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REIFICATION
We have seen in "NATURAL MODEL" that Mind supports
two natural attitudes:
1.Intellection founded in the immanent physical 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 essential 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 "real" and no more
seeming reality. Reification consists in yielding to this
temptation. Yet, no matter how tenacious and persistent it may
be, the transcendental "reality" of regressed mental constructs
is nothing, but a "transcendental illusion", aka reification.
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, but often
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 the abstract names of "physical bodies" are 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
"reality" 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 immanent perception.
In addition to primary concepts, model formulas contain secondary,
auxiliary ones, helping to structure the primary within
rigorous and efficient expressions, such as mass, momentum,
energy, entropy or heat. And just as the secondary "physical
bodies" are more unshakably reified than their constitutive
events, so tend the secondary concepts to be more persistently
reified than the primary. Popular prejudice sees the "world
out there" 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 vulgarizing comments physicists occasionally use such
shortcuts as "matter", which don't appear in any formulas
and thus have no physical meaning. Herds of pseudo-philosophers
took this vulgarization 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 absolute Hegelian idealism.
As Gulag's ideology it exterminated over hundred million
people.
We live in nearly totally reified world and enumeration of
all gods, loves, patriotisms, freedoms, honors and fidelities
would fill the Congress Library, headed by "my honor calls
itself fidelity" - the device of SS.
When Einstein said "A new manner of thinking is essential if
humankind is to survive", he meant braking the chains of
reified phantasms.
