Ron said to Marsha:
You do realize that these quotes conflict with the assertion that reification
IS conceptualization. You may have won the battle but you lost the war in this
regard. just pointing that out.
dmb says:
It's frustrating, isn't it? No matter how many times Marsha is presented with
this contradiction she just can't see it.
This is a good example where she uses "evidence" that contradicts the very
thing she's trying to assert. Look, all a person has to do is emphasize a few
simple and ordinary words.....
Marsha quoted Alan Wallace:
"Everything in the world that we conceive of and experience is related to the
mind. WHEN that world is reified however, it appears to exist absolutely, in
its own right; and this mental distortion MAY lead one to wonder how nature can
be comprehensible to the human mind. ...The TENDENCY of reification among
mathematicians is particularly interesting. ...This attitude suggests a
formalists view of mathematics one the Davis and Hersh assert is GENERALLY
instilled into today's students. Yet in a later chapter they claim that NEARLY
all mathematicians hold PLATONIST conception of mathematics NEARLY all the
time. ...It would seem that MOST mathematicians, WHEN they philosophize about
mathematics, profess a formalist view, but the rest of the time (especially
when they are actually doing mathematics) they revert to a realist stance.
This MAY well be true of many scientists as well. The natural TENDENCY of
reification, which we have had since childhood, is extremely DIFFICULT
to eradicate from our habits of thinking and perceiving." (Wallace, B. Alan,
'Choosing Reality, : A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind',2003,pp.120-123)
dmb continues:
If Marsha were capable of understanding the MOQ she would be using this
evidence to support the MOQ instead of undermine it. The pragmatic theory of
truth rejects Platonism and it rejects scientific objectivity, the
correspondence theory of truth and instead says that truth is provisional,
plural and practical. It says the language and the culture supplies us with a
pair of conceptual glasses [SOM] through which we see the world AND it says
there is another way to see. It gives us an alternative. If reification was a
certainty rather than a tendency, then it would not have been possible for
Pirsig to construct the MOQ and it would not be possible for Wallace to warn
against it either.
Again, Marsha's incoherent position is like betting cash that cash is no good.
She doesn't see the contradiction entailed in using concepts to condemn
conceptualization. Logic is not the main goal or anything and there is plenty
of room for paradox and subtlety but Marsha's reasoning here is just plain bad.
It won't work. It makes no sense. In Marsha's hands, perfectly wonderful
scholarship is transformed into self-centered, new-age drivel wherein ideas
mean whatever Marsha wants them to mean. Notice how many of her "definitions"
and key concepts begin with the phrase "For me,..." It just doesn't work like
that. Like dollar bills, words and ideas mean what they mean for US, not for
me. We don't have to believe that legal tender is fixed and eternal or
something other than a human invention in order to spend it. We can accept the
conventional, provisional, flexible nature of money and still see its value,
its point and purpose.
Marsha walks into a store, plunks down a stack of counterfeit bills she made
herself (with crayons and construction paper) and then, while making
pronouncements about the illusory nature of currency and material reality, she
runs out the door with an arm load of goods. As the cops are putting the cuffs
on her, of course, she declares that there is no authorities over cash and
merchandise. That's how it feels. Kinda crazy and slightly criminal, yet smug
and self-righteous at the same time.
If reification is a normal part of the conceptualization process then there is
no such thing as a concept that isn't inherently erroneous. But, obviously,
Pirsig, James and Wallace (and many others) are using concepts to push back
against the ABUSE of concepts, against the conceptual error known as
reification. The idea here is to put things in perspective, to show what
concepts can and cannot do and what they cannot do is give you a key to unlock
the riddle of the universe. And money can't buy me love. The point and purpose
is to guide experience, to serve life. Like cash, it is an instrumental good
and it has limits. There is no such thing as THE TRUTH or eternal truth or a
single exclusive truth. As in the art gallery analogy and actual existence of
alternative, non-Euclidian geometries, there can be many truths. Their merit is
measured by their practical uses and consequences not their correspondence to
the one and only external, objective reality or their proximity to so
me ideal Form. Rejecting these claims is not a rejection of the
conceptualization process. It's a rejection of the reification process. That's
why its important to see that they are not one and the same. Chemotherapy is
not supposed to kill the patient but the cancer. In the same way, rejecting
subject-object metaphysics is not a rejection of intellect or science. In both
cases the idea is to heal, repair and reform the intellect, to bring it back
down to the earth of things, as James puts it, to loosen up our theories. Even
as MOQers, we don't say that Pirsig's painting is the only true one or that all
the other ones are wrong. But that doesn't mean everyone in the world is a
great art critic or a good painter. To say that truth is conventional and
provisional and plural is perfectly consistent with saying there are lots of
hack painters and some people can't tell the difference between a masterwork
and some uninspired mess that came out of a paint-by-numbers kit.
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