Ewa Discussion

I have a few questions regarding ExperienceWithoutAbstraction. However when I made them on that page, I felt it ruined the calming mood imparted by the poem, so I decided to move them here instead. --BradAppleton

Is "Experience" intended as a noun or a verb in the title (or both, or neither)? Im going to think aloud a bit, so correct me if I make conclusion that is out of sync with the intended meaning.

AccomplishWithoutAction is WuWei - yes? ("Doing without doing" or Actionless-action).

Hmmn ... Abstraction means, literally "to take away from." When we abstract, we are removing details which are deemed "inessential" based upon some perspective. If we abstract something of beauty, we are removing beautiful things from it (assuming a reasonably homogeneous or equally probabilistic distribution of beatitude ;-). But does less beautiful really imply ugly, or just less beautiful? Similarly, does "less good" truly imply evil? Is it really a question of good and evil, or more one of yin & yang and harmonious balance (karma)?

-- BradAppleton

This may be the dictionary sense of the word "abstract" and its cognates, but in software terms (and more generally) does it not usually mean treating things separately for a particular purpose, rather than taking them away?

When a supertype is abstracted out of a collection of types, the commonality goes into the supertype, the differences remain in the subtypes. Nothing is created or destroyed, gained or lost, but a distinction valuable at a given time and place that was hidden is revealed.

When I drink a glass of Chateau-Neuf I first inhale the aroma, abstracted from the colour, the taste, the texture; but they remain, and are not diminished by being tret separately. If the wine is any good :-)

I always took the first stanza to be about seeking out beauty and good from some larger whole. That is, those who seek out beauty are recognizing (or possibly creating) ugliness, and so on.

-- DavidMcNicol

Quite right, David. And, yes, one is creating ugliness. Brad, it isn't a matter of 'removing'' beauty, leaving ugliness behind. Rather beauty and ugliness are relative terms - relative to each other. As soon as you create the concept of beauty, you have created the concept of ugliness. (BTW, "experience" is a verb.) -- KielHodges

Thanks for the explanation! -- BDA

This idea, of contrasts, and ground-and-image, positive and negative: I'm reminded by the image below that for some time Escher demanded that his works be printed using both black and white inks on grey paper, rather than just black ink on white paper.

If it were my poem (which it's not), I would have said.

Difficult and easy are abstracted from learning.

In my book, "progress" and "regress" are themselves definitions abstracted from change.

Nice poem, though.

-- BetsyHanesPerry

Well, I guess if it's anybody's, it's mine, but properly speaking it's everyone's; it's an adaptation of chapter 2 of the GNL, a living, evolving work I released OpenSource. The GNL is my interpolation of a whole slew of English translations of LaoTse. And LaoTse is just ancient Chinese for "the old philosophy", so that's the capper.

But Betsy, I like your thinking. I wonder whether learning is generic enough though? Maybe the right word is leverage. Others?

On Brad's "harmonious balance", and "yin & yang", these words are of course dreadfully overused. In the spirit of ExtremeHarmony perhaps we ought to have some definitions. I take harmony to mean a kind of dynamic balance or organic interdependence between a number of apparently separate flows. When harmony is perfected the flows apparently merge into a single flow. I leave the consequences to anyone who'd like to flesh out HarmonyAndFlow?. Is this karma? Well, WhatsKarma?

On "yin & yang", I translate these as feeling and doing and don't really understand why the Chinese words are so often preferred.

And I think Kiel and David are, of course, right on the money. -- PeterMerel.

I found the GNL back when I first started hanging round wiki. When I first read it, I felt the text had a tremendous resonance, and I found myself remarkably calmed by it. Now I see and feel the same pulse everywhere.

I suspect I may be a taoist, but I have the feeling that taoists would not feel the need to label themselves as such.

