A spectre is haunting philosophy - the spectre of reification. Etymologically the word reification derives from the Latin res. Res is translatable into English as the multi-categorial: thing, object, matter, concern, affair, business, property. Res extensa was used to denote the physical world, whilst res cogitans was used to denote the thinking being, the being that perceives its own (so-called) beingness.

We do not need the formulaic self-referential confirmative subsumptions that Descartes considered necessary for the recognition and incorporation of one's humanness under a more general category of human. It is not the utterance of abstract nouns, verbal frequentatives (like: I think) or the reificative lexical shells and their contents which confirm our existence as homo-sapiens. We are aware that we exist as human beings at a much deeper non-lexical neurological level without the need to articulate the obvious. We require no verbal, algorithmic mantra like: I think therefore I am nor the mouthing of the usefully encoded first-person personal pronouns: 'I' and 'me' to corroborate our manhood or womanhood.

Our brains are self-registering survivency organs, evolved to provide continuous feedback of its own indications at the maxima and minima of experiential variations. Our brains provide a ceaseless biologic systems-analysis backed up by an informative biographic arcanum of stored stratagems for survival.

A brief consideration of these facts leads us to reject the motivation, the requirement and the saneness of any ill-considered ritual of existential self-confirmation of the type represented by the spurious Cartesian cogito. The exposited content of a shell pronoun like 'I' makes available an enshelled or memory-packed abundance of potentially useful interfacial layers. Such experiential templates enable the human entity to interact with the environmental system in which it finds itself. The following excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an interesting example of some 18th century uneasiness with reification Burke's unwillingness:

is a practical judgement that implies a conceptual counterpart like Berkeley's view that

In both cases, philosophical wariness matched a distaste for considering aspects of objects in permanent isolation from the other aspects with which they were essentially connected.

Mark Twain wrote;
"Man is a Religious Animal," and there is no doubt that religion is universal feature of human life, but corporeal sickness is also a universal feature of life and the finality of death from disease is no less terminal than death suffered as a result of racialist and religious terrorism or internecine or inter-religious wars that have blighted mankind for millennia.

Mark Twain added that

The World Christian Encyclopedia (2001): a book which is the standard reference work for religious statistics of all kinds, and both Britannica and the World Almanac cite from has a single page [http://gem-werc. org/gd/gd16. pdf] estimating the number of martyrs since the origin of each religion: as 160,000. This does not include those who perished in religious wars or those who were killed in more local or individual acts of murder. Whether diseases of the body or transcendentalist disturbances of the brain were responsible for more deaths is difficult to say - but on even cursory examination of the statistics it is impossible to put an overall figure on either cause of death for the purposes of making a comparison. One thing is startlingly obvious however - we would be far better off without both of them.

There's a difference between a "universal" feature of human life and an "essential" one. Most people who think they've given up religion have done nothing of the sort -- they've simply substituted one set of reificative superstitions which they believe to be essential for another. One of the distinctive features of religion is a faith in the existence of some mystically interpreted phenomena and most people who finally reject religion mistakenly believe they have successfully given up transcendental belief altogether. In other words they remain irrationally committed to a residual form of religious dualistic reality-type left over from there childhood indoctrination phase.

The classical and most crudest form of dualism is most dramatically demonstrated by the Cartesian cogito together with its so-called proof of the existence of God, but its post-religious or *secular version* stripped of a god-head is known as object-action reification, which is usually defined as:

Reification, also known as hypostatisation, concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, corporeal or physical entity.

For Marx reification is a characteristic of economic value as it manifests itself in market trade, i. e. the inversion in thought between object and subject, or between means and ends. The term hypostatisation refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, which is an ontological and epistemological fallacy.

Such is the dictionary definitions of the neurological glitches imprinted during the religious phase which manifests itself as a conviction that there exists a dichotomous interchangeability between an active object and its action, which are often separated out and expressed as non-existent processes or events such as: *movement, speed, agency, change, transfer,* etc. Such reifications are then referred to as disembodied quasi-entities, no differently and with no less an intransigent belief in their existence than the faith held by a religious worshipper in discorporate *spiritual beings* with supernatural powers that control human destiny.

Ostensive (rather than dictionary) examples of reification which involve a distortion of consciousness and reality-disconnectedness can be seen in practically any book, film, newspaper, religious sermon, TV dialogue, internet discussion group, classroom, university lecture hall - indeed in any scientific or natural language conversation which one experiences or observes.