I wrote about objectivity before, claiming it meant to ‘see things as they really are‘.
“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood…“
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
I see now that objectivity wasn’t the right word for what is really something else – abstraction.
Abstraction is being dissociated from any specific instance – an abstract thing doesn’t have any tangible existence. It’s a generalization from a particular instance. A song – take ‘The Shape of You’ is a specific song. But the term ‘song’ is an abstraction, it doesn’t refer to a single specific thing. It’s a category, a generalization – you can take a hundred different songs and call each of them by the general term (hence the generalization) ‘song’, and you won’t be wrong.
Abstraction is generalization, dissociation, but that isn’t the whole picture.
Abstraction (from the Latin abs, meaning away from and trahere , meaning to draw) is the process of taking away or removing characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics.
Most people would be familiar with this, used as it is in sciences and coding. Abstraction is modelling – you take certain features you consider important, and ignore others you don’t, and create a model.
A real-world analogy of abstraction might work like this: You (the object) are arranging to meet a blind date and are deciding what to tell them so that they can recognize you in the restaurant. You decide to include the information about where you will be located, your height, hair color, and the color of your jacket. This is all data that will help the procedure (your date finding you) work smoothly. You should include all that information. On the other hand, there are a lot of bits of information about you that aren’t relevant to this situation: your social security number, your admiration for obscure films, and what you took to “show and tell” in fifth grade are all irrelevant to this particular situation because they won’t help your date find you.
Link
‘Generalization’ and modelling are really two sides of the same coin that is abstraction – you can’t have one without the other. All generalizations are models (you ignore many details, and select only some) and all models are generalizations (they attempt to represent many specific things under the umbrella of a single category).
So a hundred different songs have a hundred different names, but also have something in common that lets you generalize and call them all songs. And you can only do that because you have a word called ‘song’ that’s a model, that’s defined with only some limited features that are common to all these hundred different collections of sound.
So, going over each song, retaining only those broad features that you look at to classify some sound as a ‘song’, and ignoring all the rest that make that particular song unique, that make it what it is, you can classify each item as a ‘song’. Just as you can reduce any food item to a bunch of micro / macro nutrients, if you simply consider its nutritional profile and ignore every other aspect of it. And all those features you ignore are what you miss out.
The Map is not the Territory
A map is a model of the territory – something you draw to make sense of something much larger that you can’t capture in one go otherwise. You can draw a line between two countries on a map easily, but you can’t draw it so easily on the earth between those actual countries.
Maps are necessary, but flawed. (By maps, we mean any abstraction of reality, including descriptions, theories, models, etc.) The problem with a map is not simply that it is an abstraction; we need abstraction. A map with the scale of one mile to one mile would not have the problems that maps have, nor would it be helpful in any way.
The map is, by necessity, a reduction of the actual thing, a process in which you lose certain important information. For many people, the model creates its own reality. It is as if the spreadsheet comes to life. We forget that reality is a lot messier. The map isn’t the territory. The theory isn’t what it describes, it’s simply a way we choose to interpret a certain set of information. Maps can also be wrong, but even if they are essentially correct, they are an abstraction, and abstraction means that information is lost to save space.
The Map is Not the Territory, Farnam Street
The map is an abstraction because I remove features from the territory – I don’t show every tree, every road, every building, not unless I draw it at a 1:1 scale, in which case it’s not really a map anymore.
Maps can be wrong – perhaps a measurement is off, or the paper expands on heating. But even if there’s no ‘error’, it’s still not ‘right’ in the sense that it isn’t a precise description of the territory (of reality). Because some information is lost in any abstraction, in order to create the abstraction from reality. And that means that you can’t derive the exact, entire territory from the map – you’ve lost some information going from territory to map, so you can’t re-create the territory from the map.
“The map appears to us more real than the land.”
DH Lawrence
“The map is not the territory” although it’s usually treated as that – think Europeans literally carving up the map of Africa and force-fitting the territory to the map. But even otherwise, the model of the thing is so often treated as the thing itself – usually taken for granted in modelling of any kind, academics or finance.
A word is a map of something too – the word ‘chair’ represents millions of different objects, the word ‘song’ represents millions of different sounds. And this is the idea that ‘the word is not the thing’.
“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood…“
Marcus Aurelius
The delusion that abstraction is objectivity, is ‘seeing things as they really are’ is mistaking the map for the territory.
