Mind's Natural Model 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 ignoring immanency and 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 pragmatically justified 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. Seemingly real immanent Imagery is 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".


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 "physical bodies" of Imagery 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 Imagery "physical bodies" or their symbolic names 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 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. Now, these rules and concepts apply exclusively to the mental, immanent model of the GR and it does not make any sense to reify them into the unreachable and incognizable transcendency. There are no Riemann tensors in the transcendental "reality".


Abstract concepts of models can be justified exclusively by their capacity to represent and to coordinate (imagery) events. "Primary" representative concepts may be regressed to their original events which embody their meaning. Such regression is not reifying, as it stays within immanency. It is tantamount to understanding the concepts. Primary concepts such as force, acceleration, temperature appear usually in mathematical formulas. Over and above being understood, primary concepts 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 observable, i.e. immanently perceivable. Besides primary concepts, model formulas contain secondary, auxiliary ones, helping to structure them as 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 proper 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. (Hegelian idealism will be discussed in the part H_REACTION_OF_DOGMATISM). 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.