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The word entititive 10 means to be considered as a pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances. Commonsense informs us it is physically impossible to exist purely or entitively - bereft of any existential modality or property at all. It is infeasible to be here in the world and be physically propertyless at the same time, in the absence of a single characteristic, attribute, essence or state. The very idea of Being is a reification - a misnomer for two very good reasons.

A photon of light is a particle with a property that causes it to have weight in a gravitational field. It MUST have mass. That which does not have mass does not exist — there is no such thing as that which does not have mass.
Dancing or doing crosswords does not exist - only the individuate mass of human meat we call a dancer or a crossword player exist

Energy does not exist - only that which has mass and is energetic (or energised) exists. Unenergised matter could never exist - thus all matter is energised material and it is for that reason that the term matergy has been coined.

In the arrow paradox, Zeno imagines an arrow in flight. He then asks us to divide up time into a series of indivisible nows or moments. At any given moment, he argues, if we look at the arrow, it has an exact location, so it is not moving. Yet that movement has to happen in the present; it cannot be that there is no movement in the present, yet movement in the past or future. So throughout all time, he concludes, the arrow is at rest, and thus, motion cannot happen.

Zeno is correct - but for the wrong reasons. Motion cannot happen because motion does not exist. What exists is the relocating, moving arrow. But Zeno was wrong when he claimed that if we look at the arrow it is not moving at any given moment. If an airborne arrow was not moving continuously it could never fly and if its constituent particles where not moving it would simply not exist at all (and neither would its particles.)

It may be possible for Zeno to fantasise, to imagine or conceive of the arrow being stationary, and mentally freeze-frame it in the neurophysical networked ideating brain-material that he employs for thinking, but such anthropocentric imaginings have absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the moving arrow. Thus it only remains a paradox for those folk-scientists who are ontologically challenged.

Scientists have simply dreamed up abstract nouns and adjectives to describe the behaviour of objects and then started to believe science's useful fictions that there is something that really exists as the nominata of its descriptive periphrastic-avoidance terms. The behaviour of objects does not exist - (there is no such thing) only  the behaving objects exist. A large part of the jargon of science refers to nothing other than the adjectives they use to describe what objects are observed to do rather than the objects themselves.

Dancing flamenco is a term that describes an existent human moving his/her body in a certain way. Neither dancing nor flamenco actually exists – only the human who moves in that particular fashion exists. By up for grabs, I mean such abstractions are candidates for elimination – or better still – candidates for illumination that is they are prime targets for de-reification via education.

It may be that most adults will find it impossible to grasp the eliminative approach – the early brainwashing is to deeply embedded and the neurological pathways so deeply entrenched in the thinking meat that they are more or less cognitive fixtures cemented experientially into place with layers and layers of (helpful) lies. Dancing does not exist. It is the dancing object that exists. Dancing cannot be demonstrated without a dancer or some moving object because it does not exist to be demonstrated or observed. The only difference between the dancer sitting at his table and the dancer who rises and dances is the way that the person exists in relation to the way he/she moves the arms, legs and body rhythmically to the music.

To behave in such a way is to be nothing more than a metaphysician - not a scientist.

As for the often-made claim that:  energy makes up all matter, but remains  massless while the matter itself has mass, is no more than an updated version of witch-doctory. There is no such thing as energy (read any dictionary - and experience the circular-semantic run-around.) What exists are changing objects. Why do objects change? Because there is a material imperative to do so. Because that is the only way that objects CAN exist. No change = no objects and no cosmos. Why? Because that is the way the cosmos is the cosmos.

Nothing or nothingness (an absence of objects) could not exist - because if  nothing existed (or did not exist)  then nothing would be in a state of non-existence, and to be in any state at all - of whatever nature -  is to exist in that state, and to exist in a state is NOT not to exist.

Bottom line? Much of science is nothing more than mere word-play and must be taken with a large pinch of salt.


The problem is the assumption that the very process of employing these ontological devices neurologically instantiates them by the very fact that they appear to be the opposites of each other. The key to understanding Being and Nothing is to be aware that they are not the opposites or antonyms of ANYTHING - never mind of each other.

