Marsha:
Your own evidence is against you. The quote you posted from a review of the
book ‘Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground’ says our simplifying patterns
are USEFUL and INDISPENSABLE. It also says these patterns MAY be granted
autonomous existence. That's reification. Reification is a matter of NOT
understanding that the law of gravity is just a ghost, one of many such human
inventions. From the beginning of ZAMM to the end of Lila, the MOQ is all about
de-reification.
But your errors are not philosophical so much as they are basic conceptual
errors, incorrect definitions and a general inability to see the ideas behind
the words. In short, you need reading lessons.
Here's your own evidence. Look again and you'll see it disputes your contention
that all concepts are necessarily reified concepts:
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. 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."
Concepts, abstractions, generalizations are intellectual patterns that simplify
and approximate. That's what makes them useful. But as anyone can see from the
James quote and the Pirsig quotes I posted (below) and the quote from the book
review you posted (above), there are intellectuals who are perfectly well aware
of the fact that it is a mistake to turn concepts into things. They're fully
aware of the fact that concepts and abstractions are inventions and NOT
independent entities.
Why would anyone want to insist that all conceptualizations are inherently
delusional? I can't think of a position that could be more paralyzing or
self-defeating. If all conceptualizations were inherently reified, then every
concept in "Buddhism and Science" would also be inherently delusional and all
your posts defending this notion would also be inherently erroneous.
> On Dec 31, 2010, at 11:43 AM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> >
> > John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
> > “What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of
> > the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal
> > generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”
> > “Sure.”
> > “Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in
> > anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was
> > no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”
> > Now John seems not so sure.
> > “If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a
> > thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has
> > passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single
> > attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single
> > scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common
> > sense’ to believe that it existed.”
> > John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”
> > “Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find
> > yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach
> > only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and
> > gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes
> > sense.
> > “And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means
> > is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a
> > ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down
> > other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious
> > about our own.”
> > “Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
> > “Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as ‘education.’” [...]
> > They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human
> > inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human
> > inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention,
> > including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no
> > existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and
> > in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live
> > in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to
> > us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes,
> > and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a
> > very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than
> > the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts
> > and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > "By this he (James) meant that subjects and objects are not the starting
> > points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts
> > derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the
> > immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection
> > with its conceptual categories.' In this basic flux of experience, the
> > distinctions of reflective thought, as as those between consciousness and
> > content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the
> > forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical
> > or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction.
> >
> >
> > "The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience
> > will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower
> > and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object
> > have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the
> > presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former
> > of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of
> > theories had to be invented to overcome."
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