Life might just be one giant big abstraction
thought 11
If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m a software engineer. You know, one of those cool hipster programmers with a sweet looking beard and black trim glasses.
All of this software talk has got me thinking in way’s I’ve never thought before. It’s helped me to break down problems into small chunks, work out solutions to large problems by taking small, defined steps that at the same time can affect the larger scope. In all of this, I’ve found a life principle that I believe to be true.
Life is about moving up the chain of abstractions. What I mean is, when you think in terms of “my room isn’t clean” your world seems small. But when you start thinking in terms of “the ocean isn’t clean” things take a different meaning. Going even further, if you think in terms “our universe is dusty!” You start to have a perspective and paradigm shift.
We can predict abstractions if we’ve seen them before, but trying to predict the next abstraction is nearly impossible until we’ve moved to its preceding abstraction. Steven Covey talks about this in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He entertains the idea that humans live in three abstraction phases. The first is dependence. This is the phase of you. You did this to me and I’m dependent on you. The next is independence. I did that and I can do this myself. I don’t need anyone else. Last, is the phase of interdependence. We can do that and we can do this together. You cannot jump from dependence, you, to interdependence, we. You must first go from dependence to independent, then interdependence.
But what if that abstraction doesn’t stop?. What’s beyond “we” and if that’s the case, are there an infinite number of abstractions after that? The longer I live, the more I believe this to be true. As we abstract everything in life, our understanding, influence and appreciation becomes greater but again, we can only see the next abstraction after reach it’s preceding abstraction. That’s why it’s taken technology, society and any other segment of life so long to progress, we have to learn one step at a time.
stay tuned.
Sterling