Plato initiated (or further developed) a trend of misidentification by first confusing the Greek word ousia, [from einai, 'to be'] with what he thought was a verb of pure existence (or elementary presence) He then misapplied and reified the term ousia with the equivalent of the entititive BE-word /Being/. In ancient Greek ousia actually meant:

(1) Stuff, matter, a type of stuff. (2) a persisting, independent thing, in contrast to its dependent 'accidents' (attributes, modes). (3) the persisting essence of a thing. (4) the essential content of, e. g., a book, in contrast to its form or expression. (5) property, possessions. what one has. [6] (Inwood. 2007)

Compare the correct usage of ousia in the biblical passage translated from the Greek below: Luke 15:13

                      Linguistically and semantically the classification of Descartes' and/or God's: /I am/ as in,

are examples of the so-called absolute signification. (the old term for orphanic copula and covert predication) They cannot possibly refer to a pure property-free state, for it would be impossible for such an entity to exist. We conclude therefore that in both cases the existential predication is covert. We already know from the start that God's ['I'] /am/ refers to God's unmentioned properties. Similarly we already know (and have impatiently anticipated) that the entity who thinks that he thinks, and therefore thinks that he exists, and finally accepts that he exists as Descartes - was (rather predictably) Descartes all along.

With ambiguity in mind we will now move on to a consideration of the part that the Greeks played in the consolidation of the habit and practice of reification for philosophy in particular and natural language in general.

The phenomenon of reification in relation to philosophy is not something unique to the Greek language or culture, or indeed to any of the great Indo-European language family itself, of which almost all European languages are sibling tongues. Greek is more interesting and relevant to our investigation because English adopted so many Greek words into its corpus and our culture is heavily influenced by Greek ideas, Greek abstraction and Greek reification in every domain of our practical and intellectual activities and is a predominant feature of philosophical discourse. There comes a time in the development of any language when the pragmatic, prosaic crudities of descriptive naïveté make way for the inevitable progression towards the sophisticated, fanciful and imaginative. In Europe this linguistic transformation happened to the ancient Greek language before any other.

Parmenides provided a compelling reason-based argument in poetic form regarding the way we talk about the abstraction Being. He recommended that all reference to non-existents should be totally eliminated from human discourse. It is a curious fact of language that the very mention of a non-existent instantiates the concept of such a will-of-the-wisp in the human mind and introduces a dimension of phantom concrecity.

Patently there is a complete lack of evidence for the existence of:  Brain states, qualia, existential modalities etc.  consequentially in spite of the conjecture-based attempts at persuading us otherwise, one can understandably be excused for concluding that there are no such things. Jousting with imagined metaphysical pink elephants, or attempting to define such fatuous metaphysical stage-properties of the transcendentalist edutainment industry as qualia - for qualia is as much a money-earning publishing racket as most other meaningless metaphysical bandwagons aimed at the hoi polloi?

And so it is with any other ontological object-action fantasy for that matter. To join the definitional feeding-frenzy is to hamper rather than assist a clearer understanding of the origination of such neurological glitches as this form of process-entification - the dualistic reification of the gradual or sudden modification of a reconstitutive object in its alteration through a series of changing states. Such transcendentalist, Cartesian-like fantasies are easily explained as being the result of imprintation in the insidious filial  (though well-meaning) agential stage of the generational sequencing of infancy:

Further reificative internalisation of object-action dualism (or Descartes' Syndrome) is given added strength and support via peer groups, and is then standardly educatively forced-fed in primary school and church, and again later in the wider domain of higher education and general societal and media ignorance. To enter into the kind of definitive pantomime such as the internalistas and interiorisers perform is to acquiesce, participate and provide a token participatory endorsement by involvement which gives succour to the transcendentalists and occultists, who point to such discussion as spurious evidence that such nonsense merits serious consideration. In such circumstances it is diagnoses (or diagnosings) not definitions that can be characterised as being individually and societally useful.

