10:03am June 18, 2014

Also, yes, abstraction is a real thing.

I know that some people find it a difficult word to understand, but it does actually refer to something.

Basically, the more concrete something is, the more it is reflected in direct experiences.

The most concrete things are direct sensory experiences. The feeling your hand has when it touches a blanket. The specific shade of purple coming in through my bedroom curtains. Those things are as concrete as an experience can get. Not the words for them, but the experiences themselves.

Things become more abstract when we put them into categories. "Cat" is an abstraction, even if any individual cat is concrete. Cat is an abstraction both as a word and as the idea behind the word. But it’s among the most concrete possible of all abstractions.

And things become more and more abstract the more divorced they become from direct sensory experiences. A word like epistemology is more abstract than a word like cat. And same with the ideas behind them.

Current theory suggests that when dealing with the more extreme abstractions, the human mind tries to deal with it by tying it back to much more concrete experiences, by means of sensory metaphors and the like. At least that’s what one of my neurology teachers says.

But there’s still a difference between feeling a blanket, and thinking of “cat” in the generic, and thinking of “epistemology”. And they’re still on a continuum of concrete to abstract.

I’ve found that the more abstract an idea is, the more it’s an idea about an idea, then an idea about an idea about an idea, and the more levels of idea come in between direct experience and this idea, the more abstract it is.

I also know something like this has to be true because my brain excels at sensory concreteness and strains with abstractions even when it manages to comprehend them. And I know a lot of people whose brains follow that pattern – or its exact opposite. So it’s a common division, even if there are people who do fine with both.

Notes: