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REIFICATION
We asserted in "STRUCTURES OF MIND", that sensations,
though stemming arbitrarily from unknown transcendency,
trigger ordered immanent "reality" of images and, that
mind's faculty of cognition guides us through their
labyrinth allowing to survive, to reproduce and to avoid
oncoming buses.
According to Einstein:
**... this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which
we shall never understand. One may say "the eternal mystery
of the world is its comprehensibility."**
While accepting with Einstein that "reality" is merely an
illusion, in every day life one takes it at its face value,
uses mind's natural model instinctively and leaps to the side
to avoid the bus, without cogitating about its ontological
illusionality.
This instinctive attitude taking the transcendental illusion
for reality at is known as "common sense". It guided original
humans in their struggle for survival directly as individuals
and socially by dint of natural languages.
However, extended over intellection, the common sense unveils
itself as a mass of prejudices gathered in the daily practice,
and rigorous rationality starts by overcoming it.
We shall consequently distinguish two attitudes:
1.Intellection founded in the rigorous, mental, experiential
reality,
2.Instinctivity supported by the transcendental illusion.
We shall call "Reification" a factitious attitude founding
intellection in the transcendental illusion. At first glance
it may seem not different from instinctivity, but second
thoughts reveal their profound dissimilarity.
Instinctivity is natural, pragmatic and unreflective, thus
void of intellectual deceit. There is certainly no deceit in
leaping to the side to avoid a bus, or in hammering a nail
in the pragmatic belief that it will drive it into the wall.
Reification, on the contrary, stems from bad faith, in the
best case from auto-deceit, but more often from the intent
to deceive, manipulate and rule social groups.
The seemingly real immanent Imagery appears to be constructed
by Sensorium as a map of some hypothetical territory
- "Transcendency". This raises the temptation to regress it
to this territory and to deal there with a "true" and no more
seeming reality. Reification consists in yielding to this
temptation. However, a map admits infinity of possible
territories, so that reification is necessarily a guess,
at best arbitrary, but usually guided by wishfull thinking
and intention of deceiving and dominating people.
Once in the reified transcendency, sky is the limit of unbridled
speculations, whether realist, idealist or whatever "...ist".
There is no strict rule governing these phantasms. Often the
mental secondary constructs - the abstract names of "physical
bodies" - are reified to "real objects" of transcendency
functioning as noumena. This case is known as "Naive Realism"
and hundreds of equally naive "realism" shades, like direct,
indirect, critical, representational, modal, transcendental
(sounds like a joke), just to mention a few, culminating in
the particularly ridiculous physicalism reifying some phantasms
having nothing to do with physics.
Not less often are the abstract names of "physical bodies" reified
as transcendental "ideas" founding hundreds of shades of "idealism",
like absolute, actual, platonic, objective, subjective, solipsistic,
transcendental (a good joke) and quantum-idealism - the most
ridiculous form of physicalism.
A particular type of reifications concerns abstract physical models.
General Relativity, for instance, conceives its abstract "cosmos"
as reduced to 4d curved SPACE phenomenally equivalent to Field,
higher density of the latter equivalent to greater curvature of
the former. It is customary to speak about the "real" (i.e. reified)
"cosmos out there" as based upon such "real" rules governing the
"real" relativistic SPACE and Field. However, these rules and
concepts apply exclusively to the mental, abstract model of the GR
and it does not make any sense to reify them into the unreachable
and incognizable transcendency. Whatever the transcendental "real"
WOT may possibly be, it's silly to believe in Riemann tensors
flying around therein.
Abstract concepts of models can be justified exclusively by their
capacity to represent and to coordinate (imagery) events. Concepts
directly symbolizing events and able to be regressed to them will
be called "Primary". Such regression is not reification, but
"understanding" of an abstraction, whose meaning is precisely embodied
by its originating events. Primary concepts such as force, acceleration,
temperature appear usually in mathematical formulas. Besides being
understood, they may be reified, but it's not a very harmful reification:
we talk about temperature as if it were "real", yet remembering that it
is an abstract concept.
In addition to primary concepts, model formulas contain secondary,
auxiliary ones, helping to structure the primary into rigorous and
efficient expressions, such as mass, momentum, energy, entropy or
heat. And just as the secondary "physical bodies" are more unshakably
"stable" than their constitutive events, so tend the secondary concepts
to be more persistently reified than the primary. Popular prejudice
sees the WOT populated with masses, energies, entropies, etc.
It's much more pernicious than the principally linguistic reification
of the primary concepts. Even Hawking falls prey to the illusion of
"real" entropy and promotes it to the foundation of time, which is
by itself the deepest foundation of the immanent physical reality,
needing no reified crutches.
In metalanguage physicists occasionally use such shortcuts as "matter",
which don't appear in any formulas and thus have no physical meaning.
In contemporary fundamental physics "matter", (or "particle") is a
shortcut for "non vanishing field divergence".
Herds of pseudo-philosophers took this shortcut for physics, hijacked
"matter" and reified it to the cornerstone of innumerable materialisms,
physicalisms and realisms. Such reification of complete phantasms is
particularly dangerous, as shows the Dialectical Materialism, a
perverse intercourse of two apparently contradictory reifications,
a phantasmagoric materialism and the equally phantasmagoric Hegelian
idealism. As Gulag's ideology it exterminated over hundred million
people.
Our social domain is nearly totally reified and enumeration of all
gods, loves, patriotisms, freedoms, honours and loyalties would fill
the Congress Library, headed by "my honour is loyalty" - the device
of SS. Most, if not all injustices, oppressions, wars and genocides
are embodiments of reifications.
When Einstein said "A new manner of thinking is essential if
humankind is to survive", he meant braking the chains of
reified phantasms.