One does not existentially define the pink elephants and giant rats of the alcoholic, nor does one existentially define the regal majesty and ermine robes of the lunatic who struts around the asylum garden as: Louis XVI King of France and of Navarre with his head still in place. Psychiatric determinations are required in order to distinguish the neuro-physiological nature of the irrationality and illogicality of which pink elephants, giant rats, qualia and other such metaphysical fantasies of which  process-entification and the existence of dualistic entities are symptomatic.

Such cognitive confusion and lack of reality-contactedness can only be understood through a diagnostic analysis and an investigation into the social circumstances or genetical copying that gives rise to the problems suffered by unfortunates whom labour under such delusions. It is the behaviour of the persons who suffer such cognitive misfortune which calls for useful investigation, not a definition of the fantasies themselves - we know enough about fantasies already, from the fairy stories, and folk tales of God we are exposed to at the same that time we internalise the dualistic Cartesian-vogue dualistic nonsense that gave rise to them.

Oh! And as far as Xs are concerned - none exist - though they are useful fictions - as compared with useless fictions like qualia


What certainly exists is our functioning brainmeat, which can be observed and physically prodded. Like every other entity in the cosmos human brainmeat exists differently from second to second. Humans have to create some form of words to describe their changing meat. We have invented words to describe all kinds of (what we call) actions, movements and changes of the bodybrain. But such a lexicon does not exist - we humans exist as living lexicons.
The descriptive words we invent for purposes of communication do not suddenly burst into existence just because we vibrate our voice-box as we force air over it to make sounds. If toe-meat is damaged when a brick falls on it - it starts to exist as a painful toe. Just because we invented a word pain does not mean that pain exists in the toe - it just means that because of tissue damage the toe exists in a painful manner, rather than the manner in which it existed before the brick fell on it.

If our bodies start to exist in a manner that we call running, that does not mean that running exists - it is simply a way we have  developed for describing (to others) a running body. We do not need to use our language TO OURSELVES -  IF WE SEE SOMEONE RUNNING.  We simply register the moving object in the way that it exists at the moment we witness it. We do not need to convert what we see into an interior language of  words for our own benefit.  

The brainmeat's awareness of the painful toe-meat is necessary so adjustments can be made (survival-wise) by the holism. The painful toe's pain is NOT transported to the brainmeat - you do not get to know about the painful toe-meat in your head - holism senses it and is aware of it because the whole system has been breached and the body carries out its own systems -survey. That is NOT to say that a system exists - what exists is a systemised holism.

Encounters with reification are more noticeable in philosophical texts and discourse simply because the level of discussion is more complicated due to philosophy's rightful preoccupation with ontology, and the necessarily measured evaluation of words and meaning.

As we have seen in earlier sections, reification was obviously rampant in pre-Socratic times as verified by Parmenides' strictures against the concretisation of the abstractive /being/ (not the ontic 17 to on version of being) and his remonstrances against non-existent to mae on. We already know that Parmenides advocated the total elimination of such linguistic references:

Non-being, for Parmenides is infeasible as meaningful language because only being, (ta onta - the plural, literally beings) exists, and non-being (to mae on), is not. Parmenides may well conclude that such a way is unthinkable, and it is interesting to speculate which of the two meanings Parmenides intended in using the word unthinkable. Perhaps it was both? I prefer number two for reasons I will reveal shortly:

Though I admire Parmenides' radical eliminativism, (are we dealing with the first eliminativist in history?) I think he takes it a bit too far when he insists that: that which is not is a notion that cannot be thought about. I am in general agreement with the great Eleatic philosopher that to reify such non-existents should be discouraged, I do not agree however that such reificational practices invalidate abstraction as an element of debate if employed with care, as a useful feature of human discourse.

In my view it is enough to inform people as to the dangers of reifying such abstractions and advise them that to THINK about a non-existent is not to existentialise it - but merely to instantiate a neurological concept of it. Perhaps if transcendentalist philosophers simply acknowledged the differences between existentialisation and instantiation, much of the dialectical tension between the more spiritually orientated thinker and the materialist would evaporate.

