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Dedicated to the late Dr. Antonio
Rossin a fellow philosopher and friend
Metaphorically speaking, in our *mind's eye*
so to speak, we are observing a linguistically
clad human operator, with the word *IS* emblazoned
on his tee-shirt and a black x symbol on
his hat, sitting in a fiction-factory. He
is seated at the head of a production line,
rather like Charlie Chaplin in *Modern Times.*
He is pouring a mixture of past actions,
happenings, memories, dualisms, opinions,
 non-entities, numbering systems, symbols,
categorisations, sets, laws (both natural
and legal) and other metaphysical immateriality
into semantic moulds which jiggle along the
cognitive conveyor-belt and drop off at the
other end as concretised bricks.
From those bricks a version of reality is
built which is then labelled and packed as
the *being* of its constituent non-elemental
ingredients and is shipped out of the factory
door labelled as:
The Way The World Is.
 Dr. Antonio Rossin the well know Italian
commentatator on the importance of further
study in this field for the education of
our young has made the following observations:
"The laws of physics are as old as the
world they govern. It is their recognition,
i. e. formulation, i. e. reification that
can be given a birth date, that of the day
in which each law has been discovered and
put into a scientific formula. Reification
thus becomes a means by which a law governing
the world - be it a law of either physics
or economy and biology, or of human communication
itself, it does not matter -- can be acknowledged
and therefore, to some extent let's hope,
controlled. In short, by means of our self-conscious
and responsible understanding of our own
connatural reificational modality (not just
the reified entity itself) , we humans could
and should more advantageously control the
world in which we find ourselves better than
before." [1] (Rossin. 2008.)
Why do humans like us do this sort of thing?
What's *in it* for us? How does the process
work? How and why should such a loss of reality-contactedness
be seen as being beneficial? More importantly
and more intriguingly, why should Mother
Nature select for such behaviour and deem
*ontological falsification* as having a beneficial
genetical pay-off for human liars?
Later I will toy with the idea that reification
is not species specific and that with the
possible exception of warning, territorial
and mating calls, although animals do not
verbalise reification, they may be said to
corporealise strategy in the form of pigmental
and morphological camouflage, hunting tricks,
sugar-traps, spider-webs and even modify
their own bodies by shape-shifting and electro-chemical
colour change in the manner of squids and
other creatures as reificative response mechanisms,
in order to survive in the evolutionary jungle
in which they exist.
Dr. Rossin continues:
But wait... Mother Nature does not behave
so badly. She has two tools, to govern the
(evolutionary) process. Or rather, only one.
I. First there are genetic mutations. Lots
and lots of them, most of which are quite
inutile, expendable modifications which lead
nowhere in terms of future genetic endowment.
The majority of them are useless and lack
any viable neurological, physiological or
morphological elements that would add to
the compendium of survivalist stratagems
for bequeathal. Very, very few of them are
useful and efficacious for more fitter, longer
more productive life - for the aquisition
of food and in the area of reproductive competition
and capability within the environmental niche
wherein they exist. The natural environment
is brutally honest and pragmatic and provides
such organic entities with positive feedback,
in order that they take stance and overcome
the competition with regard to their own
life and that of their future descendants.
II. Memetic behavioural modalities occur.
All of them are useful within the milleux
of social animals - humans included. It the
examples-commands given by the leaders of
their own social environment are acknowledged
and obeyed they obtain a positive feedback.
Problems arise via reification, when unlike
the pragmatic, dispassionate feedback provided
by the natural world, the onto-social environment
particularly in the case of our children,
is represented dishonestly in such a manner
that it provides negative rather than positive
feedback in relation to some behaviours that
are unfit to a successful and satisfactory
life.[2] (Ibid)
Because encouraging comments have come from
people I respect, both as human beings and
as serious thinkers, it has reinforced my
hope that my General Theory of Reification
may have wings, and that it may be allowed
to fly in *the real world* rather than patrol
round and around in tautological circles
in an interior, incestuous domain of academic
or pseudo-academic speculation which I have
inhabited for so long.
The Causes of Reificative Inhabituation.
