What it is
An abstraction captures the essential pattern and drops the specifics. That’s not a weakness, it’s the source of its power: a skeleton key opens many locks because it isn’t cut for just one.
David Deutsch makes it concrete. When a computer beats you at chess, it’s really the program that beat you, not the silicon. That program can move unchanged through neurons, radio waves and memory chips. To explain why you lost, you have to talk about the abstraction itself.
How it shows up for me
Software taught me this before philosophy did. Good code names the pattern and hides the particulars, so the same idea works in ten places.
It’s also how I try to write values and beliefs here: general enough that you can use them, specific enough that they still mean something.