 elephants every day, some 30,000 elephants each year to poaching. There are still stores around the world that are selling ivory trinkets. We are looking at the extinction of a species simply because we have the…
How Will the World End? | Street Spirituality
[Music] [Music] Foree: The world will never end, uh, but if it does end, I think everything will just fall apart. I don’t [Music] know. Don’t get scientific. Star explosion, where we collide with something. I don’t know, a lot of light would come into th…
The Stock Market Is About To Flip
What’s down you guys? It’s Graham here. So, as we start off the new year of 2021, we have to talk about something that’s been brought up a lot lately, especially now that the stock market is near its all-time high, and that has to do with our stock marke…
Vertices & direction of a hyperbola | Precalculus | High School Math | Khan Academy
Which of the following graphs can represent the hyperbola ( \frac{y^2}{9} - \frac{x^2}{4} = 1 )? We have our four choices here. Choices A and C open up to the top and the bottom, or up and down. Choices B and D, you can see, D here opens to the left and …