Abstraction

2024-08-24

Dear MW,

If there is one idea that you will fall in love with more than any other, it is Abstraction. Put simply, Abstraction is the process of taking some process and giving it a name. (We did it just now!)

If we want to talk about our Self, an all-encompassing dynamic process that is the key to our experience, we have to know how to name the different processes we notice. To do that, we have to develop a working understanding of how we name processes.

Abstraction allows us to reduce the complex and confusing nature of our experience by putting parts of it that “go together” into boxes. For example, when you see an animal that lives in a house, you may call it a pet. In this sense, all pets “go together”.

The animal is a living process and the house is a process too. The way that we understand these processes is by breaking them down into simpler processes using abstraction. The animal is made of organs which are made of cells which are made of molecules… Although houses are typically thought of as static or unchanging structures, they too are processes that can be analyzed with many different abstractions. Houses are a process of a family or an owner, of industries (such as the lumber or concrete industry), of the construction crew which builds the house, of the bank which offers credit in the form of a mortgage… There are many ways to draw abstractions.

Abstraction is the spirit of word. But it doesn’t have to be defined with words per se. When we look at abstract art, it is art that expresses some reduced or singular essence of the subject. For example, where a classical painting might attempt to portray a landscape or a sailboat, an abstract painting might focus intently on the shapes and color of a landscape or evoking the emotion that the artist associates with a certain sailboat.

The way we write, too, reflects the way we abstract ideas. We organize our writing by grouping thoughts that “go together”. This website is called “Where the Wall Falls”. This essay is called “Abstraction“. In longer texts, such as a book, there are commonly “section headings” to denote topics that “go together”. When a text is discussed very often, it may have more even more finely detailed ways to refer to constructions of language. For example, the Torah, Qur’an, and Bible all have standard systems for referring to every line of text (e.g John 1:1). We can use any label to refer to an abstraction. We could call this paragraph Steve if we’d like.

We can then, in another paragraph, talk about Steve. Steve has 114 words. Steve includes the words “organize” and “finely”. We can call these Concrete variables of Steve. These are the parts of Steve that can be directly observed, measured, and quantified. But what Steve does is different. What Steve does is to represent some idea about the way that we organize writing to represent abstractions. These variables of Steve cannot be directly observed. We can call these Abstract variables of Steve.

The existence of Steve, as an abstraction, relies on the agreement between the reader and the text that Steve refers to something objective; that the variables that conspire to create Steve are going to remain somewhat stable for some time. The more stable an abstraction is, the more purposeful it can be. This is why we define words and their meaning when communicating with others. In this way, abstraction is the source of objectivity; it is the process by which we can establish shared notions of truth at all. Even the most primitive grunt, scratch on a rock, or dance of a bird can be an abstraction. At the heart, abstraction is the agreement on which we build worlds. You can say that without abstraction, our experience would be entirely subjective!

Not all abstractions are created equal. If we begin to create abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions arbitrarily, we cannot keep track of them all at once. Imagine trying to describe to a barber the haircut you would like by relaying the desired length of each individual hair. Haircuts would take much longer to complete and the end product would likely not be much closer to the haircut that we want; in fact, it would likely be much further from what we want. What we want, is the leanest set of labels (razor lengths, the names of popular styles, the direction of your part…) to describe a haircut that we love.

Our ultimate goal here is to create a Self that we love. This means finding the minimal set of abstractions — words, images, narratives, habits, variables, which we can use to understand and define our Self.

We can call this process Self Science. In letters to come, I will attempt to define methodologies for you to use in conducting Self Science. These include:

• The architecture of a system for Self data collection
• A unified language for expressing abstract and concrete variables within the system

Future letters will become more technical and concrete in nature as we move into the realm of Computer Science, Software Engineering, and wherever else this journey may take us.

Yours Truly,

Wally Flowers

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