Thus would we be liberated from the corrosive dangers of objectifying such conceptual instantiations as Being and Nothing (as was the case with Heidegger), and both sides of the ontological divide could draw closer, and talk about being and existence and experience free from the angst and annoyance that such ontological uncertainty engenders. It is understood and accepted that we have a need to be able to talk about Being and Not Being in order to render accounts of our world, but we do not have any need to reificationally interiorise the abstractions that we use to communicate such worldly observations.

Parmenides, of course, would insist that non-existence, to mae on is impossible. Scientifically this concords with Einstein's conservation of energy principle, whereby, though mass and energy can turn into each other, mass cannot be absolutely created or destroyed. Sounding remarkably like Einstein himself, Parmenides writes of to on in Fragment 8 of the Proem:

Parmenides bequeathed the argument about Not Being to subsequent philosophy - that means to us. What is to be made of it? The One became the common name for Being as it was described by Parmenides.

The great Eleatic philosopher instinctively grasped the concept of the impossibility of mere presence and consequently never used any predications with it is not, simply because for him no predications are possible of the non-existent, and a predication-less (purely existential) entity is an impossibility.

Somewhat annoyingly the phrase, It is not, seems to instantiate the erroneous ontological notion that there is a phantom /it/ which is a pronoun standing for something.

THE ONE is a key phrase in Parmenides. It is to that important concept that we now turn our attention. We can be pretty sure that Parmenides was aware of the fact that there are two ways of looking up at the night sky, or indeed of contemplating a heap of sand. Both can be looked at as either: the one or the many, depending upon circumstance or mood.

Each object in the cosmos is not merely a discrete, uneffectuated holon 18 or entity, but a reciprocative autonomous, sub-systemic component of the universal environmental meronymy.19 From a human point of view all objects can be conceived of as being at the same time the parts and the sum of those parts - both the constituents and the integrum. We can conceive of a heap of sand as either a multitude of individual grains, or as a unitary object.

One can gaze up at the splendour of the starry heavens and see an infinite myriad of shimmering uncountable individuates, or one can throw one's optico-neurological lens switch to wide-angle macro-view and suddenly see the Milky Way as one gigantic, breathtaking, cosmic holism. But now we turn to the more familiar battlements of Elsinore Castle in Denmark,20 where the figure of a gloomy prince, contemplating suicide looks down upon the waves crashing upon the jagged rocks below.

But now it is time to deconstruct the holy grail of sixteenth century philosophy and to prove the the apparent existential axiom: I think therefore I am, only succeeds in formulating the predicational concept I think therefore I think and completely fails to acheive any kind of  ontological wisdom or philosophical  profundity  that is recondite, abstruse and  epoch-making.

The Cartesian sense of I the cogito is a crude attempt at the reification of the soul, for otherwise he could of quite as easily declared:

                                        I sit before the fire watching beeswax melt - therefore I exist

Such an equally absurd ontological tautologic redundancy would have also worked to fool the less enlightened elements within philosophical community into viewing it as:   a profound remark.

His choice of positing: a thinking I as existing, rather than: a sitting, watching I that is existing, is informative and pregnant with meaning. Even a merely tenuous reference to a body (which sitting and watching implies, would have introduced the corporeal concept of a human soma into the formulation aimed at confirming an existence of the I which would immediately exclude the reification of the apparently en-souled version of I which was the whole purpose of his theologically motivated thingification of an existing dualistic mind.

As to the precise nature of his theologically motivated thingification, we have Richard  Sansom to thank for providing  Damasio's observation, that the speaking of the cogito may also have served the clever purpose of accommodating religious pressures of which Descartes was keenly aware, and that the latter is a possibility, but there is no way of finding out for sure. [12] (Damasio. 1994)

For me an understanding of the errors at the heart of the Cartesian system, (which we will see in a moment) lies in Descartes's discussion of the equivocal theory of substance.

The Cartesian reification of his theological version of existence can be extrapolated from the I think - therefore I am  formulaic rendering of the cogito as follows:

                                                       I think  - therefore God and I exist.

