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
2015 AP Calculus 2c | AP Calculus AB solved exams | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
Let H be the vertical distance between the graphs of f and g in region s. Find the rate at which H changes with respect to x when x is equal to 1.8. So, we have region s right over here. You can’t see it that well since I drew over it. What you see in re…
The Black Swan Theory
You are a chicken. Yes, you. You look around and sometimes wonder why your owner takes such good care of you. At first, you’re not sure; you’re skeptical. What if he sends you to the slaughterhouse? You’ve never been there, but you know very well none of …
Matrices as transformations of the plane | Matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to explore how a two by two matrix can be interpreted as representing a transformation on the coordinate plane. So let’s just start with some examples or some conceptual ideas. The first conceptual idea is that any point on our…
Investigating Plastic Surgery Clinics | Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller
[suspenseful music] BLONDE WOMAN (VOICEOVER): Until recently, the high cost of plastic surgery meant that the only option for some patients seeking exaggerated curves were underground procedures like the silicone shots I witnessed in Atlanta. So this is …
Affordable Watches For Your Collection | Reacting To Underappreciated Watches FT. Teddy Baldassarre
This is the gateway drug. It is, I mean, this is it, so be careful. What if I told you this watch is around 300 bucks? Can’t be! You know, you instead of going out for dinner, buy a watch. Okay, Mr. Wonderful here, you know I’m doing a very special editio…
The TRUTH behind why Tai Lopez ads are SO EFFECTIVE
Tai Lopez ads are some of the most effectively crafted ads I have ever seen. To make a video like this, I watched every single Tai Lopez ad I could from beginning to end just so I could better understand the fundamentals of what was really going on from a…