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
Introduction to proteins and amino acids | High school biology | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about proteins. Some of you all might already be familiar with them, at least in some context. If you look at any type of packaging on food, you’ll oftentimes see a label that has protein listed in a certain nu…
The #1 Investing Mistake Of 2019
What’s the guys? It’s Graham here, and you know what? We made it! Congratulations, it’s officially 2020. This is the year to destroy the like button for the YouTube algorithm. Plus, as weird as it is to say, we are now closer to the year 2050 than we are …
Khan Academy Live: SAT Math
Hello and welcome to Khan Academy live SAT. I’m Eric, I’m an SAT tutor and one of the SAT experts here at Khan Academy, and I’m so excited to be with you today and over the course of the next few weeks as we cover SAT Math, reading, and writing with one c…
The Story of Us with Morgan Freeman | National Geographic
This is the story of mankind: our beliefs, our struggles, our traditions, and our inspirations. This is the story of us. Once again, my journeys take me around the world, meeting inspiring individuals from all walks of life. As always, I’ve got a lot of …
Simplifying rational expressions: two variables | High School Math | Khan Academy
Let’s see if we can simplify this expression, and like always, pause the video and have a go at it. Now, this one is interesting because it involves two variables, but it’s really the same ideas that we’ve done when we factored things with one variable. …
Warren Buffett's Advice for the 2023 Economic Recession
Are we through the banking crisis at this point? Failures, the orders of banks may have lost a hell of a lot of money. The people who want the debt of the holding company, they may lose a lot of money. People can, they can lose a lot of money, uh, but the…