On page 15, he quotes Fibonacci's description of fecund rabbits in a cage. Two pages later- the two pages are a repetitive explanation of how the numbers of rabbits grow - he says
"Reification" is the term used by philosophers to refer to serendipitous actual manifestations of something that was originally conceived as an abstraction or as a figment of mind.But this wasn't conceived as a figment of mind; it's a perfectly realistic question. has this man never met a rabbit? had he no gerbils as a child? Was he so desperate to use the word 'reification'?
Why would this solution to a simple puzzle reveal patterns in the real world? There is, to my knowledge, no definitive answer to this question; nor, probably, can there ever be one.
After some more clumsy explanations of simple mathematics, followed by
what I think were equally clumsy arguments about the ineffability of
the human mind and its puzzling, I gave up.
So wrote clew in
Philosophy.