[MD] reifying carrots

[MarshaV]

"Confronted with the transiency of experience and the ever-present physical and psychological threats to our integrity and survival, organisms with higher nervous systems such as ourselves must be able to recognize and comprehend recurrent patterns underlying our variegated forms of experience, and to construct working models capable of anticipation, predication, and premeditation. In this sense, the emergence of a “self” from the stream of inchoate experience into a relatively stable locus of self-reference and self-awareness, with all its regular and regulated cognitive and affective processes, is one of the most remarkable achievements of biological evolution and constitutes perhaps the most fundamental human technology. 

"The Buddhist critique of these twins constructions of “self” and “world,” however, rests largely upon their deleterious consequences. We typically fail to recognize, the Buddhists contend, that the twin reifications of “self ” and “object” achieved through our linguistically and culturally mediated symbol systems are simply skillful means, highly practical tools for getting a handle on the whirlwind world within and without for the purpose of serving our own relative purposes. In our constant struggle to secure a stable, predictable, and prosperous life, we mistake these pragmatic tools and provisional purposes for actualities and ultimate ends: by imagining that we actually are such a self, we fail to fully appreciate the evolving and constructed nature of all experiential phenomena. 

"Hence, while our sense of self addresses one set of problems, that of coherence and continuity, it simultaneously raises another, that of our underlying anxieties bred of transience: just because it is a product of complex interactive relation- ships which are continuously evolving, our culturally mediated symbolic selves are also continuously slipping away, just beyond our grasp, like an optical illusion that disappears as soon as one looks straight at it. A nagging fear of our possible non-existence, a sense of the sheer fragility of this constructed “self,” is always lurking around the corner, underlying all our thoughts and actions. So we grasp all the more onto our pains, our attachments, our identities, all the while vaguely sensing that the only thing standing between us and non-existence is indeed this self-wrought self. If this were lost – or so we fear – so would be who and what we think we are. ..."

           (Waldron, William, 'THE BUDDHIST UNCONSCIOUS')


On May 2, 2012, at 5:06 AM, MarshaV <valkyr at att.net> wrote:

> 
> Greetings,
> 
> How would you differentiate between 'thoughts', 'ideas' & 'thinking' and 'concepts' & 'conceptualizing'?  Can you?  How?  Because it is my understanding that every pattern within the Intellectual Level is a product of the involvement in the conceptualization process and its interdependent involvement in the twin reification of subject and object: dualism.   
> 
> 
> Marsha
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On May 2, 2012, at 4:14 AM, MarshaV <valkyr at att.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Greetings,
>> 
>> I am more and more convinced that conceptualization is the twin reification of self (subject) and other (object).  As such it would say something significant about ALL static patterns from the inorganic level to the intellectual level:  All patterns, all levels - inorganic, biological, social & intellectual - are conventionally, indeed, statically, subject-object oriented.
>> 
>> "Mystification, in the concept of reification, is basic to the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann (1966, 89f) make a distinction, similar to the Buddhist analysis of self-identity, between two levels of reification, one implicit and unreflective and the other explicit and cultivated. Reification is 
>> 
>>     the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were 
>>     something else than human products—such as facts of nature, results 
>>     of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will... Reification is possible 
>>     on both the pretheoretical and theoretical levels of consciousness... 
>>     it would be an error to limit the concept of reification to the mental 
>>     construction of intellectuals. Reification exists in the consciousness of 
>>     the man in the street and, indeed, the latter presence is more practically 
>>     significant. It would also be a mistake to look at reification as a perversion 
>>     of an originally non-reified apprehension of the social world, a sort of 
>>     cognitive fall from grace. On the contrary, the available ethnological and 
>>     psychological evidence seems to indicate the opposite, namely, that the 
>>     _original apprehension of the social world is highly reified both phylogenetically 
>>     and ontogenetically._ (emphasis added) 
>> 
>> That is to say, consistent with our main thesis, that we know the world by means of our evolved capacities to reify experience into the categories of language and social and cultural life. These are both fundamental and fundamentally obscuring." 
>> 
>>      (Waldron, William, 'Common Ground, Common Cause')
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