Abstraction is beautiful

If you touch a red kettle on the stove today and get burnt, you will be wary touching anything on the stove tomorrow. Have you ever wondered how interesting this is? Have you understood how beautiful this is? You might think that I am insane (seriously...who obsesses about a red kettle?). But what I am trying to stress on, is not the kettle, but the process of learning, deciding which concept to remember. Remembering this experience completely is very complicated (in terms of information - the colour of the kettle, the position of the kettle on the stove, the angle of the kettle with respect to the stove and - I think you get the point! :P) . We could have chosen to remembered not to touch a red kettle on the stove, or not to touch a kettle, but what we remember is to be cautious when touching something on the stove. We removed all the information that seemed unnecessary and remebered only what was left. The core left behind after removing all the unnecessary frills is the abstraction. And to choose the best abstraction to remember is just art (what we call intelligence today!). Can you see it?

If you are still not convinced of abstraction being beautiful, let me link it to something which you might find beautiful - the concept of the Ultimate Truth. The abstraction that you remembered (to be wary of anything on the stove), applies to numerous situations. So, from just one experience, an abstraction allowed us to learn about more than one situation. Imagine a list of all the possible situations in anyone's life (OK! If you can imagine that, what are you doing reading this? Go save the world or something!). In the first level of abstraction, there will be fewer elements than is this list and the second level will have an even smaller number (computer science geeks are requested to not curse me for describing a tree!). So what would you have at the maximum level of abstraction? Just a single element! A single element which is the condensed form of all possible situations! The Ultimate Truth! Behold the power of abstraction.

In conclusion, reading this is just another experience, from which you should forget my side comments and remember the abstraction, abstraction.