-- DavidMcNicol

Thanks for the compliments David. I generally think any folk who prefer harmony to truth are taoists, but that's just my value judgement, not a definition. Historically taoism carries a lot of baggage that you might not care for; there are two main schools:

Tao Chia: People who dig LaoTse, ChuangTse, and SunTse.
Tao Chiao: People who dig the Taoist Cannon and often deify Lao and Chuang

These schools usually don't conflict for practical reasons; Chiao has ensured the survival of Chia, and vice versa. Me, I kind of prefer the more recent Western tradition: CharlesFinney, JohnSteinbeck, HalAshby?, UrsulaLeguin?, ... -- PeterMerel.

I'm not a Taoist. I believe that preferring harmony to truth leads to great evil. I find these poems to be annoying. Oh, well.

"If we abstract something of beauty, we are removing beautiful things from it."

This doesn't make any sense to me. Suppose I see something beautiful. I try to figure out why it is beautiful, and come up with some ideas. Maybe I write a book that describes my ideas. (Like "A Timeless Way of Building" or "A Pattern Language"?) How has this made the world more ugly? If I follow those ideas, I might not succeed at recreating the original beauty, but I might very well do better than I would otherwise. The way to get good at creating beauty, whether in music, painting, literature, or programming, is to practice, criticize, experiment, and practice again. Criticizing is abstraction. To be an expert, you need both experience and abstraction.

As soon as you create the concept of beauty, you have created the concept of ugliness.

So? But creating beauty does not create ugliness. Beauty and ugliness exist before we can define them. Some things make us feel good, and others make us feel bad. This is true whether we can explain why or not. Concepts are not reality.

The phrase "Experience Without Abstraction" seems silly. You can't experience anything without abstraction. We all have our ways of thinking that we use to filter and organize sensory data. Not only does experience influence our theories, but theories influence what we experience.

There are lots of dangers involving abstraction. I like the quote "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Every abstraction has its limits. I think ChristopherAlexander found this out with "A Pattern Language". The only people who were able to use the book to build things that he liked were the students that worked closely with him. He decided that his abstractions were not sufficient (Surprise, surprise! His model was wrong!) and went off looking for the ultimate model, which is supposed to be coming out in NatureOfOrder. I am willing to bet money that people will read his book, love it, build things with it, and ChristopherAlexander will not like what they build.

On the other hand, the people who used "A Pattern Language" liked what they built, and felt that the book helped them to make good buildings. Does it matter if ChristopherAlexander was dissatisfied? And does it matter if he doesn't like some of the buildings made by fans of NatureOfOrder? I don't think it does. The question is whether these books make the world a better place overall, not whether every building that is made based on their theories is successful.

The same is true of all abstractions. Abstractions are necessary. Moreover, they are good. They are not sufficient, however. As ChristopherAlexander said "Once we have built TheGate, we can pass through it to the practice of the timeless way". TheGate is an abstraction, and we can use it to get to reality, which is the timeless way, but it is not reality, it is not the timeless way.

-- RalphJohnson

In deference to Ralph's desire that his remarks stand alone, I'm replying by quoting. Those that dislike ThreadMode will just have to bear with us. If Ralph thinks I've missed a pertinent point in this I hope he'll draw my attention to it.

"... creating beauty does not create ugliness. Beauty and ugliness exist before we can define them. Some things make us feel good, and others make us feel bad. This is true whether we can explain why or not. Concepts are not reality."

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder? Some things that once made me feel good now don't, and others that once made me feel bad now seem to have the opposite effect. Is it that reality has changed, or my concepts? Perhaps reality is not something I can trap inside concepts. Perhaps it's more something that is continuously unfolding. Then I'd do well to discard concepts when they are no longer convenient, and not to let them cloud my experience or my appreciation of the understandings of others.

"You can't experience anything without abstraction. We all have our ways of thinking that we use to filter and organize sensory data. Not only does experience influence our theories, but theories influence what we experience."

EWA and the larger poem of which it's a part don't suggest you can do away with abstractions completely. That might be zen, but it's hardly practical. You need a map to navigate. But experience is an unfolding thing, not something that is captured, structured or compartmentalized by our theories.

