Abstraction is a great tool for mankind. The history of human evolution has seen uncountable number of evidences on the usefulness of abstraction. Abstraction is to absorb important attributes and leaving out unimportant attributes. Very state that we are in is the fruit of our ability to abstract - Ideas.
Ideas - what are ideas. Ideas are fruits of abstraction of events happening around us or impulse of information that happens elsewhere (which again an event to us). In problem solving domain, ideas are output of abstraction (elevated thinking) and inference (desirable response from higher plane of thinking).
While most of us think creativity is for people who are brainy. But the truth is that the creativity is fruit of hard work, systematic way of abstracting the problem and connecting those events with our experience. Like anything, it is only the practice that makes it smart work. The first step towards solving problems is to understand a problem or rather find/recognize a problem, understanding it at higher plane and giving way for ideas to emerge.
Abstraction is what it took us where we are and it is the only thing that is going to take us where we ought to go.
PS 1: This is hangover of reading programming languages pragmatics which i think is a wonderful book. I will be reading for next several months (so surely there are going to be numerous posts on that)
PS 2: I am posting after an year. I have to admit that i ran out of ideas and since i am reading a book i think i will get a lot more ideas
