Philosophical Connundrums

Consider the following from a great article in the San Diego Reader this week, the full article is here: Philosophy Majors Sit Around and Think About Things

"Sentence one: Lois Lane believes that Superman can fly.

Sentence two: Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent can fly. "

"Sentence one is true. Sentence two is false, because Lois Lane doesn't know that Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same person. From this, it seems reasonable to conclude that it's the substitution of the name "Superman" for "Clark Kent" that changes the sentence from true to false. Let's call that our intuition. And let's call the truth or falsity of a sentence its truth value Simple enough."

“… The first: Proper names that refer to the same thing have the same meaning. In this case, "Superman" and "Clark Kent" mean the same thing, since they both refer to the same person. The second principle: "Embedding a proper name in a belief context does not change its meaning." That is, putting "Superman" and "Clark Kent" in sentences about Lois Lane's beliefs doesn't change the meaning of "Superman" and "Clark Kent." Got it. And for principle number three: "The meaning of a sentence comes from its structure and from the meaning of its parts."

Now -- "If we accept that sentences with the same meaning must have the same truth value" -- a reasonable claim in Niemeyer's opinion -- "then the truth value of the sentences must be one and the same." So, because sentence one and sentence two mean the same thing, they must have the same truth value. But our intuition was that they did not have the same truth value.”

Fair enough. For sentence two to be false is should read “Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent cannot fly”. Obviously, because we know Superman and Clark Kent are the same person. But if we had no pre-existing notion of Superman or Clark Kent, then would sentence one and sentence two be true?

No, because Superman and Clark Kent are still a priori the same person. I doesn’t matter what we believe for something to be true because truth exists outside our perception. Much like 2 plus 2 equals 4. This equation is true even if we change the names of the objects.

Another interesting tidbit from the article:

"In it, she places herself on the side of Aristotle and other philosophers who favor "the hypothesis that mental functions map onto a certain kind of physical organization. That is, they are brain activities." She opposes this to the view of thinkers like Plato, who embraced "the idea that the mind cannot be a physical thing but must be ontologically distinct from the physical brain." She pricked the mind-folk for not being able to explain how a "nonphysical soul (or nonphysical properties) can have effects on the physical world without violating the law of conservation of mass-energy." And she suggested that they were clinging to the "folk intuition that brain activity and mental experiences are too different to permit a neural explanation of mental events."

So tell me, how does “thought” violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics? How does thought impact the physical world? Unless, thought then translates into action, but that is something altogether different in my mind. No pun intended. In what way, does neural activity generate thought? It is (at least at this point in time) an unprovable theory. In order, to absolutely hold that thought is a function of neural activity, you would have to prove that thought ceases when neural activity ceases. But in order to do that, you’d have ask a dead person wouldn’t you?

Interesting article, I suggest you read the whole thing.