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
Grand Canyon Adventure: The 750-Mile Hike That Nearly Killed Us (Part 3) | Nat Geo Live
By now it’s March. Winter’s over, the weather’s starting to warm up. Starting to feel vestiges, signs of heat again, and Pete and I are about to pass through a doorway. We’re about to step across a threshold into a section of the canyon that is rumored by…
Doc Brown "Loved Himself Some Einstein" | StarTalk
Einstein always kind of, uh, amazes me. And it was he amazes us all, by the way. Yes, yeah, and he was just a clerk in the patent Department. Yeah, nobody knew, you know, but he’s going looking at this, and there’s a railroad station. And he spent a lot …
The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves
1.3 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, two black holes merged. As they violently spiraled into each other, they created traveling distortions in the fabric of space-time: gravitational waves. In the last tenth of a second, the energy released in…
The Worth of Water | National Geographic
You know, there’s a saying: even if you are next to a river of water, save each drop because you don’t know whether there will be a drop tomorrow. The more people on Earth, the less available water we’re going to have to drink. The most important thing is…
2015 AP Chemistry free response 6 | Studying for the AP Chemistry exam? | Chemistry | Khan Academy
A student learns that ionic compounds have significant covalent character when a cation has a polarizing effect on a large anion. So what are they talking about? So if I have a cation, so this is my cation, and then this is my large anion, my large anion…
How To Get Rich According To Jeff Bezos
There are a million ways to make $1,000,000. And this is how Jeff Bezos did it. He needs no introduction. Right. So let’s just cut straight to the chase. Customers have the money, not the competition. Well, many people think about the competition. Bezos …