[MD] Reifying carrots - corrected

[MarshaV]

Ooops.  That should have been anti-intellectual in the first sentence.  - m




> On Sep 11, 2010, at 8:31 PM, david buchanan wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Marsha to Dave:
>> If you listened to the videos on reification, you know that all of us who interpret the MoQ, the Intellectual Level or any level, are participating in the subject/object thinking that is the result of reification.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> dmb says:
>> 
>> If all of us who interpret the MOQ, the intellectual level or any level are participating in reification-caused SOM thinking, then so is the guy in the video and so are you. So even if you make an intellectual case against the mistake of reification, the case itself is inevitably a reification. It doesn't matter what anybody does. If ideas are used, even if those ideas are used to criticize and condemn reification and SOM, they're still reifications because that's just what ideas are. So there is no escape and any idea that ever was or could be is inherently false and fundamentally wrong.
>> 
>> A person would have to be insane to construe that position as anti-intellectual. And if such a crazy nut suggested such a thing, it would be a personal attack on Marsha. So it would be wrong to say she pushed the idea so far that it became absurd and illogical and intellectually paralyzing.
>> 
>> Reification is an idea, of course. The idea is supposed to be useful and helpful. The idea is suppose to help you avoid a fallacious kind of literalism, not put you in a mental straightjacket. 
>> 
>> It's an overblown and mixed up idea with very bad consequences. And yet Marsha clings to it like a lifeboat in a stormy sea.
>> 
>> I just don't get that. 
> 


For me, the MoQ represents Quality(unpatterned experience/patterned experience).  Once the analysis starts the discussion becomes reification-caused subject/object thinking.  But I don't think intellectual patterns are bad.  I don't understand the position as anti-intellectual.  As stated:  


"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' (p. 108). 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."   

I agree conventionally created entities are indispensable.  


Marsha 



 
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