Maybe you got the impression that my levels of abstraction would go higher than Oriental levels, but I disagree. So far, I have attacked these levels of abstraction:
Level 0: rules
Level 1: connection, life and death..., which can be reduced to Level 0
Level 2: influence, thickness..., which can be reduced to Level 1
Robert, I think you have completely misunderstood, and in particular missed what abstraction means here. It means more like extraction (as in extracting essence) but really amounts to 'dilution'.
I think the basis of the misunderstanding is that it is not about you as an individual but about pupils in general. We are all pupils. The starting situation is a position in a game of go that we are trying to understand usefully. That is at least one level of abstraction to start with - a dilution of reality. We then 'experience' that position - take a snapshot of it. We know from chess experiments that grandmasters (top pros in go) see that position in a vastly different way from even strong amateurs. Their huge familiarity with the game means they see things in meaty chunks. The rest of us may have the odd chunk of meat thrown in but by and large we make do with gruel. The top pros' chunking is another form of abstraction which is diluting reality. The rest of us are diluting even more.
When we then stick a label from the ordinary language on part of the position so that we can discuss it with other people, e.g. 'thickness', we are further diluting in two ways, deliberately or inadvertently missing both thickness and non-thickness features. People who then share that label are diluting even more, even if they share the same native language, because their understanding of the core term varies according to their previous experience.
If you refine that label by giving it a technical nuance, as in go, you are abstracting/diluting even more.
If you do not share the native language and translate it to your own, e.g. Japanese to English, you have to dilute your understanding yet further, and people who use your translated term risk even more dilution, again because of different previous experiences. Of course if you do not share even the second language at native level, the dilution goes on and on.
That sort of thing applies to
all of us. But individual approaches can also affect the degree of dilution. As you known from previous debates I find your particular approach of list-making inimical. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe that making lists, despite the illusion it gives of understanding or control, is especially pernicious in diluting reality.
There are times when you wish to obtain the essence of something. In those cases, repeated refining or diluting, by making lists or any other method, will yield results, good or bad, but will not represent reality. If you refine a cow you will end up with an Oxo cube (beef stock) if you are lucky, or essence of cow pat if you got the parameters wrong. But a cowherd who wants to tend his herd and not get trampled to death at calving time isn't interested in Oxos. He just wants to know what a whole cow is and how it behaves, and he picks that up mostly without formal tuition by mixing with them from a young age, aided by a dose of "cow proverbs" from the lore of previous cowherds. In go his cows would be games and his lore would come from teachers. He would largely ignore books.
For a matador recognising a whole animal and how it behaves is even more important and pressing. Yet even if he has the courage, skill and dedication to get into a bullring, his knowledge of bovine reality will always be flawed, and he will at some point in his career be gored, tossed or trampled.
With something like go, where there is a sub-industry of people teaching or writing about the game, there is a special caveat. The ability to make things sound plausible in lessons or on paper can create an illusion of understanding. The truth is that we are more like butchers who can size up a cow and name and list all the parts - sirloin, rump, brisket, tripe - but no matter how much carving skill we have, we are dealing with lumps of dead meat and a pile of offal. A butcher is not a matador, and a butcher can't teach someone how to be a matador. The best he can do is stimulate interest in eating cows.
