-
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