Abstraction and Complexity

 Beauty is life itself. Here I attempt to describe what I find beautiful within the intellectual landscape in which I exist.  

Abstraction is a key idea in computer science.  Each piece of the technology we use has lifetimes worth of history and memory embedded in it. Generations of scientific progress, a historical march leading to the conditions for it's production and so on. And so, you cannot go by opening each and every door you see.

The genuineness of your curiosity is determined not necessarily how deep you go, because it is rather easy to be that engrossed by any thing, but how much you can get back out from that plunge into the water.  You go too far down and suddenly you're learning assembly trying to debug some python code until you run out of mental space and give up. Or life forces you to with other commitments. 

A balance has to be caught in Abstraction which one of my professors described as a middle out approach; Understanding enough of the bottom up description to paint a picture in your head and enough of the top down to generalize and connect further. 

I read in feldenkrais, a comparison of good attention to reading a book.  Reading as deeply as possible but not deep enough to get stuck. That is perhaps good attention. And as you spend more time you can go further both ways; deeper understanding of the fundamentals, or a more birds eye view. 

Never stuck, always moving. The resistance we encounter in life is also what enables us to flow. 

Namaste.