Abstractions are the models of either real or notional entities. One abstract way to define abstractions is: "Abstractions can be defined as representational transition of concepts/objects of one form to another."
Abstractions, may lead to simplicity. Though all of us may not like all of the abstractions that we may encounter, in our lives, generally speaking, we as a human society have always cherished the idea of abstractions. If you do not believe this check the list below. Abstractions though helped us to overcome the complications, but have limited our thoughts, behaviors and actions. Assume that if one abstraction has been accepted by everybody - which is a model of something, then we are limited by the preciseness of the model, and for that sake everyone knows that a model is a model and not the exact entity itself. Well, now let's start with the biggest abstractions that we generally encounter.
The first biggest abstraction is God - who has created this Universe in the first place. Though this may be arguable for some, the next biggest abstraction is - Time - which has been accepted by everybody!. Humans have modeled a clock, a calendar to model this important phenomenon!. I also consider time to be the real taskmaster that drives all of us. The next biggest abstraction, that I could think of is Numbers, that lead to Arithmetic, and of course the entire subject of Mathematics. Adding to this, without experiments, even Science, is only of abstractions. The entire concept of Money and Finance is also an abstraction, which had been evolved out of the abstraction of Numbers!. So, we live in a world embedded with multiple layers of abstractions!.
Ofcourse the list can go on and on, with simple abstractions to complex abstractions built on multiple layers, but I would like to stop here, and wonder about the most basic and elementary abstractions, which may throw some insights and spark new thoughts, and after all the world will call you as an 'intellect', if you work with higher and higher layers of abstractions!
