Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

Today I came across this statement from Alfred North Whitehead, and instantly loved it as an extension of my previous post on abstractions.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

That to me is the essence of abstractions. Not that one needn’t ever be required to dig down into the implementation details, but that the layer on top of those details enables them to be ignored to an increasing degree.

Incidentally, this is the second Alfred North Whitehead reference I’ve come across recently, the first being a mention of his book Science and the Modern World in one of my favorite podcasts. Something tells me I need to dive deeper.