[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[MarshaV]

Ron,

I have a busy day ahead.  Do you really want to play twenty questions?
From past experience, you probably want only to have me make a 
contradictory statement to prove me: use whatever your favorite word 
to hurl at me is at the moment.  

I've explained reification.  And because fault is often found with my 
attempts to explain, I have offered numerous examples taken from 
Buddhists texts explaining the delusion of conventional reality.   
Here's one:

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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    

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If one want to transcend the reification habit, try mindfulness and 
mediation.  There's nothing like seeing it work first-hand to destroy 
its mental habituation.   

The thread "Reifying Carrots" has lots more examples.   

Thanks.   

Marsha
 
 
 


On Dec 18, 2010, at 9:34 AM, X Acto wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ron,
> 
> And I did state:
> 
> The delusion is to think that static truths (patterns) are independent.  
> Static truths (patterns) are ever-changing, inter-dependent,
> and impermanent.  
> 
> 
> Marsha 
> 
> Marsha,
> I thought you maintained that human beings could only
> function to percieve static truths are independant.
> Reification is the way the human mind functions.



> 
> How is this resolved?  


 
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