Human organisms, like other life forms on
our planet, thrive on habit and environmental
predictability. Instincts and the compendium
of self-referential reflexes upon which we
draw in order to respond to anticipated events
in an effort to stay alive, eat, learn, survive
and reproduce were once survival strategies
that were innovative products of genetical
mutation, individual discovery and generational
happenstance.
That such originally diffuse and variegated
attitudes became successful responses with
regard to the survival of the individual,
the group, the tribe or the nation and became
concentrated into their essential survivalist
elements as "the names of things"
rather than regularised actions, into which
they were categorised and labelled, into
such metaphysical objects as "battle,
death, love, peace, matehood or marriage,
etc., shows the inevitability of such an
occurrence in organisms which are the product
of evolution within the framework of the
natural Darwinian order of things as it is
now generally accepted. For in the selection
of suitable attitudinal response mechanisms,
where rapidly retrieved reaction rules, reification
renders ready responses.
Are such retrieval mechanisms still relevant
in the modern world? Or was it only in the
dangerous jungles, wide vulnerable savannas
and rocky outcrops of the cave country of
our ancestors that ready-made reificata was
required? The prolixity and growing ubiquitousness
of reification answers that question, for
though unless you are a member of the military,
a policeman, a criminal or a coal-face worker
or are engaged in some other high risk occupation
you don't need ready-made reification to
initiate your responses, and most conversational
interaction consists of prolix, boring verbosity
rather than short, sharp answers, there is
no doubt that reification continues to flourish,
and (apart from the debatable existence of
homosexuality) Mother Nature seldom makes
mistakes - so it might be that reification
is here to stay?
One observer of the ongoing financial crisis
made the following observation:
There's plenty of blame to go around (blame
= aitios = cause). The ultra-low short-term US interest
rates helped to keep the economic interplay
going after the bursting of the dot-com bubble,
but they also opened the door to the risky,
imprudent strategy of borrowing short and
lending/investing long .[3] (Eldred. 2008}
This analysis is pure reification and ontological
poppycock. *The ultra-low short-term US interest
rates* *caused* zilch and were not to *blame*.
We still live with the priestly-inspired
connection betwixt *cause* and *blame* which
to a large extent is responsible for the
confusion that still attaches itself to the
whole philosophical mess which is: the classical,
traditional version of Theory of Causation
in its intertheorectical and antitheoretical
versions, all of with various forms regard
causation as a form of pseudo-entity the
elements of which can be blamed for the eventual
outcomes.
Are we anthropocentrically or personificationally
correct to *blame* a falling telegraph pole,
which crashes down in a high wind and crushes
a car and its occupants to death? No, but
a court would identify the pole as being
the cause of the deaths without actually
blaming the pole itself.. Then the telephone
company would be sued by the insurance company,
and because the telephone company do esnot
exist as a real entity (being only as a so-called:
*business entity) the man who ordered the
timber from which the pole was made, or the
man or men who erected the pole, or the man
held responsible for the regular inspection
of telegraph poles (you know, those lumps
of mobile thinking-meat things in overalls
called humans, who know about wood) would
be held to account, sacked, perhaps sued.
The Laws of Hammurabi covered the same areas
of cause and blame These ancient law codes,
were divided into two types of law - the
causal laws that appear in a: If such and
such - then such and such scenario, and the
other type in the form of commands or directives
such as thou shalt not kill. etc. Evidence
for this confusion of cause with blame (
and the unfair disparity of sentencing between
aristocrat, citizen and slave) can be found
in the bible [4] (Bible. Exodus 21:29) which
prescribed the stoning to death of a goring
ox, or, in the medieval interpretation, condemning
a guilty pig who had killed a child to death
in a court of law then hanging it as a criminal.
The utter stupidity of this biblically inspired
primitivism was not that the pig was killed,
which was going to end up slaugtered anyway,
in order that the human flock could eat its
dead body parts, but (considering that the
bible claim that animals lack souls and therefore
presumably intelligence and intent etc.)
the grisly ritual of trying the pig for murder
and hanging it in the same way that a man
might be hung for blasphemy or for cattle
rustling should have taken place in a society
which was capable of such acheivements in
lierature, art, architecture, and learning.
