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
Kieran Snyder of Textio at the Seattle Female Founders Conference
To our next speaker, Sharon Schneider, who is the founder and CEO of Textio. Oh, so I actually started hearing about Textio last year from a number of YC alumni who used and loved Textio. They use Textio to analyze their job postings. So, Textio is used …
How Are National Park Trips Different From What They Used to Be? | National Geographic
I think that every generation experiences the natural world differently. Like the 50s and 60s, like this glorified Yellowstone, go see the bears. Maybe during my parents’ generation, the park system was sort of blooming and emerging, whereas now it’s a bi…
Pollution and human health| Aquatic and Terrestrial Pollution| Khan Academy
Hey there friends! All of my life, I’ve struggled with asthma, and normally it doesn’t bother me too much. But when it’s really cold outside or if I’ve worked out really hard, my asthma symptoms get worse. When this happens, or in other words, when I get…
The Most Disturbing Reality TV Show of All Time
[Applause] What else? Yeah, let’s see. What else would you walk around naked with 17 million people watching, including your friends and family? Get locked away for 15 months and have zero contact with the outside world, and have to choose between starvat…
Surviving a Water Crisis in Detroit | Parched
We wash dishes. This is our dish thing. Is that this container work? It out our clothes. We have washing clothes. Survivor mode, you come to use the bathroom, will use it. We have a bucket going to get full. Take our school per scoop out. Whenever we have…
BEST of MARGIN CALL #4 - Senior Partners Emergency Meeting
Please, sit down. Welcome, everyone. I must apologize for dragging you all here at such an uncommon hour. But from what I’ve been told, this matter needs to be dealt with urgently. So urgently, in fact, it probably should have been addressed weeks ago. Bu…