The world is a complex place. Even without considering how recent developments in technology have multiplied manyfold the average person’s access to information, the amount of raw stuff that can be crammed into a human brain by their early teens is phenomenal. Layers upon layers of very particularized frameworks, mirthed across endless contexts are being accumulated each and every second in order to build the complex main frame which is our mind.
Yet despite the seemingly incredible phenomena of the human mind, we should not be hasty to forget that it is a practical device – a flexible tool designed to adapt to a plethora of situations. As we shall see, the problem inherent to a practical system is that its only concern revolves around getting whatever job it was designed for, done. In our case the job involves babbling around and getting food for around 30 or so years, having a child, and then dying. If the specifications of any job never entail one getting to the root of things, then those roots, those fundamental aspects of the world which may seem necessary to know but often are not, will unfortunately remain untouched and unexplored.
In order to navigate an incredibly complex reality with respect to the ends of reproduction and death, our brains have developed a variety of shortcuts by which they cut up and organize the outside world, somewhat for ease of understanding, but more importantly for ease of communication. This process of cutting and categorizing is so natural to us that it often sits under the radar of our consciousness, and as such the phenomenon of mistaking ones understanding of the world for reality itself is a ubiquitous malpractice. It seems to be the case that if a statement makes sense linguistically, it intuitively seems also to be a statement about the truth of the world. If we all agree that patch of grass is a country, then we may mistakenly miss the grass for the idea of the country.
The World “As Is” vs The World “As Perceived”
The Philosopher Emmanuel Kant gave us the word Noumena, the meaning of which describes that can never be perceived directly by the brain. For example, consider the colour red, the “Redness” (otherwise known as Qualia), that we perceive is really a filter provided by our brain, the actual wavelength of light which, when reflected off of our retina results in the redness, is inconceivable to us for naught of such redness. The true nature of the light and the objects themselves around us, are thus by our nature unknowable, we are held prisoner by our brains ability to interpret the Noumena, and this interpretation is known as the Phenomena.
And so it happens to be that from our limited perspectives, the world is divided into two. One is the world “as is”, otherwise known as the Noumena, and the other is world “as perceived”, known as the Phenomena.
The trickery of the mind does not end at here however, the brain also uses another technique to better concentrate the complexity of the Noumenal world into easier to digest fractions. This more devious technique is that of abstraction, and is perhaps the more difficult one to grasp.
If we understand the Noumenal world to be the world that exists regardless of our observation, and the Phenomenal world to be that which exists as a consequence of our observation, then the abstract world is the world that comes to being after we have considered what it means to be part of an observable world.
For example, a thousand grains of sand resting upon a bed of concrete is just that. A pile of sand upon the road is something completely different. The concepts of “pile”, and “road” are abstractions that we have used to better organize the phenomenon of a thousand grains of sand upon a bed of concrete. There is no “Pile”, and there is no “Road”, it is our understanding of a mass of many objects upon one another that gives birth to the idea of a pile, and the relationship that we infer as existing between the concrete and the facilitation of smooth transportation which gives birth to the idea of the road.
Our minds use their brilliant capacity for abstraction to divide the world up in practical ways, some of these ways are in fact so practical that we seem naturally to ignore the fact that we are operating mainly in terms of abstraction rather than in statements about the nature of reality.
Whilst the distinction between abstraction and reality may seem trivial at first, it soon becomes an extremely important one to make if one is to properly give respect to the nature of our human experience, (a necessary step before any practical application of philosophy can occur). Unfortunately it is also exceedingly easy to become completely and utterly confounded by this distinction. The principle issue is that the human experience is very much an abstract one, we very much depend on abstractions, and such dependence makes any deliberate separation between the nature of reality and our abstracted parlance a difficult task. Hopefully the contents of this article will push you just a little bit further down the path if being an attentive and responsible thinker.
