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
Worked example: Identifying an element from its mass spectrum | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
So let’s say that we have some mystery substance here, and we know that it’s a pure element. We need to figure out what it is. Well, scientists have a method, and we go into the details or more details in other videos called mass. Sometimes it’s known as …
Decomposing shapes to find area (subtract) | Math | 3rd grade | Khan Academy
What is the area of the shaded figure? So down here we have this green shaded figure, and it looks like a rectangle, except it has this square cut out in the middle. So when we find its area, we can think of it exactly like that. We want to know how much…
Stolen Mummy's Left Hand Found and Returned to Egypt | National Geographic
We have a repatriation of ancient artifacts from Egypt. It includes a child sarcophagus about 2,600 years old, the top of another mummy sarcophagus, a burial shroud from inside a mummy sarcophagus, and finally, there is a mummified hand which was collecte…
How to Conserve Water | National Geographic
Today, I’m in Colorado, a state that can see more snow than Alaska. Standing here in the banks of this frozen reservoir, it’s easy to understand why water seems like a limitless resource. But the fact is, in the United States, we could face a national wat…
How To Make Passive Income with $500
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. So we’re going to be talking about something that I have not mentioned for a very long time here on YouTube, and it’s a term that either gets people really excited or makes them feel as though they’re about to be invi…
The REAL potential of generative AI
You’ve heard of large language models like Chat GPT, Chat GPT, Chat GPT, Chat GPT. They can answer questions, write stories, and even engage in conversation. But if you want to build a business that uses this technology, you’ll need to ask yourself an imp…