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