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
Half the universe was missing... until now
This episode was sponsored by KiwiCo. More about them at the end of the show. Until recently, half the universe was missing or hidden or just… undetected. And no, I’m not talking about dark matter or dark energy, which make up 27 and 68 percent of our un…
How do you know if a business idea is worth pursuing?
How do you know if a business idea is worth pursuing? So, my take on that is to think about what you are going to uniquely bring to the table. Sometimes I’ve been at a restaurant with a friend, and they’re like, “Oh, this restaurant’s doing so well, I th…
The Housing Market Just Went Negative
[Music] What’s up, real estate? It’s BlackRock here, and in the last few days, I have been overwhelmed with non-stop requests to talk about what appears to be one of the biggest and most controversial real estate stories of the entire year. It’s the claim…
Big Data by the Numbers | Explorer
I’m Richard Bacon. Let’s talk about surveillance. But let’s do it quietly because they’re probably listening. That thing in your pocket that you call a smartphone, it’s a tracking device that just happens to make calls. Digital tracking has become a part …
Into the Ocean | Branching Out | Part 3
[Music] As we eco-road trip across this amazing land, we can’t forget the rivers we’ve crossed and the waves crashing beside coastal roads. More than 70 percent of our planet is covered in water, and more than 96 of that is in our oceans. Unfortunately, 1…
Meet The Homeless Man Who Bought A Bugatti | TheStradman
[Applause] What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here! So a little over four years ago, right before I started making YouTube videos, I met James, also known as The Stradman, through a close friend of mine, Gordon, also known as F-Spot. We started talking cars;…