The Nature of Abstraction
The most fundamental cutting point between abstraction and reality lies in understanding the past. “The Past”, as it were, is the largest and most fundamental point of abstraction that we deal with on a day to day basis. To put it simply, everything we experience moment to moment is as close to “real” as we will ever get, after that, it is all abstraction. Thus, the leaves we see fall off the tree are, for our purposes, real, whilst the leaves we saw on the tree just a second ago have passed from the realm of reality and into the realm of abstraction. Why is this? Consider that you can no longer show anyone the leaves on the tree, the state of the leaves being on the tree only exists in your mind, some sort of mechanism of imagination is now required to understand them, and thus what was once observable reality is now an idea which can be shared, but never experienced.
Because pretty much everything we understand to be real outside of our immediate sensory experience falls into the realm of abstraction, many ideas that we may believe to be fundamental constituents of our world; for example, “society”, are actually loose concepts used to organize complex phenomena rather than being parts of reality in their own right.
Broadly speaking, we tend to group our abstractions into three main categories, the first of which is Function. These Function-Type abstractions include things like silverware, tools, tables, workspaces and the like. As the name implies, the difference between a piece of stone tied to a stick and a hammer is naught but the fact that we intend to use the hammer to hit things. The semantic difference between the hammer and the humble stone on a stick lies in the human wrought intended function of the object, rather than some fundamental quality setting it apart from other objects.
The second common form of abstraction is Organizational abstractions. These sorts of abstractions tend to occur when a number of items sharing some non-arbitrary quality are grouped together and considered as a single object despite evidence to the contrary. All groups are abstractions of organization, as are forests, beaches, countries, etc. Organizational abstractions are particularly devious, owing to the fact that they constitute such a fundamental part of the abstracted make-up of human reality that it is intuitively difficult to admit that they don’t actually have grounding in reality proper. For example, how would you feel if someone told you that Switzerland doesn’t exist? These ideas of groups are so ingrained into our understanding of the world and so useful for communication that it seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise even if all parties were to agree beforehand. However, disagreement at this level of analysis is actually quite common, and highlights the inherent unfalsifiability of the issue. You may consider the nearby forest to be more akin to a wood, or that pile of sand more like a heap than a pile. In the same way, there is no physical evidence that Switzerland exists, or that today is Tuesday, these ideas are simply organizational abstractions that have been passed down for a very, very long time.
The final of the three common categories of abstraction is ideological abstraction. Whilst the previous two categories are by and large concerned with the categorization of physically verifiable phenomena, ideological abstraction is concerned with behaviour. It is the realm of words such as “good”, “bad”, “economy”, “society”, “socialism” and “capitalism”, to name but a few. The erroneous belief that such words denote things that exist in of themselves leads to demonsterously counter-productive logical mistakes, also known as category mistakes. Ideological abstractions exist to convert the incredibly complex phenomena of human activity into easily communicable concepts, confusing these concepts with reality proper leads to unhelpful and circular reasoning. When trying to work out how we should best get on in this difficult life, becoming stuck in a faulty mode of thought due to misattribution of category can be a tragic occurrence indeed.
It may help you to understand that all language is abstraction. The word “house” cannot be lived in, in much the same way as a map is only a representation of space, rather and space itself. This is what is meant by phrases such as “Words are only symbols” and “The map is not the territory”.
Why it is important to understand that you are drawing lines
For the average person, it probably isn’t necessary to be aware of the strict divides and misattributions your mind makes on a daily basis. The purpose of abstraction is to make it easier to divide and categorize information for practical recall, and only so much of this practicality is needed to bring someone from the cradle to the grave. However we often strive for more than just a perilous journey from cradle to grave; we desire happiness, relationships and have aspirations of varying and sometimes seemingly insurmountable complexity. It seems clear to me that as the problems facing our lives and the world become more complicated, the philosophical errors we make at fundamental points in our discourse expound into massive, potentially tragic misalignments.
