/lit/ - Literature

You, as subject, have never existed without something as your object.

Philosophically, to "spin" out the subject from the object (ie materialism) is equally erroneous as trying to "spin" out the object from the subject (ie idealism). This is because you are abstracting away one component of the subject/object relationship to create a scenario in which subject or object stand purely by themselves, which has never occurred in experience. The very definitions of subject and object become meaningless in these scenarios.

If one is serious about the truth, one must begin their philosophy with the subject/object relationship as the starting point.

This starting point is the representation, the mental image of reality [object] produced by cognition [subject].

In Schopenhauer's work, our cognition's "a priori" forms of space, time, and causality are discussed constantly and are precisely the foundation of this philosophy.

But these "forms" themselves are never really interrogated further, and they are never pinned to anything concrete and real.

So my question is this:

Could these a priori forms of space, time, and causality of our cognition simply be the fact that our cognition is comprised of neurons that are arranged:

1) as arrays (space)
2) successively, end-to-end (time)
3) transform external signals step-wise into neural firing signals that are passed through the successive array to produce the mental image aka representation.

Are these the physiological correlates to the abstract concept of apriori forms of space, time, and causality in Schopenhauer's (and Kant's) works?

In other words, if our neurons comprised some new, fourth apriori form, then our representations would be mental images of successive changes in space of objects through time, linked together by causality, and [insert fourth apriori form inferred from arrangement of neurons]?

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