On Abstraction (Lon's contribution)
Jun 8, 2006
Regularly I have conversations with people, and wish there was a stenographer standing by to transcribe the conversation so that it can be shared with others on my blog. I often complain that of all the remarkable things I can do with my phone it doesn't have software that allows me to record my conversations.
There's one conversation topic that lon and I often have - where we discuss a concept he came up with - that basically brilliance is one's ability to abstract.
Here's an email that he wrote on January 5th 2006, that I just now got around to re-reading (I had marked it as unread so that in the future I'd refer back to it). Here it is for your reading pleasure:
My thought below is tangentially related to the article [Sal sent]... It sprang to mind because of the Star Wars reference and the fact that there are many discoveries to be made in our universe, but we won't hear about them until there are stores houses in our collective, thought vernacular.
My perspective on the universe of scientific discovery is that there are some minds, the most brilliant of humans, who are capable of thinking in almost pure abstraction. These are people who do not need to be able to have concrete examples or visualizations of concepts and may thoroughly think through concepts in theory alone. These people see ideas as clearly as others see the ground beneath them... and are typically scientists, though possibly artists or more.
However, for their discoveries to become celebrated by the rest of us, concrete examples or visualizations must be made available. Otherwise their concepts go on the shelf (in their mind, of course).
The fantasy (fantastic) freedom of books, movies, and other media often provide a way to house (and I use that term because of the limitations it connotes) abstract ideas. For instance, the original thought of diving 20,000 leagues under the sea was probably swimming around in some brillian russian engineer's mind a century before Jules Verne wrote his book. However, (a) technology and (b) a concrete example was not available for the implementor of that abstract idea to sell it to the rest of us.
- Lon
p.s. Humorously I am currently reading "Everything's Relative" a enjoyable book about the misunderstanding of famed scientific discoveries.
Labels: Life_Tools, Philosophy
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