Breaking the spell of abstraction - by Kasra
bitsofwonder.substack.com · 776 words · saved by 1 readers
putting time into things without the promise of generality
M.C. Escher’s Relativity I've always seen my intellectual curiosity as a pursuit of beauty. Math is beautiful, biology is beautiful, the rhythms of the brain are beautiful. But my aesthetic sense has been constrained by a fixation on universality. Finding one theory that explains a whole lot of things, like how natural selection explains the evolution of all organisms, or how Newton's laws explain the motion of every object in sight. I call this a tendency towards abstraction. I want to reach out with my brain, with a specific concept, and be able to catch all of reality with it:…
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