Distinction and abstraction

I launched my personal philosophy on the basis of abstraction, and then switched to distinction as the primitive. Last weekend, Sipes and I began to explore the connection between the two.

Take a chair, look at its parts. You have the spindles, the legs, the back, the seat. You have the grain of the wood, the marrings, chips, scratches, dents. You have the dirt and stains. You have the leaked glue and the screws, sunk deeply or not. It is an act of distinction that give us each object from amongst the others.

Now look at the whole. Consider the chair in relation to the desk, the floor mat, the bookshelves, the window fan, the paper shredder, the piles of old CPUs. These objects likewise are distinguised one from another.

Distinction appears to involve parallel objects, siblings. Distinction requires at least two objects, many more in the above cases. This is not that or that or that. Definition is at least in part negative, relative. This is distinction as zooming in. Taking a scene and resolving it into component parts, distinguishing each item from the rest.

But the converse is also an act of distinction. Distinction can be an act of composition, of taking an agglomeration of parts and investing it with identity: distinction as zooming out, as a positive act.

Distinction trades off identity for information. It is short-handing. Zooming in and zooming out can be thought of under this single heading. In zooming out, the information lost is below, internal to the object (i.e., properties or child objects of the spindle—its grain, defects, etc.) . In zooming in, the information lost is external or above; it is the parent object and its siblings. I lose the notion of "chair" when I zoom in on a spindle.

I also note that I have by now distinguished this concept of scale, of level. From what? Non-scale? Flatness? Distinction is justified by fruitfulness, by the enablement of further distinguishings. The distinction of scale is fruitful, then? I have distinguished fruitfulness?

[Aside: it is as if my screen of consciousness is flat and only has so many pixels. I bring this or that object onto the screen as a representation (a mental object). There are only 1024x768 pixels available for representation of any kind. Hence, the possibility of cognition requires that I ignore information.]

Why is the abstraction of scale, of hierarchy, so fruitful? Information is always power, so with each information loss (zooming both in and out) I forgo the power to perform additional other distinctions on the basis of the object. Distinctions can be thought of as a (complex, trending webwards) tree. The property of distinctions that they enable additional distinctions is what makes hierarchy so fruitful a distinction.

Here are some things I have distinguished:

1. distinction
2. fruitfulness
3. scale/hierarchy
4. zooming in/out (abstraction)