Abstract Versus Concrete Creation: The Senses

How is abstract, intellectual creation different from the creation of concrete, physical things? One thing I’ve thought about is how immediate, and also intuitive, the feedback is in physical creation. At least compared to pure intellectual creation. I feel that this partly is due to the higher bandwidth of input in physical creation. When creating something with your hands, you get feedback from all your senses. You see what happens, feel it with your hands, and what you hear is more important than it might seem (try doing something you’re very used to, but with headphones on); and smell is often important as well.

Contrast this with intellectual creation, where everything goes on inside your head. In Buddhism, and several other religions and cultures, the senses are six, with the sixth being the mind. This makes sense. Whereas physical creation gets feedback from all six senses, intellectual creation only gets feedback from one: the mind.

So intellectual creators try to get their ideas out of their head in some form. They sketch their ideas, draw diagrammatic representations of them, build models or prototypes, and so on, in order to get feedback from as many other senses as possible. This made me think that it might not simply be about rendering ideas in a physical form, but just in an other form.

In my previous post, I wrote that “the fact that [pieces of software] are expressed in text (the source code) doesn’t make them physical.” This is true, but it makes them other. Source code is a form you can perceive visually (and aurally), and not just with the mind-sense. And this is indeed valuable.

When we render our ideas in some form, which senses are we targeting? For software, it’s usually the visual sense, and the way we render concepts visually is usually simplistic. What about richer visual renditions? What about renditions for other senses? Would that make sense? And what about other forms of intellectual creations than software? For instance, do mathematicians ever need to render their ideas in other forms than formulas, expressions, diagrams, etc?

¹ Photograph of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker taken by Katherine Harris, found via stock.xchng.