What is money? Money is a piece of paper or coin with specific markings on it, or it can also be defined as a number displayed on the smartphone. This is the raw experience of money and this is how babies would define money (if they could speak). Let’s ask the question again, what is money? Money is something we give to get things. I give money, I get chocolate. I give money, I get groceries. This is how children and a few adults would define money. Let’s ask the question one more time, what is money? Money is a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account. It allows people to trade without bartering. It allows millions of people to co-ordinate without knowing each other. Let’s say you buy coffee from Starbucks in Mumbai, the coffee farmer in Brazil doesn’t know you. The truck driver who transported the coffee beans to the port, the manager of the port, the manager of the shipping company, the manager of the roasting company, the manager of the Starbucks in Mumbai, the cashier at the Starbucks, none of them know you. Yet, you were able to get the coffee. This is perhaps how an economist would define money. Let’s ask the question again, what is money? Money is nothing real, it is just a story that humans collectively believe in. It is a shared fiction sustained by collective trust. This might be how a sociologist answers the question. A philosopher might go even deeper, they might ask something like, “If money is a symbolic representation for value, what even is value?”
So, what is money? (I swear this is the last time 😄). The word “money” is a placeholder for a very complex concept. This helps to hide the complexity of the concept and packages it into a neat, small word. It helps the user of the word to communicate effectively without getting into complexities. It is essentially abstraction. Abstraction is the concept of hiding complex internal details while exposing only the essential features to the user. It focuses on what an object does rather than how it does it, acting as a way to simplify complex systems and reduce cognitive overload. While my understanding of the term comes from computer science because of my software engineering background, the concept is much more general and can be applied to everyday life. For example, while driving a car, when you press the accelerator pedal, the car accelerates, it is as simple as that for the user, but there is a lot more going on beneath the surface. The user does not need to know how the engine works to drive a car. In general, abstraction is the process of generalizing or stripping away unnecessary context to highlight a general pattern.
We defined money on multiple levels of abstraction in the first paragraph. With each level, we went one step deeper, unpacking the compressed zip file called “money” step by step. If you think about other abstract concepts, such as freedom, justice, success, happiness, beauty, love and many more, we can define all of them in multiple layers of abstraction very similar to how we did for “money”. All the vocabulary in modern, complex languages is built on abstraction. The primitive languages of early humans may have reached only two or three levels of abstraction that helped them function in their environment, but modern languages enable us to define concepts so abstract that our ancestors could never have even dreamed of them. Hence, abstractions play a huge role in our understanding of the world. There might be levels of abstraction that our current language cannot define, just something to think about.
So why does this matter? Because abstractions are everywhere. We already discussed language, capitalism (the Starbucks example) and technology. But they are also internal. Sentences like, “I am an Indian”, “I am not evil”, “I am a failure” are abstractions that have direct impact on our identity and happiness. Sometimes these abstractions help us navigate life. Sometimes they trap us inside stories that are too simplistic to capture who we really are. Why do the levels of abstraction matter? You might have experienced debates which turned into a shouting competition, many such debates are because both people are discussing at different levels of abstraction. For example, when someone says, “Religion has caused a lot of violence throughout history,” they are talking about religion as a large social institution. Another person may reply, “My grandmother is religious and she is the kindest person I know.” Both statements can be true simultaneously because they are operating at different levels of abstraction. One is discussing religion at the societal level, the other at the individual level. Similar confusion happens with capitalism, nationalism, feminism and many other topics. We often think we are disagreeing with someone, when in reality we are discussing different layers of the same abstraction.
These abstractions and their various interpretations also create an illusion of understanding. We often hear heavy words like democracy, dictatorship, capitalism, freedom, justice, free will and equality being thrown around in discussions. Many times, we feel that we understand these concepts simply because we recognize the words. But recognizing an abstraction and understanding the layers hidden beneath it are very different things.
I remember that I was watching a podcast one day and the host casually used the word, “epistemology”. It struck me that I would not have understood the word if I watched this podcast two years back. In fact, I would not have understood so many things from that podcast. That made me realize two important things, first is that abstractions are heavily linked to each other and humans understand things in a very complex web of abstractions. Second, if you think about it, expertise on any topic is essentially the ability to unpack more layers from the zip file or abstraction and how many other abstractions can the person link to the current abstraction. This reminded me of the concept of Anekantavada that we discussed in the blog Leap of faith.
A constant problem I face as a writer is figuring out what level of abstraction my reader operates on. I write this blog for people who are 12th pass and also for people who have completed a PhD. I am writing for people who understand terms like “cognitive dissonance”, and they will find the blog very boring if I go too much into explaining the meaning of cognitive dissonance rather than staying on the topic. But simultaneously, I am writing for people who don’t even understand English beyond basics. It’s hard to find the right balance. That led me to think along the lines of abstraction and I thought that it might be a genuinely interesting topic.
So if you want to take away one thing from this entire blog, it is that we are surrounded by abstractions and reality is layered. It is important to ask ourselves every once in a while, that do I understand the abstraction I am using here, or am I just throwing it around without understanding it.
Hope you liked this one, see you next time!