(In)appropriate (De)reification

post by herschel (hrs) · 2023-12-20T04:51:56.269Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://brothernin.substack.com/p/inappropriate-dereification

Contents

  Inappropriate reification
  Appropriate reification
  Dereification, in general
  (In)appropriate dereification?
None
1 comment

So obviously there’s a 2x2 here: appropriate/inappropriate vs dereification/reification. I think the basic concepts here are unfortunately not that familiar to everyone, so I'll lay them out at least a bit.

Reification I've already discussed, and is perhaps worth reading if the word is not familiar to you from meditation discourse.

Inappropriate reification

'Inappropriate reification' is a concept which I get almost entirely from Mark, and which hasn't yet diffused much further than people directly following his stuff. A fine way to put this is something like, "pernicious over-updates". Mark uses this concept almost reflexively, to point at a pervasive pattern in transformative practice where people notice a pattern, causal structure, etc (spuriously or not), and then make updates in a way which is perhaps "inadequately epistemically parsimonious".

This is probably not a problem that's unique to practice, but it seems stickier or more problematic in that domain. My vague impression is that in the history of science, lots of people over-updated and then held on to whatever ideas they had for too long; this problem doesn't really appear that bad in our telling of history (I think?), because the broader community is able to make the right updates, at least eventually. Anyway, in some sense this is a very general pattern in human cognition and is not really particular to practice.

I think this framing as a sort epistemic misstep or maladjustment is probably decent. I should also say that the problem is not necessarily analyzed as epistemic, but I usually think about occurring at a phenomenological level, which is obviously upstream. I'm going to wave my hands here and say bayesian brain and leave it there.

Let's talk about the other three quadrants.

Appropriate reification

It probably goes without saying that basic functioning relies on various kinds of reification, let's say object permanence. Probably there's developmentally earlier stuff I've never heard of. A friend of mine criticized my reification post, saying that I seemed to be demonizing reification in principle (even though I said otherwise in the post). This is the obvious counterpoint: fabricating (read: phenomenally constructing) stability and distinction is something like the basis of perception whatsoever, and is useful! This is appropriate reification!

Everything else though is obviously going to be contentious: big notions of Justice, Truth, Beauty etc are the obvious ones here, maybe also (one's) "Path" or (eugh) "Destiny". Obviously things like cleanliness, politeness, correctness, are going to have critics, and I think there's also often subtle fractal inappropriate reification going on here. I'll also throw in here stuff like, ok, if you want to follow through on a project, this requires variously gross reification, and surely this is useful, perhaps agnostic about whether it's appropriate. Civilization is built on these kinds of reifications.

Another dimension of this: reification is basic to cognition: distinctions need to be made salient and relatively stable to be able to start making inferences based on them.

Dereification, in general

Ok fine, "the opposite of reification"--obviously there's more interesting stuff here. A very gross and common form is literally telling someone "that's not real". Some dereification occurs """naturally""", perhaps waking up from a dream and the reality of the dream dissolves. There's also just updates and slow decay that occur naturally, so one way of conceiving of a thing replaces another, ok fine.

Dereification is a important aspect of traditional Buddhist models, and maybe marginally in some other traditions. My vague sense is that Burmese Vipassana folks have this in the most explicit way, and that lineage has had an outsized representation in western internet meditation culture, but in any cases dereification is reported in all the traditions, and variously reified (lol).

"I was meditating, this aversive phenomenon arises, something something I saw through its fabrication, I saw the causal structure responsible for its arising, I saw through the micro-phenomenal structure," (etc etc, I think there are more of these but those are actually pretty representative) "and then it ceases, or at least it appears much less real and is present in a flimsier, weaker form."

This is a description of a kind of acute dereification. I think? some models place stable reification as the cumulative result of a lot of acute dereification; some as a progressive process which culminates in acute ("suddenist") transformations like the above, which remain stable; some as a progressive process with no sharp changeovers. My memory is that reports of things like deconstructing the self occurring in one of these ways, similarly for deconstructing/dereifying/etc the ordinary material world.

I might talk about this elsewhere (I suppose I did briefly here [LW(p) · GW(p)]), but I there's an important point here re transmitting insights. In rat terms, it's pretty straightforward to say that an insight, expressed in language, has to be reconstructed anew on the receiving person's side and in principle is reconstructed out of different material cognitively etc. Ok fine, maybe you can spark the "same insight" or whatever, the thing I want to point out here (and this is a cold take in my circles, mostly) is that transformative insights especially can't be recapitulated by a new person just from hearing them. So then, if Alice has some big dereifying insight and tells it to Bob, and he takes it on, it's very likely that his version of it is mostly just layering etc. (This point re layering, just fwiw, would be agreed upon in a very narrow circle of mine, but isn't widely agreed upon or whatever.)

(In)appropriate dereification?

So, fine, the above was just to say, "these are various forms of dereification", obviously the details are going to be contentious. Obviously I have my opinions about what should be regarded as inappropriate, and I'll try to name them straightforwardly.

I think a bunch of the most popular western therapy models are doing something that amounts to "One Weird Trick Gets Rid Of Negative Emotions!" I think a lot of spiritual practice from all over the place is doing something similar, if more advanced or more subtle. It's worth noting that these practices don't even work very well, and there's usually a bunch of cope added to the framework to justify this.

I think the best mystical/contemplative models that I'm aware of take a bunch of metaphysical questions as already answered. I think a lot of this is epistemically incredibly uncareful, and metaphysically/spiritually kind of terrifying: to me it often seems like a bunch of people are blindly jumping off of bridges at the direction of teachers with dubious justifications for the safety and rightness of this. (Ok, most of them don't even successfully get off the bridge, but that's a separate issue.) This is particularly cursed because often you're trying to explore the domain at the same time as modifying it, and the modifications are hardly superficial.

Part of the trouble here is that a lot of upstream questions remain unanswered, as I see it. Some of these are philosophical, some moral or axiological or whatever, but some are probably largely empirical, actually. I want us to be able to even ask these questions at all, and make the right distinctions. Anyway, imo eventually the question to ask here is going to be something like, "what is appropriate (read: good), and how can we know?"

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