A Heuristic for Heuristics

I am still being oppressed and victimized by technology, making blogging a challenge. Thus, this post probably didn't get as far as I would have liked, but it's not nothing. Call it an Introduction to a Foreward to the Preface of an unwritten text.

As we all know by now, no fact is a fact outside some interpretive framework. For example, the existence of crackheads and skanks is trivial. Their existence only becomes factworthy in the larger context of the morally depraved president who raised them, in which case they become more evidence of his general depravity. 

You've heard the cliche that men are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. Looked at another way, we aren't actually entitled to opinions, since there is no right to be wrong, but we are entitled to our facts depending upon our heuristic.

"Heuristic" is a much abused word these days, but according to Big Webster, it is etymologically related to "discover" and to "I have found," and is a technique "providing aid or direction in the solution of a problem," BUT -- and this I did not know " -- is "otherwise unjustified or incapable of justification." 

So, one's heuristic is precisely what allows us to identity facts as facts. But the heuristic itself is not a fact. Rather, it is said to be unjustified and unjustifiable, which makes it just your opinion, man. 

Is there a way out of this viscous absurcularity? Well, Big Webster did put a qualifier in there: if our heuristic is truly unjustifiable, then it appears we're stuck. But if it's only unjustified, it implies that you're telling me there's a chance it could be justified.

This problem reminds me of yöu knöw whö, because it seems that our heuristic necessarily includes at least one fact unjustifiable by the heuristic, which is to say, the heuristic itself.

In these times -- the time of progressive Orcs -- there is a controlling heuristic that goes by the name of the Narrative. This Narrative has its own facts, and these facts are determined by its heuristic lens. 

For example, at the moment, this lens -- which reminds me of the Eye of Sauron -- is combing through the wreckage of Ian, in search of facts that will damage Governor DeSantis. 

Conversely, 17 years ago the Eye scoured the soggy landscape of Katrina for facts that would damage President Bush. State and local governments were invisible and irrelevant to the Eye.

Thus, quintessential cases of the Narrative creating the facts needed to justify and feed itself. 

The question is always the degree to which the Narrative is known to its users. The answer is that most of its users are too stupid or too indoctrinated to know anything about it, much less question it. The unexamined life is not worth living, which is precisely what makes these progressive media-academic hacks so not-even worthless.

Now, like anyone else, I have a heuristic. However, not only do I examine it every day, but I am very cautious about the facts I let in. Come to think of it, my heuristic is so broad and deep that it tries to account for everything, so it illuminates a lot of facts that other heuristics either overlook or dismiss as irrelevant, while dismissing with extreme prejudice facts that the Narrative considers vitally important. 

For example, Race, Gender, and Class are central to the left's heuristic, while mine regards the first two as accidents of human nature, the third as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. 

Similarly, I recall last year, Brandon saying something to the effect that every department and every decision in his administration would see and be seen through the Eye of Equity, which is always left undefined, in the hope that people will conflate it with equality. Very different eye. For one thing, the Eye of Equality is colorblind.

Continuing with yesterday's post, there are different levels and dimensions in this cosmos, each requiring its own heuristic. The heuristic of modern science only emerged a few hundred years ago, prior to which time a lot of folks tended to employ a defective heuristic for understanding material reality.

But that's not quite correct, since people certainly had a great deal of commonsense understanding of the physical world, indeed, more than most moderns. I mean, you try to construct a cathedral, or sculpt a Pieta, or build a Great Pyramid. 

What they lacked was a deeper, abstract heuristic that could account for the properties of material reality. For example, people imagined that a different heuristic applied to celestial than to terrestrial reality. Newton's heuristic revealed the unity of these two, but left time out of it. Then Einstein came along and discovered the unity of time, space, and matter. 

There are always divisions followed by new and deeper unities. I'm thinking, for example, of how Darwin's theory of natural selection seemingly broke the unity of God and man. But this can only be the case if natural selection is applied to realms it cannot even perceive, let alone explain. Different dimensions, different heuristics.

Still, something draws me to the notion of a Heuristic of heuristics -- i.e., that it really is One Cosmos, and to even say this implies one ground, one source, one explanation. It doesn't mean we can know it in some inexhaustible sense, but at the very least we can posit it as an ontological placeholder, which I call O. O is necessary, even if we necessarily can never contain or exhaust it.

Conversely, we are contingent. Then again, since we can know this with absolute certitude, this ironically partakes of Necessity. 

Moreover, there is no doubt that we in fact exist. You could say that our existence was once conditional, but now that the conditions have been met, we are necessarily here. I am a fact. And in my heuristic -- as alluded to yesterday -- I AM is the most important and consequential fact in all of existence.