And what about the wind - was that the *cause*
- *blame?* What about God, who according
to the bible was always kept busy causing
a wind to pass over the earth, and the water
and blow here and there, sometimes deliberately
to cause wanton destruction and sometimes
beneficially to help out one of his more
favourite believers or tribe ... who created
the earth and the wind that blows across
its waters, and blows down telegraph poles
that crush cars ? Was HE to blame? Is God
more than just a *prime mover* is he not
also a prime suspect?
I am coming to the conclusion that most of
mankind is living in a reificational dreamworld
and the stupid assocaition of *cause* with
*blame* is yet another of the ontological
Greek spin-offs that helps create this confusion.
The meaning of *aitios* is: author - you
know, *author* ( lump of mobile, thinking
meat often found with pen in hand )as someone
who originates or causes or initiates something
(see Strong's Number 159)
It is the human man or men (you know, those
thinking meat things in smart suits) who
decide, act and order the interest rates
to fall into line with *so-called *market
responses* or remain the same in the light
of some other human (yes real live human)
agenda.
I find it ironic that the very critics and
commentators who admonish the stupid reificative
behaviour of the fiancianciers fall into
the very same ontological traps as the culprits
they blame. It makes sense to accept that
whatever the temporal or environmental conditions
( sitting around a neolithic camp fire or
faced with a gang of yobs in a modern McDonalds
eatery, an organism must have ready-made
action patterns, which because they need
to, can be very readily accessed in a priori
terms.
PART TWO.
THE REIFICATION OF PHYSICAL LAWS
I now move on to address the genesis of reification
of natural or physical laws - its sources
and causes; and hope to provide at least
circumstantial evidence to show the inevitability
and the ubiquity of the reificatory tendency
as a biological feature of the functioning
of the human brain.
We may discern a natural preference towards
reality-contactedness, which manifests itself
not only in the lifetimes of individuals
and groups, but in the greater dimension
of human evolution itself. The very increase
in human brain-size was driven by the need
for more space for the neurological computations
and memory involved in achieving a greater
awareness of the hostile environment with
which early man was surrounded. This led
to constant changes and modifications in
the direction of correction and refinement
of reality-contactedness.
In one sense reification can be said to be
the designation of the perceived relationships
or states of affairs between objects - as
objects in themselves. Thus to observe the
factual state of affairs that at ground level
water heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit starts
to bubble and boil is interpreted by some
as there is something called "boiling"
that actually exists and that can be identified
as "being present in the world"
in addition to the heated bubbling water
as an entity that Heideggerians call: "The
ontological difference." A similar defective
reificative duality was posited by Descartes,
exemplified in his notorious reification:
I think therefore I am" (sometimes translated
as: "I think therefore I exist")
which although it implies an evidential holistic
ontological parity or necessary functional
equality between acting and existing also
implies a spurious ontological difference
betwixt two existential modalities as later
expressed as Descartes proceeded to the Wax
Argument: In which he describes the way when
a piece of wax melts, all the sense data
you have about it changes character, yet
it is still the same object. So to know what
something is, is an act of the mind, not
the senses, or as Descartes put it:
"Thus what I thought I had seen with
my eyes, I actually grasped solely with the
faculty of judgment, which is in my mind."
[3] (Descartes. Part IV)
Antonio Rossin makes the point that whilst
he agrees with Descartes on the faculty of
judgment :
I like to feel myself responsible for what
I do, behave etc. But I want to be sure about
the judgment elements, AKA feedback. I must
confess, I am distrustful of the social feedback,
to date. [4] (Rossin. 2008)
Such dualistic instantiation occurs in spite
of the fact that there are no objective (material)
correlates or nominata whatsoever to substantiate
the actual existence in the world of the
subjective existential human neurologically
perceived reality thingified as "boiling"
or "bubbling."
The reification of racial or cultural types
of beauty, intelligence, superiority is another
example of applied reification. Reification,
in action, is utterly impatient of the dissenter,
ruthless in its insistence upon conformity,
and given to the single control technique
of ordering-and- forbidding. Such postures
have been witnessed by the arrogant behaviour
of the British colonialists towards their
subject races, or even worse by the fanaticism
of the Nazis or Japanese Shintoists and the
religious fanatics of the contemporary world,
who sacrifice their own lives and the lives
of the innocent believing it to be the will
of the mega- reificant that the religious
call God being interpreted by soothsayers
and priestly intermediaries who interpret
The Holy Law.
