The human intellect is a funny thing. It has evolved in time through the different environments we have created to serve it while its physical structure has remained relatively unchanged for the past 10,000 years or so. This new type of evolution is driven by the human minds ability to create, to imagine and then implement those imaginations on the physical and conceptual world around it. New ideas are constantly being generated but how? it seems that through all of our time on the earth that the amount of ideas that we could come up with would slow or become less interesting as time went on. This is far from the truth however.
We as humans have continued to drive our intellectual progress to greater and greater heights throughout history and the device mainly to blame for this is that of abstraction. Abstraction is the ability of the human mind to take a concept, a physical thing (or at least the perception of that physical thing) and to create a associated concept containing only the necessary information. Abstraction allows for the human mind to take in an enormous amount of complex information and to process it on a reasonable time scale.
What does this have to do with intellectual development however? Well as humans have continued to produce new ideas the level of humans ability to abstract thought has gone up as well. Ideas about the nature of the world as well technology created by these new ideas have created a new environment for humans in which more highly abstracted thought could be possible. Just think of how hard it it would be to imagine the idea that our brains are like the software being implemented on the hardware of our physical brains without any idea that something like a computer could exist. The creation of the computer has allowed us to think these higher level abstract thoughts without which we could not understand that the functions of human brain are something that can be studied in a systematic scientific manner, an important part in the next step in our intellectual development.
The human intellect because of its ability to continually abstract information will continue to develop through history as technology and scientific discovery continually provide more and more information for our brains to process. Since each generation’s intellectual development is based upon the environment in which they were raised the levels of abstraction will continue to increase as we begin to have a better understanding of the universe and ways of exploring it conceptually (think of the internet).
As the sea of concepts we as humans have to swim in get larger and larger we must find the most efficient ways of swimming. Abstraction as flippers, what a weird metaphor.
