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
Teleportation: Tearing the Fabric of Spacetime
The date is October 23rd, 1593. The governor of the Philippines had just been assassinated a few days after setting off on our journey from Manila. His ship and crew were overthrown by Chinese pirates on board. When the news of his assassination reached t…
How America's First Shark Panic Spurred a Century of Fear | National Geographic
It was 100 years ago that America became terrified of sharks. In 1916, a great white was blamed for the first spate of shark attacks recorded in US history. That summer, the East Coast sweltered in a relentless heat wave. Along the New Jersey shore, thous…
Epic Grand Canyon Hike: Frozen Shoes and Low on Food (Part 2) | National Geographic
After 160 miles of hiking without a trail, we’d hoped our next sections would get easier. They didn’t. With 500 plus miles to go, we have to keep moving downstream. For the next two months, we do just that, hiking 12 hours a day, often hunting water and l…
Place value blocks | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
What number is shown by the place value blocks? So here we have several sets of place value blocks, some with many, many, many blocks, and some with just single blocks stacked on top of each other. We want to know what number is represented by all of the…
The Peloponnesian War | World History | Khan Academy
As we’ve already seen, the fifth century BCE starts off with Athens and Sparta and various Greek city-states fighting on the same side against the Persian invaders. But as we saw in the last video, as soon as the Persians are dealt with, tensions start to…
npage85: knowing the fundamental character of X
And page 85 made a video called “The Brain Doesn’t Create the Mind.” In it, he tried to use a deductive argument to prove the existence of souls. It went like this: Premise one: All fundamentally same processes create fundamentally same products. Premis…