Abstraction is the ability to boil things down to its core by ignoring unnecessary details and instead focusing on whats common with something else. The ability of abstraction is a defining characteristic of humanity: We can talk about a book , even though every book has a different content, color, languages or size. The concept of a book is an abstraction of all the different concrete books and every other human understands what we mean. Through abstraction we are able to draw connections between seemingly unconnected things. Making sense of the world requires abstraction. In his famous monologue Goethes Faust wishes in German Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält That I may detect the inmost force Which binds the world, and guides its course The better we can abstract things, the better we can model the different aspects of the world around us. This enables us to better understand how things effect each other, allows us to make better predictions of the ...
Comments