[MD] Thus spoke Lila

[MarshaV]

On Dec 7, 2010, at 2:34 PM, Arlo Bensinger wrote:

> [Marsha]
> Wagner's leitmotiv seem to me like reified concepts.
> 
> [Arlo]
> Just out of curiosity, do you think there are such things as "unreified concepts"? If not, why do you use the word at all? Why not just say "concepts"? Or is it a pejorative, like "just"?
> 
'

"Well, we 'seek and find, or project, a simplifying pattern to approximate every complex field ... by lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible) and by splitting (ignoring some relations as negligible)."

From:   

From a review of the book ‘Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground’.  

How do we deal with the complexity of experience? Well, we 'seek and find, or project, a simplifying pattern to approximate every complex field ... by lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible) and by splitting (ignoring some relations as negligible). Both ... create discreet entities useful for manipulating, predicting and controlling ... [but] may impose ad hoc boundaries on what are actually densely interconnected systems and then grant autonomous existence to the segments. Even the contents of our own consciousness have to be dealt with in this way, resulting in our array of fragmented self-concepts, and we just put up with the anomalies that arise. Buddhism, he explains, agrees that discovering entities is conventionally indispensable, but attachment and aggression arise through reifying them, which violates the principle that all things are interdependent, and all entities are conditional approximations."
 

http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol4/buddhism_and_science.html    

 
I am not opposed to reification; it's a very useful intellectual tool.   


Marsha 
 
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