Inside the Layered Mind

    Abstraction Is The Art Of Partial Attention

    #absurd-abstractions
    08-03-2026

    Here is my definition of abstraction, and I want you to sit with it before I explain it:

    Abstraction is the art of partial attention.

    Not reduction. Not simplification. Not hiding complexity behind a clean interface, even though it is also that. Partial attention. You view an object as an entity associated to the original — but with some features subtracted. Which features you subtract, and why, is the entire game.

    The reason I prefer this definition over the standard one is that it puts the human back in the equation. Reduction sounds like something that happens to the object. Partial attention is something you choose to apply. It is a cognitive act, and like all cognitive acts, it has a direction, a purpose, and a cost.

    What You Subtract Is the Whole Point

    Let me demonstrate with something you probably have an intuition about: fighting game notation.

    If you've ever watched someone describe a fighting game combo and encountered strings like 236HK or j.MP > 5MK xx 214L, you may have bounced off immediately. The notation looks like a foreign language. And the reason beginners find it confusing is a perfect abstraction lesson: the notation has subtracted everything except the inputs. The why is gone. The spatial logic of the joystick directions, the rhythmic timing of the cancel window, the strategic context of when to use this route versus another — all of it abstracted away, reduced to a sequence of symbols.

    The notation is not wrong. It is a very precise abstraction for a specific audience — people who already have the spatial and rhythmic vocabulary and just need a compact reference. For them, 236 is not a mystery; it is a quarter-circle forward, a movement the hand already knows. But for a beginner, the abstraction is pointing at a doorway they have never walked through.

    This is the trap. An abstraction that omits the right features for one context is completely opaque in another. The same subtraction that makes something useful for an expert makes it hostile to a newcomer.

    The Art Is Knowing What to Keep

    So if subtraction is the mechanism, taste is the skill. And taste in abstraction means knowing which feature is load-bearing for your purpose.

    This is why the right abstraction should be as specific as possible while remaining flexible enough to be useful. Ideally it isolates one feature clearly distinguishable from others. This is the Interface Segregation Principle from software design — but it is not exclusive to software, and it is more than a design pattern. It is an epistemological discipline. If your abstraction covers too many features at once, it stops being an abstraction and starts being a vague gesture in the direction of a thing.

    A broad generalization is not an abstraction. It is an abdication.

    Consider Magic: The Gathering versus Yu-Gi-Oh. Yu-Gi-Oh is, in theory, the freer design space. No mana, no IP restrictions, no color wheel constraining what can be created. A character can be a space witch who dreams of candy land and summons a candy monster — that's a real card sequence, and the game allows it. Total creative freedom.

    Magic, on the other hand, built its entire multiverse on a handful of precise abstractions: five colors representing philosophical alignments, a universal resource system, type categories like creature and artifact. These abstractions are specific enough to be load-bearing. Any new set, any new IP, any new mechanic has to snap into them — and when it does, the payoff is serendipity. Darth Vader is obviously black-red. Palpatine is black-red with a touch of blue manipulation. Chewbacca is green-red. And because the abstraction is specific and shared, a Star Wars set can suddenly play in a green-red beatdown alongside werewolves, and it makes sense. The color wheel created a compatibility layer for things that were never designed to meet.

    Yu-Gi-Oh players are stuck waiting for a Star Wars werewolf expansion. Magic players get it for free.

    The precision of the abstraction determined how much serendipity the design space could contain.

    Abstraction Has Levels, and Switching Between Them Is a Skill

    Here is the part that clicked for me through sculpting, of all things.

    When I sculpt, I am not thinking about vertices. I am working through levels: silhouette, then form, then surface detail. The silhouette is the highest abstraction — does the shape read at a distance? The mid-level is where something reveals its quiddity, its whatness. You can have a perfectly clean silhouette that is illegible until the mid-level detail lands and suddenly it becomes a spaceship, a face, a hand. The topology is the implementation — invisible from the outside, but determining everything about how the form can be modified.

    Sculpting forces you to practice switching levels deliberately. You resist the surface detail when the silhouette isn't solved yet, because adding fine detail to a broken shape is just polishing noise. You separate the aesthetic intent from the technical implementation and decide which one deserves attention right now.

    This is abstraction as a visceral activity. Not a concept — a discipline applied with your hands.

    And this is exactly the Sculptor Heuristic I apply to development: start with the simplest working whole, keep injection points open for more ambitious features, never add complexity before it is needed. The abstraction-first approach is not about making things vague. It is about building specific, load-bearing pieces that can be composed later — lego pieces rather than a monolith. Even when prototyping. Especially when prototyping.

    The Same Mechanism Works in Art and Language

    What I find genuinely surprising is that the same cognitive operation shows up in places that seem to have nothing to do with engineering.

    A novel does not give you sensory experience. It gives you symbols. And yet you read a description of a room and feel the room — not because your brain faithfully reconstructs the sensory signal, but because the novelist has operated at a level of abstraction that bypasses sensory detail entirely and goes directly to meaning. A film has to show you the room. The novel evokes it at a higher level of abstraction, and what you fill in is entirely personal. This is not a limitation of the medium. It is a feature. The reader becomes a participant in the abstraction.

    And the good novelist doesn't describe every action word by word. They infuse a scene through anecdote, metaphor, analogy — a high emotional abstraction that creates instant associations and perspectives a more literal medium simply cannot access. Two abstractions happening simultaneously: one over the sensory, one over the narrative. Both requiring the reader to pay attention to specific features while ignoring others.

    This is also why abstraction sits at the center of philosophy — it is the bridge between sensory experience and the structure of reality. Aesthetics, which is concerned with how we perceive and respond to the world, and ontology, which is concerned with what the world fundamentally is, would have no common language without it. Abstraction is the node they share.

    A Personal Confession

    Here is the thing I realized about myself that I find somewhat funny: I am extremely good at abstracting. Seeing patterns, reapplying frameworks across domains, connecting things that superficially have nothing in common. It is probably the skill I use most.

    But I am quite bad at dealing with abstract things to begin with.

    Give me a concrete object and I will abstract from it happily. Give me a pure abstraction as a starting point — a philosophical universal, a mathematical structure, a purely conceptual framework — and I lose traction. I need the concrete first. The partial attention has to start somewhere.

    Which is, I think, the honest condition of most people who are good at this. Abstraction is not a way of escaping the concrete. It is a way of moving between levels of it. And the skill is never forgetting which level you are currently standing on.

    -- Written with Claude using the Obsidian MCP to link original ideas from my Zettelkasten

    Nodes visited:

    1. Abstraction — the definition, the entry point
    2. Why Fighting Game Notations confuse beginners — the opening example, subtraction as context-dependence
    3. Make Abstraction as Specific as Possible + The right amount of abstraction — precision vs vagueness
    4. difference between Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic the Gathering how they handle abstraction — load-bearing specificity, serendipity
    5. Sculptures read on the midlevel + Sculpting is Abstraction as visceral activity — levels, quiddity, the visceral dimension
    6. Sculptor Heuristic + Abstraction first Prototyping — the development application
    7. Novels dual abstraction mechanism to share an experience differently — art and language
    8. Abstraction as bridge between Aesthetics and Reality — the philosophical anchor
    9. I like to Abstract but not abstract things — the personal close