[MD] The other side of reified

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
I asked you the other day to post what you thought was my understanding of 'reification.'   Of course you didn't.  So I'll ask you again,  please explain my understanding of 'reification.''  Explain my understanding in its entirety.

dmb says:
I just dished up your thoughts on reification and explained the objections. You "understanding in its entirety" is incoherent. It is a series of contradictions, of mutually exclusive claims.
You can't say that reification is "interdependent with the conceptualization process" or simply "conceptualization reifies" AND also say that concepts are necessary to act in the world. You can't say reification is inescapable AND also say it is a tendency that may occur. Those are contradictory claims. Reification is a conceptual error, one we want to correct because of the vital importance and value of concepts or concepts themselves are inescapably doomed to reify experience and we ought to kill the intellect because its a prison. These are wildly opposed claims and you want to say them both at the same time. That's what I mean by calling saying your view is incoherent. For the millionth time.
Marsha posted this quote:
"Indeed the tendency of the human mind to assume the existence of things that are in fact nonentities is considered to lie at the root of a broad range of unnecessary conflicts and miseries.  The most basic expression of this mental distortion is the reification of oneself as an intrinsically existent personal identity. Having reified oneself, it is inevitable that one reifies others in the same way, and this sets up absolute demarcations between self and other.  One naturally also reifies one's natural environment as intrinsically existent, and therefore as absolutely other. " (Wallace, B. Alan, 'Choosing Reality, : A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind', 2003, p.142)

dmb says:
He's talking about SOM. This is just another way of saying what Pirisg and James say about subjects and objects. He's talking about the metaphysics of substance, scientific materialism and common sense realism. Do you think this is at odds with the MOQ? I don't. When James said there is no such "thing" as consciousness in 1904, it shook the world, Bertrand Russell said. It was the biggest thing since Descartes, Whitehead said. Pirsig quotes James saying subjects and objects are the products of experience, secondary concepts, and not the starting points of reality. SOM then leads to amoral science, ugly technology and a terrible secret loneliness. I think it'd be fair to call that suffering. It would make sense if you were using this quote to support and illuminate the ideas of Pirsig and James or explain why SOM is such problem - instead of using it to attack the human mind.

Marsha said:
... The word 'inborn' is stronger than than 'tendency.'

dmb said:
And "inborn" would not be accurate if taken literally. Wallace is just talking about natural realism, the unphilosophical, practical kind of realism. But you're taking "inborn" to mean something like "hard-wired", like there is just no way to avoid it or, to combine your terms, an inescapable prison. Again, the result is an attack on thought itself, on all words and ideas as such.




-------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> On Jun 2, 2011, at 1:20 PM, david buchanan wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Marsha said to dmb:
> > You obviously have no idea of my understanding of reification.  -  The quotes I present match my view perfectly.  
> > 
> > 
> > Here is the quote that presents Marsha's view "perfectly":
> > "One of the chief causes of bondage is, not so much the faculty of conceptualization, but rather the propensity to grasp onto the products of that faculty. The rational nature, like the dispositions Nagarjuna discussed in section seven of the karika, has a value. Concepts are an important and necessary tool to be used in ordering one’s world and acting within it."
> > 
> > dmb says:
> > Your pants must be on fire because Wallace's statement is pretty much the opposite of what you say. To cite a recent example, you said, "I might have defended Bo because of his loyalty to the MD, but that was not the reason I came to believe Bo is correct. I was backed into a corner, he backed me into a corner, and I was struck wordless. I realized that conceptualization reifies. I didn't know the word then, but I clearly understood the process. Only later did I stumble across the word 'reify' and after reading it a number of times I recognized it as the process from which I couldn´t escape..."
> > 
> > See, Wallace describes the problem as the propensity to grasp the products of conceptualization and NOT the faculty of conceptualization itself. Wallace says concepts are necessary for acting in the world. You say, simply, conceptualization reifies, period. And you say you cannot escape this process. This goes along with your assertion that language is some kind of prison, with the assertion that intellectual patterns are to be killed rather than cured, with the assertion that the intellectual level is forever doomed to conform to SOM. It all adds up to a profoundly anti-intellectual view and it's a gross distortion of what Wallace, James and Pirsig are all saying about this problem. These guys are not philosophical enemies with each other and it makes no sense to pit them against each other. 
> > 
> > I don't even think you're being honest in the normal sense, let alone intellectually honest. It's just plain foolish to lie about what you did and did not say because your posts are in the archives and anyone can see that you're not telling the truth. Jeez, don't you have any shame? 
> > 
> > 
> > 		 	   		  
> > Moq_Discuss mailing list
> > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> > Archives:
> > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> > http://moq.org/md/archives.html
> 
> 
>  
> ___
>  
> 
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html