Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 6:09 am
popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 3:38 am
Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 2:20 pm
We are subjects of in the sense that we can't extricate ourselves from our perceptions and experiences to stand outside of them entirely independent of them. To say that biology is everything is to elevate biology above all else and that is a second hand experience, not the way we experience life when we get right down to it.
That is a funny twist, not sure there is any credibility to it. No experience is second-hand. Experience is always true to the state of one's biology. Again, biology is the measure and the meaning of all things, apparent reality is a biological simulation or a biological readout of the energies of the physical world. There is only one way we experience, subjectively, and the merger of subject and object in one's biology creates your day-to-day reality or apparent reality.
Philosophically, I believe the view is as follows;
Philosophical realism [PR] claim that things exist by themselves regardless of humans [subjects] i.e. mind-independent.
The ANTI-PRs oppose above PR's claims is not tenable, rather they claim somehow things exist with an inevitable relation to human conditions.
The human conditions would include the biology of humans,
"Biology is the
scientific study of life" WIKI
thus to claim "biology is the measure and the meaning of all things"
is too wide.
Things may exist mind-independent, but mind-dependent is the only way we come to know the world of objects, mainly because they alter our standing biology. However, I contend that we do not experience things as they are, only how they alter our biology. This gives us experience and knowledge of how it relates to that biology, thus we give it meanings relative to their effects upon us--- it is hard because we are soft. To claim biology is the measure and the meaning of all things is simply reality. Our apparent reality is a biological readout a melody if you like that the outer world plays upon us as its instrument, it is a melody only the biological subject perceives as its day-to-day reality. All meaning belongs to the conscious subject and never to the world as object, for in the absence of a conscious subject the physical world is utterly meaningless.
To bring in 'biology' is not wrong but is not very philosophical.
The philosopher Protagoras claimed
"man is the measure of all things"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras
which is more realistic and covering the whole of the human conditions not "biology"-the scientific study of life. [/quote]
Biology is the study of life by biology, for all measures and all meanings are biologically dependent. Biology as a subject and the physical world as object are the summation/the totality, of the human condition. Pythagoras whether he realized it or not was touching on the reality that free will is nonsense. Your behaviors encompass your entire experiences to the present going right back to that primordial pond or ocean, the complexity of existence is all-encompassing.