This conforms to his statement which claims to establish God as the only one substance which can be understood to depend upon no other thing whatsoever, and that in the case of all other substances, he perceives that they can only exist with the help of God's concurrence.

Ergo - of him and God existing at the same time.

He expresses his definition of substance thus:

I is simply a pseudonym of a consciousness of one's own identity. It is a reference to the catalogue of self-referential neologisms that mankind has created as synonyms for the primitive belief of early man that objects, including man himself, contain a spirit - an incorporeal, supernatural vital principle or animating force or fundamental emotional and activating principle determining one's character variously referred to as: the self, ego, psyche, soul, mind, nous, noesis, cognitive content, episteme, anima, spirit, etc. which are characteristic terminology of the object-action dualist. Such philosophical foolishness reminds me of the Trobriand Islander (today officially known as the Kiriwina Islands) who traipsed around the beach clutching an empty coca cola bottle. The old man and the empty bottle were inseparable. When asked why he carried it about endlessly, day after day, the old fellow replied that the spirit of his grandfather had taken up residence therein.

Apart from the different spiritual venue involved or the alternative localisation of the liberated soul (residence in a putative heaven rather than in a coca cola bottle) humanities'perception of the occult dimension don't seemed to have changed much over the millennia between the more affluent and better educated societies Western world and the beach-dwellers of the Indian Ocean? Ah well! It's a question of horses for courses I suppose? But this is yet another kettle of fish.

Questions regarding the neuro-physical structure of humans are a matter for the many experts that study such matters, such as: biologists, anaesthesiologists, biochemists, cardiovascular specialists, general physicians, genetic counsellors, immunologists, kinesiotherapists, neurologists, etc. If you are female and your structure is undergoing change in the stomache-area you visit an obstetrician or a gynaecologist. If your limbs are failing you make an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon.   If he cuts your leg off - you turn to a prosthetist who assists patients with disabling conditions of limbs and spine, or with partial or total absence of limb, by fitting and preparing orthopaedic braces or prostheses.

                                  In such circumstances one does NOT turn to some metaphysicalist
                                   dreamer who does not even know who  he is  or  what he is.

The words pretend/pretence in relation to Descartes' counterfactual cogito have a variety of meanings. It is wrong to select a version of the word pretend which gives the impression that Descartes constructed his counterfactual scenario with the intent to deceive. Let's pretend that... blah, blah, blah. or Let's imagine that... blah, blah, blah is technique that continues to be used in some of the rooms which lead off from the corridors of shame, which is described by critics of many forms of Continental thought as: Let's Pretend Philosophy." Every human on earth who is neurologically capable of self-identification (knowing who he is) is automatically aware of his humanness and of being a member of the order of homo sapienses - the only surviving hominid; a species to which modern man belongs; being a bipedal primate having language and ability to make and use complex tools. Humans don't ask what they are - they KNOW what they are and that the well-known specifications of what it means to be human apply to them personally. What follows is that we AUTOMATICALLY self-recognisably associate ourselves as being species-specific to that classification of mammals and don't ask Cartesian-style interrogative redundancies.  

As every utterer of the I word is aware, I is a referential term which derives its reference from antecedency, or the thinking, flesh and blood state or condition of being physically and neurologically antecedent . Thus, in the absence of a referential antecedent the word I would be neuro-linguistically inaccessible to an entity which was no longer extant. The first person pronoun I is the most powerful referent in any language. I conveys the utmost informational recall as to personal identity, self knowledge and understanding of an individual's history, beliefs, goals, abilities and occurrent realisation of his or her current state of connectedness with the surrounding environment.

I believe that Descartes'  cogito: I think therefore I am  is a useless would-be syllogistic statement and a classical example which shows deductive reasoning at its worst. Its misleading conclusion is derived from two premises which are inherently established a priori, via the nature of the content and the particular linguistic form in which the redundancy itself is brought to the eye of the reader.

Descartes decided that he (like all humans) is a res cogitans. ("Sum res cogitans" or "I am a thing that thinks.)  In an impressive display of philosophical reasoning, executed in perfect French - Latin he drives his existential point home forcibly.