Thus it is that such ontological projection,
hallucination, and delusion are pre-eminently
cases of mistaking what is subjectively real
- as if it were objectively real. Traditional
philosophical conjecture is riddled by linguistic
ambiguities and by ignorance of important
ontological truisms and has set forth various
primitive, metaphysical systems of faith-based
nonsense, grounded not upon rationality or
logic, but upon half-grasped, occult philosophical
fundaments.
This Greek incipience, vexed by reified forms
of superstition, was originated by an ancient
and noble people striving towards the light,
brilliant as questioners, innovators and
inventors and categorisors of the objects
and phenomena with which they found themselves
surrounded, but, mapped against the broad
tapestry of human progress, had progressed
no more than a few hesitating steps removed
from savagery and were obsessed by slavery,
paederasty and supernatural fantasies which
are no longer tenable in a modern analytic
age.
Across a gulf of more than two thousand years,
in one of the world's most highly industrialisedcountries, the arch-reifier
Plato's metaphysical mummy, the existentially
embalmed abstractive notion of "Forms,"
was grave-robbed, plagiarised, unbandaged
by the Gestaltists and placed in the shop
window of scientific ignorance like the preserved
corpse of Norman Bates's beloved mother,
who was lovingly embalmed and sewn-up by
her son's affectionate filial fingers in
Hitchcock's "Psycho."
Hawking a psychological quackery little better
than chiromancy and divination via the observation
of the spilled intestines of ritually slaughtered
animals of their reificant forebears they
named the disinterred cognitive corpse "Gestalt
Psychology. Thus is Plato in keeping with
his doctrine that the soul is immortal and
has been many times regenerated.
Tricked out in a white coat, by the Gestaltists
Plato is appointed Keeper of Keys and Grounds
at a Heideggerian-style hermenuetical Hogwarts,
with responsibility for the objects, processes
and behaviour that are closely associated
with the perceived states of affairs registered
by the brain of the observer and are mistakenly
unified, taken to be associated in reality
and reified into Potteresque psychological
concretions.
Thus then are Plato's forms modified, elaborated
and labelled with the German word Gestalt.
The updated Platonism is linked with the
word psychology and launched upon a naive
public as Gestalt Psychology, and paraded
as a novel feature of a shameful repertoire
of nonsensicality calculated to elicit large
amounts of money from vain and self-infatuated
wealthy naifs, who lie about upon couches
in sordid "consulting rooms" swallowing
tricyclic antidepressive, lithium, benzodiazepines
and biperidon.
How did this all come about? Why do men concretise
the non-existent? What is there in common
between the reificational activities of ancient
Greeks and the hypostatisational behaviour
of quacks after a quick buck more than 2000
years later. What is the reason for reification?
How does it work? What is it FOR?
Dr. Antonio Rossin provides us with a telling
answer
What it is FOR, there is little doubt about.
It is FOR survival, inside a given environment,
according with the feedback coming from the
latter. The vital question arises: how could
I verify that feedback?
Were it the natural feedback, there is no
problem for most human organisms, as they
have eyes, fingers, and some other sensitive
sense-terminals to perform the job in what
is named (say, reified) experientialism.
AND, if any sensitive terminals, or operative
nodes, or some neuro- physiological machinery
in between, be wrong, the price must be paid
for the mistake. Let's only hope we humans
are smart enough modify ourselves accordingly
and so to pay the price soon, before the
mistake and its price had become too heavy.
But when it comes to social feedback, the
matter becomes very delicate, because this
feedback comes from - is supported by - the
social leadership whose memes I must respect
with for the necessay purposes of survival.
What can I do, then?
Of course, memes are countless, and I cannot
pursue each one of them searching to reveal
some mistake inside, what madness! Memes
are also fed back in the nature of advice
and social support. Let's but view the memes
as social directories dropped down to us
commoners, i. e. commanded, by the social
leadership. There must be a super-meme, telling
us: "Obey the authority, do not even
question it!"
At this point, the task becomes far easier.
