Heuristics

I mentioned Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams in a previous post about the power of imagination, and I'm coming back around to it again because my friends and I had a wonderful conversation about it this weekend that got me thinking about the nature of understanding and how human beings wrap their heads around mind-bendingly complex ideas.  As Lightman's reader traverses fantasy after fantasy about alternate modes for the functioning of time, the mind is slowly opened to a fuzzy, imprecise appreciation of the multi-faceted view one can take of something as abstract and expansive as time itself.  Could it be an inherent property of matter or space?  Could it flow at different rates in different places, or in different directions?  What if we couldn't imagine the past, or the future, if we could only conceptualize of time in the immediate present?

Imagining various reductive interpretations of time, even if we can't fully picture them, starts to hint at the inverse possibility - that there might yet be many other aspects of time that simply lay beyond our capability of comprehension, much in the same way that we imagine bacteria can't imagine time as we do.  It's not a mathematical description, but this kind of meditative exploration is made possible through a methodology known as heuristics.

Rather than demanding an algorithm to solve problems, heuristics is essentially the "all-of-the-above" approach to all situations.  Where a precise chain of equations falls short, an impressionistic intellectual construction rising from the vigorous exchange of ideas, the development of metaphors, the creation of analogies and so on may in fact yield useful understandings that create actionable advice for real living in the same way that more structured scientific problem-solving can.  One famous example involves a certain George de Mestral going for a stroll in the woods and observing the cockleburs (10-point word on the funny scale) that stuck to his jacket.  After returning to his laboratory and examining them under the microscope, he developed the concept for Velcro!

Heuristics is a method grounding in the philosophy of "yes, and...", continuously inviting new perspectives and tactics to shed light on phenomena and expand the family of ideas that live within the realm of human understanding.  I think what I find particularly appealing about the heuristic methodology is its implicit recognition of the our human fallibility.  It is not judgmental.  It assumes no epistemological superiority for any particular problem-solving method, even if that method has received historical or societal preference.  It lives in constant recognition of the fact that what we now understand to be "the real world" might someday be different, and that any avenue that might help know God's creation better is worth walking down.

If you'd like to know how to apply heuristics to your own life, the answer is simple.  When you're wrestling with a difficult problem, open your mind to all possible solutions.  Don't be afraid to explore many different ideas, and see what results ensue from each.  Be comfortable with trial and error; every failed experiment still produces useful data for posterity.