It follows therefore that whilst he was far from being a brain in a vat, he may well have been lying there in his armchair in front of the fire thinking without any arms, legs, hair or teeth, but in such circumstances he at least would have existed with the essential properties he specified as being essentially required for thinking, i. e., a head with a functioning brain that generated perfect formulations of a language often described as the flower of western culture, together with the organs necessary to sustain his human thinker's thinking brain in thought.

Thus it is that as a human thinking thing ("Sum res cogitans" or "I am a thing that thinks") the activities of a thinking human thing are not restricted even to the other meanings of thinking as mental acts and data: will, feeling, judgement, perception, etc., and so on as specified by Koyre who claims that the verb cogitare was traditionally very wide in its meaning "It embraced not only thought, but all mental acts and data.
[xx] (Koyre details here. )

Descartes, as we shall see in a moment, goes much, much, further than that in his definition of thinking and in his description of a res cogitans which  includes

So where does that statement take us as far as the cogito is concerned?  It means that following Descartes' practice of spelling out the inclusive features of the verb to think we have no alternative but to reformulate his cogito and show it in its full existential expanse and implications.  Here is the cogito recast into its fuller and more correct  form:

So now we discover that it was not the case as the mind-body dualists like to boast, that Descartes dared to think, as no one had ever dared think before.  The term think as he conceived of it  included a catalogue of human modalic behaviours which included the physiological prerequisites needed to sustain them.
Such essential essences automatically imply the existence of an alert, educated human being - a human being who, under normal circumstances would certainly never even dream of questioning such an existential  auto-justifying, axiomatic, in-your-face  human apodeicity.

Therefore, in spite of his devil seeking to deceive his senses and his conspicuous introductory use of perfectly phrased linguistic argumentative over-kill, he shoots himself down in flames the minute he utters the words I think and renders the whole ontological exercise a tautologic squandering of time.  He could have spent his day more profitably working on his math sums rather than his ergo sums,  for anyone on earth could have come up with an formalised, systematic existential questioning commonplace like that - not that any person in their right mind would of course - most people have more commonsense.

So exactly why was he foolish in asking such a silly question? Because HE was the one who characterised humans as re cogitans, and the minute he thinks he immediately swamps the cogito project with the thousands of other existential modalities, manners, behavioural characteristics and prerequisite physiological particularities implicatively required is his specification of the corporeal necessities required in order to be able to think as an all dancing all singing res cogitans. His act of thinking turns the whole thing into a farce, for as a thinking thing he would have already BEEN ANTECEDALLY AWARE of his humanity which included the necessarily required essences and their neurological and physiological appurtanences and what that proprietarily entailed as corollaries of any thinking thing as so defined by him in his definition of the thing called a human res cogitans.

Did he REALLY believe that ANYONE in the world doesn't ALREADY understand the crucial fact that the ability to think - to  speak - to have language - is an essential part of being human, and is the feature that separates us from animals incapable of speech?  Did he not realise that ordinary folk would have discovered this for themselves, when, millennia ago, they tried to engage their cat or their dog or their donkey in conversation and all they got in reply was a mew, a bark or a bray? Humans have known since they first became self-referentially recognisably human tens of thousands of years ago that animals cannot speak - and we can.

First of all Descartes decides to draw upon his previously learned, antecedently acquired concept of  what thinking and existence is, and then he puts it into words in the language he acquired at home and at school to create his tautologous or coterminous phase. which proves that HE IS ALREADY EXISTING AND HAS BEEN FOR A CONSIDERABLE TIME as a living, breathing, concept understanding, language enabled HUMAN BEING and to make such statement is completely unnecessary and a redundancy.

It would make no difference whatsoever as to which existential modality Descartes chose to use in order to confirm the fact that you exist.

I think, I experience, I have a painful blister on my bottom, I am thirsty therefore I am, I think I am thinking therefore I am, or even the single first person pronoun I am!