Roasted meat is a dead creature at the bottom, be it fish or bird or pig – but that doesn’t take away that it is also roasted meat, is also a dish, an appetizer, a snack or dinner or any of many other things.
It’s even more clear when I take other examples. A song – for instance, The Shape of You, is just sound (or noise), but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t that particular song. Snow is hydrogen and oxygen, or solidified water, but it is also snow. Food might be dinner, and dinner might be roasted meat, and roasted meat could just be a dead fish, and a dead fish is just proteins and omega-3 and other micro/macro nutrients, but none of these levels imply the others are mistaken. Just as a human being is a mammal, a vertebrate, a living organism, a bundle of cells, a bag of calcium, water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous – all of these things, all at once.
So yes, at one level, a level low enough, it is just ‘Sound’ – but that’s not to say that it isn’t ‘Song’, nor that it isn’t ‘The Shape of You’.
What difference does it make what you call it, whether abstraction or objectivity? I think there is a difference, that ‘objectivity’ means ‘freedom from bias’ and tries to imply truth – the implication being that other ways of looking at it are somehow wrong, or at least ‘biased’ (not objective).
‘Abstraction’ removes that suggestion (connotation) of truth that ‘objectivity’ has. It’s a generalization from an instance, but it doesn’t claim to refute that instance it’s generalized from. It’s the same thing, just looking at different levels – at the lowest level, Sound, above that Song, and above that The Shape of You. Just as dinner is roasted meat is a dead fish is nutrients, all at once, all at different levels of abstraction.
Hollowing Out
“…This anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.“
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
“The abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content.“
Abstraction might do more than just exclude certain features and retain others – it might hollow things out. All ‘things’ are reduced to concepts, to models of things – in other words, reduced to mere outlines of things.
“Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation.“
Denotion being “the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests”.
And connotation “an idea expressed by a word in addition to its main meaning – like “Resolute” means stubborn, but with a more positive connotation“
Abstraction hollows out because it removes connotation, the idea, and maybe more than that, the feeling, associated with something. Snow probably connotes something that ‘solidified H2O’ doesn’t, wine something that ‘fermented grape juice and yeast’ don’t, ‘The Shape of You’ something that ‘song’ doesn’t, and ‘song’ itself something that ‘sound’ doesn’t.
Which is to say that abstraction isn’t the same as objectivity because it ‘reduces’ things to concepts, literally reduces them by removing (‘reducing’ or deducting) their features. It treats a specific thing as an abstract concept instead of what it really is – which is the specific thing that it is. It removes the flesh and retains only the skeleton of the organism.
“The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts.“
The things exist only as concepts of things, not as things, all foods reduced to nutrients, all songs reduced to sounds, all mountains to rocks, all beaches to sand and water.
“Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.“
The map becomes the territory, the word becomes the thing. And that’s why I can, and might, navigate on the map, yet not really exist anywhere in the territory. Reducing things to concepts, to words, that I know but unable to see the things themselves, things that I cannot understand.
Erratum
It’s not hard to see why such ‘objectivity’ has value where anything and everything can be and usually is hyped and exaggerated so easily. A basic app hyped as an AI based revolutionary product, a generic bunch of fluff marketed as ‘profound’ pearls of wisdom, ordinary run-of-the-mill idiots projected as ‘thought leaders’ and ‘motivational speakers’.
The irony is that this ‘objectivity’ meant to see things for what they really are. Seeing the land for what it is instead of the map you want to make of it. Seeing beaches as the sand and water they are rather than the beaches you want to make of them. Seeing snow or rivers as the water, the hydrogen and oxygen they are. Mountains as rock, music as sounds, media as pixels, humans as cells.
But that very so-called ‘objectivity’ can err on the other extreme and reduce everything to its outline, hollowing it out. And the truth is that this reduced skeleton is just as much a distortion of reality, of the thing, as is the hyped-up exaggerated distortion. Mistaking the territory for the map is as much an error as exaggerating the territory. Only this error is in the opposite direction – but the magnitude of error might well be as much or even more.
I imagine it’d be hard for those who don’t know what the ‘radical abstracting of everything, and hollowing of stuff’ is like to relate to anything here. But I still think it’s worth writing about.
Indebted to David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, a great book, for the ideas here.