Failure to sort out your arbitrary abstractions from whatever can be conceived to be representative of the more fundamental nature of reality often results in category mistakes. A great example of a ridiculous but quite telling error derived from a category mistake is found in Hunter S. Thompson’s novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, where two men go to Las Vegas in search of the American Dream – a thing which obviously can’t be “found” in reality.
As we proceed on our quest for new knowledge, it is clearly important we understand exactly what we are doing. What is knowledge, what does it mean to know, on what level of analysis are we close to reality, how close to reality is it possible to be. These questions require a thorough understanding of first principles to investigate, lest we risk making tumultuous errors later on in our discourse.
Because the nature of all knowledge is in abstraction, becoming aware of the lines we are drawing allows us to strive to draw better lines. For example, the entirety of physics can be described as the quest to map the nature of reality into an abstract form (often using mathematics) which can be used to describe the processes apparent in reality in as much detail as possible across all contexts. To put this into a wider perspective, I would like you to consider what is now known as folk science.
You see, Before the formalization of modern science, there was what is now known as folk science – loose abstractions of reality expressed in ways which were practical for the people of the time. A personal favourite example of this is the idea of Chakra. For those unfamiliar, the abstraction of Chakra labels 7 points on and around your body which act as centers of certain types energies peculiar to the human condition. Now while I’m sure there are many who would dismiss the idea of Chakra as mystic mumbo-jumbo, such dismissal misses the point of the abstraction.
You see, our perspective of some abstractions as nonsense and others as factual is a consequence of how successful our modern process of abstraction, the process of scientific discovery, has become at delineating ubiquitously useful abstractions from more primitive ones. However, our more rigorous methodology, the scientific method, only seeks to uncover what older mythologies and folklore were also trying to uncover – consistency of reality. To take the previously mentioned theory of chakra as an example, it happens to be the case that the narrative surrounding the heart chakra shares several associations with actual neural activity seen around the heart. Now whilst the theory of Chakra doesn’t account for other related complex phenomena such as individual neurons in the body, it does account for, in broad strokes, observable activity originating from the same point in the body as an actual cluster of neurons (for example, the heart chakra is connected to the left arm, an arm which becomes dysfunctional during heart related malfunctions). When considered from this point of abstraction, there is no difference between the verbally expressed abstraction of a heart chakra composed of neurons, or a neuron cluster composed of neurons. In the end, a cluster of neurons and a heart chakra are both abstractions and serving as an explanatory mechanism for the activity of microscopic organisms within the chest, it just so happens that one abstraction is far more thorough in its explanatory power than the other. This is an important point to understand, as it highlights that science is not a journey in pursuit of objective truth, but of useful abstractions which seem consistent with our experience, it just happens to be the case that our theories of neurology map somewhat better than previous theories of Chakra, but both theories are fundamentally concepts of the same species. It is not that Chakra doesn’t exist or than Neurons do exist. it is just that the Neurological explanation more consistently maps on to reality across various contexts – both points of view are simply tools of communication to help us move through a complex world.
A Summary of the Discussion so Far
The world as filtered by consciousness can be understood as consisting of two parts, the world “as is”, and the world “as perceived”.
Humans filter the world “as is” into an understandable framework, for example, certain wavelengths of light are interpreted as colours (this is known formally as “qualia”). This new, filtered world can be understood as the world “as perceived”.
Humans then subdivide the world “as perceived” into abstractions for the sake of convenience and smooth communication with other humans.
The human ability to abstract out the world is a practical function designed to enhance survival over the course of a natural lifespan. It is therefore not suited to create an accurate depiction of the nature of the universe, and thus humans are subject to category mistakes, such as falsely believing abstractions to have bearing on the physical world, or confusing cause and effect between observed phenomena.
By understanding the shortcomings of our natural ability to abstract, we can train ourselves to be cautious of the assumptions we make in everyday life, whilst also respecting the practical function that the assumption making process has, and ultimately design a superior version of assumption making, which will be the subject of the next article in this series.
Thank you for reading.