All I have to do, it is to adopting and advocate
a "questioning of authority" posture
as a principle or basicsocial tool at everybody's
disposal. By this method of a dedicated searching
and analysis of the reicative meme-types
a satisfactory resolution and verification
of hidden agendas may be identified within
the social feedback with which we have to
deal. From this principle, everything else
follows. Let us educate ourselves and more
importantly our young and make reificative
analysis the dominant meme of of all. [5]
(Ibid)
Are the Gestaltists really charletans? Are
they just ontologically stupid, or is it
a natural outcome of mans interface and reificative
formularisation and storage of his social
environment and the wider world in which
he finds himself as Rossin suggests?
Is such behaviour perhaps "condoned"
by Mother Nature and if so why? Dr. Rossin's
answer above certainly seems to answer this
problem
Gestalt has the meaning a unified or significant
whole, the distinctive totality of an integrated
mental and social unity, as opposed to merely
a sum of various parts. It is a German word
for "form," which was adopted as
the focus of psychological study. Although
it was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932),
who was the actual originator of the term
Gestalt as the Gestalt psychologists were
to use it, reificative psychology had its
roots with Ernst Mach (1838-1916.)
It was Mach who plagiarised and resuscitated
the concept of forms directly from Plato
for inclusion into his cosmology of geometric
quantitieswith his relabelled"space
forms" and "time forms." [6]
(Maccarone, Fender and Ho, 2005)
Somewhat irrationally he reasoned that just
because we have a brain that remembers what
we see, such as when we see a square as a
square, whether it is large or small, red
or blue, in outline or even partly uncompleted,
etc., it is to be something which must be
instantiationally nominalised as "a
space form." Likewise, when we hear
a melody in which we recognise the melody
even if the keys have been altered in such
a way that none of the notes are the same.
Max Wertheimer became interested in the perceptions
he experienced on a train. While stopped
at the station, he bought a toy stroboscope
-- a spinning drum with slots to look through
and pictures on the inside, a sort of a primitive
movie machine or sophisticated flip book.
Based upon his experience whilst looking
at the spinning pictures on his toy, he published
his seminal 1912 paper: "Experimental
Studies of the Perception of Movement."
[7] (Wertheimer 1912)
Wertheimer's observation was that we often
experience things that are not a part of
our simple day to day sensations. He noted
that we perceive motion where there is nothing
more than a rapid sequence of individual
sensory events. This is what he saw in the
toy stroboscope he bought at the Frankfurt
train station, and what he saw in his laboratory
when he experimented with lights flashing
in rapid succession (like the Christmas lights
that appear to course around the tree, or
the fancy neon signs in Los Vegas that seem
to move). The effect is called the phi phenomenon,
and it is actually the basic principle of
motion pictures!
(See my: Meat Thinks. /meatthinks. htm)
Apparently we humans wrongly conclude that
not only do the moving pictures spinning
through the gate of the movie projector or
those revolving around on the inner-surface
of his toy drum exist, but the moving images
that are perceived by the brains of the observer
exist too.
Some (perhaps most) human viewers cannot
grasp that it is not the visualised movement
of the pictures, photographs or fairy lights
that exist, but the brain of the human viewer
who interprets such a sequentially rapid
replacement of slightly different pictures
or lights, which (compared with the film
of drum or bulb speed) so slowly that the
brain interprets the high-speed replacement
as a single moving picture rather than hundreds
of rapidly appearing pop-ups.
The bottom line? It is the sequentially replaced
pictures and the human viewer that exist
- the "movement" (like all "movement")
is an ontological visual trick that does
not exist in itself, but is merely an existential
modality of the tricked brain.
"There are wholes, the behaviour of
which is not determined by that of their
individual elements, but where the part-processes
are themselves determined by the intrinsic
nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt
theory to determine the nature of such wholes"
[7] (Wertheimer 1924.)
Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists,
we are built to experience the structured
whole as well as the individual sensations.
And not only do we have the ability to do
so, we have a strong tendency to do so. We
even add structure to events which do not
have gestalt structural qualities.
It is a pity that Plato's long suffering
defunct puppet Socrates was not aware of
this particular transcendentalist reificative
hustle, for it would have been an excellent
gambit to have used during his interminable
and consistently sterile discussions and
wearisome dialogues with his mostly monosyllabic
interlocutors debating the meaning rather
the real-world societal application of his
dreary catalogue of abstract nouns. Why is
there a compulsion to reify universals into
unified wholes? Is it part of the way our
brains classify and retrieve information?
