Many times, when we abstract pieces of information out of the world, we are trying to hold that little bit steady in order to have a fulcrum for moving everything else. When ask about what gravity is, we like at all of the things that move by gravitation - that is, everything gravity isn't. The apple that falls is not gravity itself, but what gravity acts upon. We ask what it is to be a cat, taking it as given for the moment that there is some roughly well-defined concept "cat" that interacts with the rest of the world.
Views that try to do away with this are considered sometimes to be incoherent. If I say that there are no individuals, that you are I are are really existent but are mere social constructions, that there are no stable selves, I must assume that there are stable selves in order to say this. I think that it is I who am thinking the thought "There are no stable selves," for example. And any view that denies that there is an ultimate truth takes this denial to be an ultimate truth.
It seems like we have to have two different views at the same time to make statements like these. We look at the world and see stable things, and then we look at the world and see flux. Problems like this abound in philosophy, and I will leave it to the audience to turn up more.
I want to look at mathematical functions & equations as an analogy. A mathematical function, as a function, has a dependent variable and at least one independent variable. Take a line, for example: that classic formula y = mx + b. Let us take in particular the line y = x + 5. x is the independent variable. It is what we control, the equivalent of these stable spots we make in the world. y is the dependent variable, which is everything else that we are explaining. If I set x to 1, y must be 6. If x is 200, y is 205. y is thus explained by x.
This is fine in many cases. y = x2 + 2x + 1 makes a fine parabola. y = cos(3x/2 + π) makes a nice little wave. But what about a circle? The equation for a circle with a radius of 1 would be x2 + y2 = 1. But that is not a function. There is no longer an independent variable and a dependent one; we have to take it in all at once. If x is 0, then this does not explain y - there are the two possible values of 1 and -1. y cannot be the independent variable either for the same reason. No set of independent variables explains everything else.
We can describe a circle using two different functions: y = √ (1 - x2) and y = - √ (1 - x2). But there is no one function which does the job. It is not even in principle possible to describe a circle in a single function - we have to keep going back and forth between these two. If you want to set one variable constant, you can't have a unified grasp of the situation.
It were as if we were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the world. We have to set down a couple of pieces. However, this puzzle is odd in that, whenever we start with any pieces and then add the others, we can never get the whole puzzle. The only way to solve the puzzle is to set it down all at once.
There may yet be a way out. Take the equation r = 1. This describes the same circle, but in different coordinates. "r" is a variable representing radius, so r=1 is the function which captures all points at a distance of 1 from some central spot. Voila - a simple equation for a circle.
But just as it is hard representing a circle in rectangular coordinates, so too is it difficult to represent straight lines with polar coordinates (coordinates which describe shapes in terms of r, the radius or the distance from the origin, and θ, the angle of the line going out from the origin). So again, we can describe circles and spirals (r = θ) and other stuff like that at the cost of describing straight lines, or we can describe straight lines at the cost of describing circular curves. (I suppose we should talk about parametric functions here too, but I'm giving an analogy, not a full mathematical treatise). By making one thing set and settled, we have limited our options of what we can describe, even though at the same time there is something beyond what can be captured through independent & dependent variables.
This is not an argument for anything, but just a thought experiment to show that it is at least possible to say that we use our views of essences and substances, of fixed individual and set kinds, of steady states of whatever sort, to describe the world, even though they themselves are not in the end real constituents of the world. It is coherent to say that everything is dependent on everything else, without any first cause starting the chain. Or I can talk about myself as an individual being, as some set metaphysical reality with this particular "soul," even while at the same time acknowledging that there is some other "function" which does goes in a completely different direction. There may even be some grasp of the universe which must take things all together and not piecemeal (such as Platonic Forms & Neo-Platonic Nous), like how there is a equation for a circle in rectangular coordinates but no single function. But I'm more interested in leaving this as a playground of thought than any settled metaphysical view for now.
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