Perceptions of Reality and Heuristics

At any given moment, a perception of reality is given shape by complex constructs. These constructs can include some or many of the following from this short list of possible ingredients:

• Ideologies: Bodies of doctrines, myths, beliefs, and so forth, that guide individuals, social movements, institutions, social classes, or groups. Ideologies are generally taken to be prescriptive.

• Metaphysics (a subfield of philosophy): A study of the most general features of reality, such as existence, time, the relationship between mind and body, objects, and their properties, wholes and their parts, events, processes, and causations.

• Physical cosmology: The study of the origin, evolution, dynamics, and ultimate fate of the universe and the scientific laws governing these considerations.

• Religious/mythological cosmologies: Bodies of beliefs based on the historical, mythological, religious, and esoteric (i.e., with meaning for only a few) literature and traditions of creation and eschatology, theologies concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the cosmos, such as:

° Hindu cosmology, dated 2000 BC, is cyclical or oscillating, with one cycle of existence being about 311 trillion years and the life of one universe around 8 billion years, including an infinite number of universes at one given time.

° Biblical cosmology, dated with the Genesis creation narrative (c. 500 BC) is based on Babylonian cosmology (c. 3000 BC), with the flat earth floating in infinite waters of chaos.

° Multiversal cosmology. Fakr al-Din al-Razi, a Persian Sunni Muslim theologian and philosopher (1149-1209), submitted the idea that there is an infinite outer space beyond the known world and that God has the power to fill this vacuum with an infinite number of universes.

° Big bang theory (Friedmann-Lemaitre Model), 1927-29. Lemaitre is considered to be the father of the big bang model.

° Eternal inflation, Andrei Linde, 1983. This is a multiverse system, with some expanding into bubble universes supposedly like our entire cosmos.

I'm fortunate to have many unique settings and mentors who brought and bring new shapes to my thinking. At the same time, I make sure that I do not miss the traditional education, resources, and images. I take verbatim notes, sit in the front seats of lecture halls and tour buses, write summaries of each textbook's pages on the margins, and sometimes take on the look of an orthodox, knowledge-filled Lutheran pastor with colorful stoles and chasubles. I even listened intently in grade school to Miss Rowe's teaching out there in the classroom from the confines of the coatroom, standing in there for punishment with cocomedian Scott Harding and a few other classmates following our predictable but class-interruptive behaviors.

But instead of simply hanging out in isolated but admirable places like coatrooms, I love heuristics, a trial-and-error path that leads toward a goal that is not clear.

To live life without a specific direction is quite joyful, for it is full of surprises.

These new adventures are detour routes that are messy and muddy, untidy, cluttered, sloppy, dusty, and bumpy. They are the metaphorical highways of curiosity!

To travel heuristically is to love orange detour signs. As a kid, I was always filled with great joy when orange detour signs would be set up on our family's chosen highways from Minnesota to visit my Detroit uncle and aunt and cousins. Back then the signs were enigmatically lighted by round oil lamps. At dusk, the flames and their smoke introduced a haunting obscurity about the road ahead.

The mysterious adventures of traveling those detours through forgotten little villages with people sitting on their front porches waving at multitudes of newcomers in buses and trucks and automobiles opened whole new worlds to the travelers as well as otherwise-isolated villagers.

I still love detour signs. They invite us to learn in a nondogmatic fashion. Detours encourage learners to explore without the confines of an interstate highway or a global positioning system or back seat drivers. Of course, GPS voices are very mild-mannered, pleasant, patient, and understanding, but I really prefer the two-way conversational one-on-one voices of detour flag women.

The heuristic method is not anti-presuppositional or antitraditional but opens a route of discovery where people are given the tools to learn for themselves even when the detour ends and there is a return to the familiar road. The heuristic method is one of ideas with new and broader horizons.

Ecumenical, interreligious, and pluralistic conversations or thoughts that often occur on the detours can lead to new concepts created by looking at things in novel ways. The heuristic style is also called lateral thinking and sideways thinking.

This valuable variable provokes fresh ideas or changes the frames of reference. Otherwise, more normal logical, vertical thinking simply carries a chosen idea forward.

On a personal level, my sideways thinking is replicated by our daughter, Abby. We enjoy laughing about the ways we think.

One day my wife Linda called my iPhone. I was driving, so at the red light I answered. Sure enough, the conversation spurred me on to sideways thinking and spiced up our consciousnesses.

Linda said, "On your way home, pick up a jar of whole coriander and some fresh thyme." I immediately imagined that this would uniquely cause me to arrive home later than I had planned. Why? Because I would have to meander to find the coriander and it would take even more time to find the thyme.

Vertical thinking tends to be repetitious and boring and robotic. Vertical thinking responses can go like this: Okay. I'll get the coriander and some thyme because the light is green.

Where Is Reality? The Philosophies of Sense Perception

Consciousness is given shape by complexities that go beyond ideologies, metaphysics, and cosmologies....