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You will hear me use the word abstract a lot
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so i thought i would actually give you an attempt at a definition,
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or maybe even more important
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an intuition of what abstract means
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and abstract can be an adjective
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you can have an abstract idea
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you can have abstract art
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or it can be a verb
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you can abstract something
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abstract the idea from some other idea
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and you can even have it as a noun
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you can have an abstract
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and it tends to, if you use it as a noun
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the one I tend to associate
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is the abstract of research paper, which is kind of,
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distills the essence of the research paper,
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which is kind of a summary of that paper
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and the one thing you are going to see
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regardless of how you
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what context you use the word abstract
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there's this kind of notion taking the essence
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of a real world object
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whether you use it as a noun, adjective, or a verb
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so over here we have our real world
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we have our real world
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and then over here you have your world of
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you have ideas and concepts
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and the general idea behind the abstraction
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or abstracting something
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is that you're taking it away
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from the particular concrete real world
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and you're going more into the direction of ideas and concepts
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and probably for me, one of the most tangible ways of
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thinking about abstraction, which is kind of a contradiction in itself
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to think of abstraction in a tangible way
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is things like geometric shapes
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so if i were to tell you to find me some cubes
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you might point to a borg vessel right over there
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a borg vessel
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you might point to a pair of dice
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let me draw a pair of dice
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if you were looking for cubes
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so you might point to a pair of dice
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that looks something like that
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you might point to a Rubik's cube
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anything you might find
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there might be a building that looks like a cube
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it might be a building that looks like a cube
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or maybe there is a box in your house that is a cube
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but in your mind you have a general idea of what a cube is
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like i know a cube when i see one
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and a general idea is distilling the concept
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the idea of what a cube is
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and all of these ideas are very different
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this is some plastic thing i could hold in my hand
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these are these white things
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they aren't even geometrically close to being perfect
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they have these little divets on the side right over there
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this is a large borg vessel that you know
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that doesn't exist yet
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is a fictional thing
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that they all have this cubeness to them
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one of the fun things about geometry
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so really distill the essence of these real world shapes
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and we do have this definition in geometry
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which is an object like this
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where every side has the exact same length
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so this is length one and that would be length one
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that would be length one
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it doesn't have to be
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whatever the length of this side is
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and this dimension
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then this dimension would be that length
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and then that dimension is going to be that length
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and i'm not giving you the rigorous definition
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but i'm just trying to highlight that there is
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pure idea of what a cube is
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of what a cube is
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and the real world, there is nothing that is actually
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a perfect cube
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if you were to get really really close to the die
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if you were to measure exactly their measurements
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they won't be exactly the same measurement
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but the abstract idea is completely the same length as this
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and this and this and all of the edges are going to
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have the exact same length
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so this is going from the concrete
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the specific from the real world
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if you consider the 24th or the 25th century, the real world
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to going to the idea behind it, the general idea
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and you probably also heard the word abstract
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in terms of art, like abstract art
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so this is abstract art
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and it is the same general idea
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so if you to look it up in the dictionary
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you're going to find 20 definitions of the word abstract
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but it's all, essentially trying to say the same thing
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abstract art is art that is not focused on trying to paint
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reality the exact way reality exists
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if you look at kind of lot of Renaissance art
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they are skilled at painting figures
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exactly how they look in the real world
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but the abstract artist
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sometimes they're not even trying
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to represent anything from the real world
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they are trying to represent a raw idea or
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a raw expression of color and form and texture
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and this is a Jackson Pollock painting
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right over here and i printed out so many things wrong
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taken by our own Steven Zucker, our art historian
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and you can see that it's not clear
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Jackson Pollock is not trying to paint a
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you know, a dog or horse or anything like that
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he is painting something that is devoid
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completely independent of anything
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that we actually see in physical reality
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and the word, abstraction, you know,
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it doesn't just apply on just a pure geometry and art
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it applies to almost everything we do on a daily basis
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when we even talk about things
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when we even use words or use symbols
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we are essentially abstracting away
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we're abstracting the essence of something that actually exists in physical reality
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so if i use the word dog
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it is a set of symbols that represent something in our mind
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that we associate with dog
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we have in our minds kind of the quality
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of what a dog actually is
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you know, it has four legs
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and floppy ears and you enjoy petting it
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and they're man's or i guess people's best friend
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you imagine this thing called a dog
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and it has the essence of dog
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and when you actually look at dogs in the real world
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they look very very different type of animals
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like when you look at a great dane
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or kind of a super small poodle
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But we recognize there is an essence of those particulars
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that we can abstract away and say this is a dog
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and we abstract it even more by representing these letter symbols
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that tend to conjure up this image
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even when we write something as simple as a number
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so if i write the number five
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we use it so frequently that to us
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a number 5 seems kind of like a concrete thing
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but it 's so abstract
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it's just a quantity of things
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i can symbolize like that
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i could have symbolized 5 like that
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i could have symbolized 5 in roman numerals like that
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i could symbolize it like that
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and in all of these cases they are
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it is the idea of a quantity of five things
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five, you know, you could say point me to a five
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and someone could draw or point you to something like that
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but they are still pointing you to the symbol of five
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but it's still an very abstract idea
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so hopefully this gives you an appreciation
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for what abstract means
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as you can tell, you know
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it's kind of a, for lack of a better word
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it's kind of an abstract idea
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not to be too cute about that
