2016-12-06 at 4:08 PM UTC
For a long time now, my school of thought has been that viewing yourself or your personality in abstractions (like, "I'm a funny/mean/caring/whatever person") is something we should not do because in reality, no one is really anything, we are capable of being and doing anything we want. Viewing yourself (or others) as a particular way could make you close minded or discourage you from doing new things.
But recently I've been thinking about something one of my profs said. Basically it was that no one would be able to understand the complexity of how computers operate without making a lot of abstractions, and learning those, to represent what is actually happening in a computer. It's the same with math. As it gets more advanced, you have to do more and more "thinking outside the box", like imagining geometric interpretations of functions and so on.
Because this stuff is so useful in science, I wonder if it would be useful to apply to our personal lives as well. I guess that's more like how normal people live. It kind of seems now like I was trying to question myself out of existence or something.
Thoughts?
2016-12-06 at 4:33 PM UTC
kroz
weak whyte, frothy cuck, and former twink
I do this on the reg for myself, and it's how I make my art.
2016-12-06 at 4:48 PM UTC
Obbe
Alan What?
[annoy my right-angled speediness]
Words are ultraspacial structures created by abstracting common features of significance while ignoring unique features. Words amplify similarities and eliminate differences by wave interference. Words are the product of fusing all the unique images of several structures into an ultraspacial gestalt.
The nemesis of abstraction is that the symbol becomes the reality, and the individual differences in the real world are occulted behind the Veils of Maja. As the focus of the mind shifts from the immediately tangible world to verbal concepts, the mind becomes separated from the body and both lose their health. Paradise is a myth about a preverbal Consciousness, before men created words and subsequently mistook the symbol (idol) for reality (God); the Fall of Man and his Expulsion is the consequence of worshipping verbally fashioned images. Philosophers pretend to lead us back to reality on ways paved with more words of higher abstraction, like devils promising to lead us to Heaven.
2016-12-06 at 5:09 PM UTC
Yes, self-image and self-description (holding a proposition like "I'm funny" to be true) is psychologically important.
I'm not really sure I'd call that "abstraction" though.