It would seem so, for reification is an important
much studied feature of artificial intelligence
and is used in order to answer the need for
data compaction into conveniently identifiable
blocks for speedy navigation and the efficient
recovery of information.
NEGATIVE REIFICATIONS
The obverse aspect of positive reification
is sublation or negative reification In sublating
one religious, political, scientific of philosophical
reification given a more extended or all-encompassing
reality. There is a is delimitation of the
generalisability of its characteristics which
implies a supposedly absolute uniqueness
of its positively reified rivals. A person
deeply in love claims that no love such as
his has existed before in history. One religion
or political party or philosophy (compare
the adherents of Islam, Nazism or Heideggerian
philosophy) claims exclusivity and meritorious
uniqueness and thereby rejects the merits
of other religious systems and secular belief-value
systems.
Such doctrinal fanatics and believers are
redolent of the claims of unique merit which
is itself absolutised in the pathological
megalomanias of the multitudes of mostly
harmless Napoleon Bonapartes and the surfeit
of Jesuses who haunt the gardens of mental
homes.
But the reificatory tendency towards abnormality
and subnormality, can also be described in
such terms. The failure of reality-contactedness
or the ontological inability or reluctance
to differentiate between what exists and
what does not exist is either brought about
genetically, by way of the DNA script, or
is the result of early interiorisation via
the exposure to parents and peers already
afflicted.
Such misfortune then leads to a similar confusion
of the subjective and objective as a direct
result of the failure of the correcting and
refining process to occur. Though for the
intelligent educated person the deprivation
of reality-contactness is nowhere near as
acute as that which can be observed in the
behaviour of the mentally challenged, relatively
speaking it is just as debilitating in its
own way as it is to he insane. Viewed from
this perspective, it is ironical that neither
the intelligent nor the insane group can
ever be aware of their communicative ontological
impoverishment with reality - by which is
meant the real, actual physical entities
of their environment which exist spatially
and temporally alongside them in the world
in which they exist.
The ontological impoverishment, sublations
and negative forms of reification run the
same course (though not with the same intesity)
for the intelligent as they do for the mentally
disabled, in that they both refuse to acknowledge
(or are incapable of appreciating) the realities
involved. Some of them go to extraordinary
lengths in negating the existent and the
demonstrable. They are the negativistic blind-spots
of the psychopathologies; often characterized
by habitual disbelief in any claims of ultimate
knowledge.
Sublation, is a translation of the German
word aufheben, and is a key concept of dialectics.
Sublation is a characteristic involved in
various unilateralisms within traditional
philosophy and science. There is the transcendentalists
insistence on an ontological difference or
duality, the indeterminist's denial of causality;
and the scientist's reification of motion,
energy and other useful fictions.
Perhaps the long drawn out denial of global
warming by Bush and the American Republican
Party, or the denial of AIDS by the recently
disgraced President Thabo Mbeki who is said
to be responsible for a failure of leadership
over the crisis, which has left more than
one in 10 of South Africa's 43 million people
HIV-positive will draw further attention
to the dangers of negative reification? We
will have to wait and see.
[1] Rossin. Antonio. The Reificative Roots Of The Global Financial
Crisis. Nominalist Yahoo List. 20.09.2008.
[2] Ibid
[3] Descartes. René. Discourse on Method. Part IV -i. The Harvard Classics. 1909-14.
[4] Rossin. Antonio. The Reificative Roots Of The Global Financial
Crisis. The Nominalist Yahoo List. [5] Ibid.
[6] Maccarone, Thomas. J.; Fender, Robert
P.; Ho, Luis C. (Eds.) From X-ray Binaries to Quasars: Black Holes
on All Mass Scales. 2005. From Astrophysics and Space Science journal,
Vol. 300/1-3, 2005.
[7] Wertheimer, Michael. 1999. A Brief History of Psychology. Wadsworth Publishing.
[8] Wertheimer, Max Über Gestalttheorie [an address before the Kant Society, Berlin,
'7th December, 1924], Erlangen, 1925. In
the translation by Willis D. Ellis published
in his "Source Book of Gestalt Psychology," New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co,
1938. http://gestalttheory.net/archive/wert1.htm
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