WEBVTT

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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