Daily Blogs!: Thinking of the Abstract

Daily Blogs!: Thinking of the Abstract This is a trackback to one of Thite's blogs. It's about an essay he wrote in the tenth standard, about abstractions. Go read it first to grok the context of this post.

This is a pretty good piece of writing for a tenth grader. I don't think I ever came close to writing anything like this back then - just the usual tripe they saddled us with in school. As with many things, whatever little ability I have with the written word seemingly sprang into being like Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus. I can't remember ever actually practicing or anything...

This may have had something to do with the fact that I never really wrote anything for the hell of it back then. :)

*BEGIN PEDANTIC SPIEL*

Er, one doesn't think *of* the abstract, but rather *in* the abstract - hence the phrase 'thinking in the abstract' . Inconsistent? Not if you're Spanish - AFAIK they always say pensar en rather than pensar de, which would be the direct English translation...

I suspect the real reason for this confusion is that a fifteen year old Thite didn't appreciate the distinction between the words 'abstract' and 'abstraction'. A little creative substitution will confirm this hypothesis.

*END PEDANTIC SPIEL*

"Where two abstracts meet we find physical existence. One man can alone think of an abstract idea. But then he himself cannot imagine it physically. Add another person with the same idea. Let them debate on it. Let them decide. And physical presence will originate."

I beg to differ. Two people debating on complex numbers will not give them any physical presence, since they aren't properly isomorphic to real world entities. Unless you count their weird quantum-mechanical uses to represent probabilities, which on quantum scales have both magnitude and direction, and are pretty abstract themselves...

What you think is *not* reality - that's independent of your image of the world. It's pretty obvious that you can't hold an exact model of the universe in your head - too much complexity. (Remember H2G2's Total Perspective Vortex?) So you make do with a little approximation, something close enough to get you across the road without being run over.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Because Nadeem was using him as a lame example to support some dumb idea in a blog post.

This business of 'your mind creates reality' pisses me off no end. Consciousness does not manipulate the universe - at least not at the macroscopic level we inhabit. And for those about to invoke quantum mechanics, be warned that a camera(or something similar) can collapse wave functions too. Go figure.

(If you don't get the wave function part, forget it. That bit wasn't addressed to you anyway.)

Stuff like this reminds me of those New Age dopes who go around talking about 'energy' and such stuff. For Einstein's sake people, get it through your heads that energy isn't this glowing thingy that keeps moving all around us. You wanna see that, gawk at a neon light or something. And enough with the 'positive energy' stupidity. The adjectives you can stick before the word 'energy' are words like 'mechanical', 'kinetic', 'electrical', and so forth. Even 'potential', though that's slightly deeper. Physicists and others who get the context can get away with using the term 'potential'. Those who don't should stick to saying 'mechanical potential energy' or 'electrical potential energy'.

Human beings often grab at an idea for the reason expressed in the sentence 'Oooh - shiny!'.

The reason so many people buy the 'energy' crap is because it sounds semi-scientific and has weird(but cool sounding) mystical connotations, with the usual dose of omnipresence that appeals to their theistic inclinations. That's a very devilish meme to fight.

Enough with the ranting now. Here, look at this disclaimer instead.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that the views expressed in the essay are those of Hrishikesh Thite circa five years ago. Presumably he's older and wiser now. Eh, Thite? :)

The weird ending was probably just an attempt at coming up with a grandiose climax to get more marks. God knows I've written plenty of weird but stylish conclusions with only tenuous connections to the subject at hand. I've probably done it on this blog too, but at least here I preface such specimens with the usual 'incoherent and disconnected rantings' tag, or words to that effect. There's no excuse for doing that in an essay, but dumb tenth graders don't really know any better.

Some teachers don't know any better either. I remember consistently scoring incredible marks in ninth standard English because the teacher apparently appreciated my style. Unfortunately my tenth standard teacher didn't appreciate it that much, being of a more staid school of thought. Sad, but at least she could appreciate really good English. A lot of the people who correct English papers for the SSC board exams aren't even English teachers, or are bad English teachers. My school(which rocked) never had bad teachers(seems so strange now), so I never ran into that problem there, but it's still a fact that they are more crappy English teachers than good ones. In fact, there are occasionally ads in the paper for a certain big coaching class of the slave-driver persuasion, and they write in this really hilarious English. Typical Indian gaffes are literally dripping from their ads. And to top it off, one of their founders apparently teaches English, and there's usually a message from him that takes the cake.

Looks like I've been ranting again. Sigh...

For those who haven't figured it out yet, this entire post was mostly an excuse to avoid studying Advanced Microprocessors. Just a bit of the usual stretch-your-fingers blogging I do occasionally.