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HIGHER_ARC

                                             January 29, 2020
                                             January 30, 2020


A sketch of intellectual history:

Once, we thought we could find a few primitive
truths as starting points, and build upwards from
there, carefully deriving more complex truths,
developing a deep understanding of the world, an
advanced knowledge of absolute certainty.


The idea that we can find those starting points
to work from keeps breaking down, but an echo
of the original dream remains-- we will have
a handful of fundamental assumptions, we will
build up a grand hierarchy based on them...

Or... is it stictly speaking built-up?

If you climb upwards to a complexity that seems
too absurd, there's a tendency to start over and
look for the mistake, to eject apriori assumptions
from the theory and try again.

When that bottom-up flow is broken, we may work in
either direction, juggling initial axioms,
working out where they go, then judging the
axioms by their implications...

Instead of one hierarchy of absolute certainty,
there's a metagame where the initial assumptions
are themselves variables, and we develop multiple
structures -- often incommensurable -- and choose
between them... sometimes choosing to live with
contradictions between them.  We try applying
theories in domains where they seem to have applied
before, without quite understanding why they apply
there and not elsewhere...



Once belief in God wanes,
echoes of the belief remain,
a search for an absolute, a           A central answer to
firm place to stand, a core           generate all others.
belief from which to derive
all others.                           A starting place for
                                      all other journeys.

                                      A central metaphor to
                                      make sense of all other
                                      comparisons.

                                      one rhetorical flourish
                                      to rule them all.


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