He's not really talking about abstraction or level of detail.
He's talking about how the "magical", naive, imagination-based ways we understand things when we are young colour the way we perceive them we we get older.
Even if we know, rationally, that the way we used to think about something was incorrect, and conflicts with what we know to be true as adults, we don't discard those old ideas entirely, and they remain internalised to some extent:
The point is that all the earlier versions, even those as patently false as the one with the stork, are not discarded completely. Something of them remains in us; they mesh with succeeding versions and somehow continue to exist
I actually think it's at least a little more profound than you give it credit for.
He's talking about how the "magical", naive, imagination-based ways we understand things when we are young colour the way we perceive them we we get older.
Even if we know, rationally, that the way we used to think about something was incorrect, and conflicts with what we know to be true as adults, we don't discard those old ideas entirely, and they remain internalised to some extent:
The point is that all the earlier versions, even those as patently false as the one with the stork, are not discarded completely. Something of them remains in us; they mesh with succeeding versions and somehow continue to exist
I actually think it's at least a little more profound than you give it credit for.