Any words confirm and carry the same implicature - and what does that implicature delimit? What does the utterance of a human tongue imply? Could it for example be the utterance of a parrot? A computer? A tape recorder? Would a statement I think therefore I exist be made by a parrot? Parrots DON'T MAKE STATEMENTS. They imitate sounds - a parrot is incapable of stating a fact or making an assertion which is offered as evidence for any thing at all - never mind that something is true. So, to get back to my question, What does that implicature delimit?

What does the utterance of a human tongue imply? Well it goes much further than implicature or entailment IT GUARANTEES that whatever makes a existential statement is a human being. We may not know in other words the name of that human being - we may not know WHO that human being is - but we can say with absolute surety and without ANY fear of contradiction that the entity - that English, Latin or French speaking entity is a HUMAN BEING speaking a complicated human language that took millennia to develop and which sets humans apart from parrots and minar birds and other imitative creature as well as it separates us from mechanical technology which repeats recorded messages. Souls don't have tongues, mouths or brains wherewith to generate language - unless that is A PERSON HAS CONVINCING PROOF THAT THERE ARE SUCH THINGS - AND THEY DO?


Before going on to discuss another form of ontological entertainment  -  Shakespeare's Hamlet,  we leave knowing that like the bard's great play with its inevitably tragic ending there was only one way that Descarte's little armchair ontological burlesque could have turned out anyway. He could never have discovered that he didn't actually exist, or the wicked stage devil had successfully deceived him, nor could and have managed to inform or convince us of such a fact if it were true. If Descartes had discovered himself not to have existed in his cogito cameo role in the Theatre of the Ontologically Absurd of Yesteryear we would never have known about the cogito, and probably only have heard of Descartes via his admirable contributions to mathematics.

Abstraction is the stuff of literature, philosophy and poetry, as the well-known line from Hamlet demonstrates:

Considered from a strict ontological rather than a poetic point of view, Hamlet's phrasing of the ontological alternative involved in committing suicide does not make sense. In spite of traditionalist opinion to the contrary, being does not exist - it follows of course that non-being does not exist either. One just cannot not exist. The aspirational condition of moving towards a new state of not-being is an intangible transcendental bluebird that flutters away the nearer your rapidly falling body gets to the rocks below.

There is no state of not-being, as both Parmenides and Einstein will rush to confirm. As it happens, and this may come as a surprise, there is no state of being either. There is only the state of being some THING. It will be remembered from an earlier section that pure existence is a physical impossibility. Shakespeare's Hamlet either continues to exist as Hamlet Prince of Denmark, or the lifeless body of Hamlet continues to exist as the bloodied decomposing corpse of the dead Prince sprawled upon the rocks below the castle walls. (In the play he actually dies in the castle as is well known.)

Every object in the cosmos changes seamlessly. There are no temporal interstices where we can rest awhile and BE in this state or that. As Parmenides and Einstein both agreed, we either are or we are not something. If we are not one form of entity -  we, or our material,  is always something else - we exist as a living human being or the material that once was us lies  in a pile of bleached bones as would have lain Hamlet's remains had he chosen to jump.  Or, what once constituted our bodies remains as grey ash in a funeral urn, or as a cloud of detritus blowing about the far reaches of the universe as part of the cosmic dust that we originally were and always will be over and over again.

One of the reasons why so much philosophical discourse is confused is because, many people find it difficult to differentiate between /being/ as:

Certain philosophical and religious systems have plainly reified the brain's unremitting neurological self-monitoring, self-referential reportage, or the feed-back-account of our somatic activity into something they are incapable of describing but call /being/ which is no more than a conceptualised instantiation of the fact and recognition of our own existential presence. Most people become habituated through language to such unreal ontologically defective reification from birth onwards and bring it with them to philosophy as transcendental baggage when they are adults.

A faith in the existence a soul  is a manifestation of an unsatisfied human state - a transcendentalist  desire, an auto-erotic desire for a love-relationship with the self - a metaphyssical missionary position with the I on top and the me beneath, that feeds their fantasy of  the possibility of an achievable immediacy of gratification  between desire and that desire's fulfillment.

In the third chapter that now follows we examine the various types of reification and discuss the responses of certain notable philosophers of the past who have recognised the ubiquity and dangers of the problem.