Abstract Thinking

Full Title or Meme

Abstract Thinking is the process of creating general rules or concepts that can encapsulate many specific use cases.

Context

• It is often said that there is no problem of computer science that cannot be solved with another level of indirection (or layer of abstraction).
• One abstraction of this idea is that it is the filtering of information about one concept that selects only those details are shared with others.
• For example a Taxonomy is a complete separation of the elements of a set into those that share the same set of attributes. Here an element can only be in one taxon.
• Another way to categorize elements of one set is to build an Ontology of types that permits elements of the set to be in more that one category.
• Once an abstract concept is created it can be evaluated and discussed as a single thing.

Implications

• James R. Flynn discovered that as society evolves the concept called intelligence is recalibrated to higher and higher amounts of Abstract Thinking.