This is a fine point, I admit, but a useful one. Think of a great dancer or athlete. A MichaelJordan?. Certainly Jordan is well aware of the rules of the game, but he's not thinking of them when he plays. If he were to define his experience in the abstract terms of a sports announcer, he wouldn't score a point. No, instead his thinking is absorbed in learning and harmonizing with the movements of the other players, the way they interact and flow - he is experiencing the game, not accounting for it - and it is this ability more than any analytic facility that wins for him.

"TheGate is an abstraction, and we can use it to get to reality, which is the timeless way, but it is not reality, it is not the timeless way."

TheGate that Alexander refers to, I think, is the same that LaoTse describes in his first chapter:

 Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
 Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world.

To put it another way:

[1]

:-)

-- PeterMerel

Ralph didn't say he saw evil in harmony, he said that preferring harmony to truth led to great evil. One might offer, say, collaboration in WWII as an example.

Collaboration on which side? If a German collaborated with the allies, would you say that was a great evil?

Oh, come on, can you seriously imagine that's what I meant?

Certainly, when faced with abominable evils like the WWII Nazi regime, you may for the sake of harmony have no choice but to resort to force. But what does truth avail under those circumstances?

To know the truth and to act in concert with that truth, whether by fighting, speaking out, or just staying out of the way, seems to me to be better than ignoring the truth and going along in the name of "harmony". it seems to me that that's what Ralph was talking about.

Has subtlety no place? The allies employed spies, subterfuge, propaganda, ambuscade, and everything else that was required to win the war. If they'd relied on the truth, they'd have been easily defeated. Say, for example, they'd been forthright about the place and time of the D-Day landings. Or do you mean something different by truth?

I do not, however, perceive the discussion of harmony here to be anti-truth. To me it's a question of how one uses truth: gracefully and harmoniously, or as a bludgeon. Of course all here know my preference, and my practice. ;->

Um, actually I don't even know who you are. You don't seem to be Ralph - at least you talk about him in the third person. Are you Ron?

And WhatIsTruth? -- PeterMerel

TruthIsBeauty?, beauty truth -- JohnKeats?

I, too, prefer truth to harmony, but I'm getting pretty fond of harmony. My preferred way of attaining it is for everyone to do what i say, or what I would have said if I had known what I meant.

The trick, which clearly I haven't mastered, is to express truth in such a way that our listener can hear it, thus maintaining harmony.

-- RonJeffries

But isn't a "harmony" made from differing notes that are consonant together (modulo minor,diminished chords etc.)? A line played purely in unisons and octaves wouldn't be very interesting. ContrapuntalProgramming? anyone?

I was trained in philosophy and mathematics by the Jesuits, so I enjoy these topics. In college I thought thoughts like these until I needed glasses.

Then I discovered computers, where thought becomes reality with little intervening. And people actually pay you to do it!

I wouldn't go back. -- RonJeffries

You were jesuit trained? By gum, I can believe that. But of course you're right, Ron. Here we've been treating harmony as an abstraction, where it's better described as a practical thing. It seems Harmony the abstraction can easily scotch Harmony the practice. -- PeterMerel

It sounds to me like a reductionist versus holist thing. Identifying an aspect as beautiful is a form of analysis, of break down: it's reductionist. This may be a route to some truths, but it is probably not the only route and it probably doesn't lead to all truths. So the holistic stance need not be opposed to truth. Indeed, the reductionist/holist axis is independent of the true/false one. -- DaveHarris

This page is certainly chock-a-block with CapitalizedEssences?. Art, truth, reality, beauty, holism, abstraction. In fact, I've seen a number of such pages in the last week or two. (I'm not complaining about anyone else's wiki style, just commenting on content.)

These CE's are so big I have not the least confidence that any group of people might ever reach a useful position. In my view, the poems are nice, from time to time, but not terribly valuable to me. I have my own visions of what is poetic (try Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams). But its fun to hear from others now and again.

I see these kinds of exchanges as SymptomsOfOurYouth. -- MichaelHill

See AbstractWithGoalInMind