Abstraction

We manage intellectual complexity through abstraction. Powerful generalizations collect a wide range of phenomena into a single unifying principle. Abstraction allows us to bring well understood intellectual tools to bear on particulars with which we are unfamiliar.

This is commonplace and yet still astounds. Why should this be so effective? Is this a trick of our brains? Does it reveal something fundamental about the universe?

Why is abstraction such a fertile mechanism for understanding the world? How is it that it produces such beauty in mathematics and the sciences, while generating such disastrous outcomes in economics, politics and the arts?

Abstraction leads at once to deep understanding and obfuscation. The more rarefied, the more comprehensively effective an explanation becomes, the more context -- history of learning -- it requires. This path to beauty is hard. It requires patience and confidence that nature is knowable, no matter how carefully hidden.

The path to beauty in the arts is deceptively accessible. We are wired much better for apprehension of its usual subjects and media -- inter alia faces, forms, movement, speech -- than we are for comprehension of logic, numerical quantities and intricate processes. Our stellar gifts are these summary judgments codified in visceral and emotional responses, the currency of animal nature. They bind us socially into small groups, endow us with a certain restlessness in space and carelessness towards stretches of time longer than a few months.

If beauty makes sense, it makes sense that it should be most accessible in what is most highly developed in us, the modes of being our bodies settle into most reliably. It is unlikely that our species will evolve to enable such immediate apprehension of the beauty enumerated by abstraction. Or, perhaps it has, we just haven't done enough due diligence to have discovered it yet.