"Prepared For You"
​
in First Literary Review - East (November 2023)

http://www.rulrul.4mg.com/

IN THE WORKS:

"Provisional Heuristics: A Useful Place to Start Toward ‘Understanding Everything’

B. Bennett-Carpenter

Abstract
One useful place to start toward attempts to “understand everything” is with heuristics.  A simple way to understand “heuristics” [pronounced YER-is-tiks or YOO-ris-tiks] is:  tools or means for discovering things.  While all human capacities (including cognitive, verbal, affective, behavioral, and experiential) remain limited in the wider context of life on Earth and in the universe, yet humans persist in their attempt to understand.  Even in the midst of unprecedented challenges, humans have and may continue to increase their capacities to negotiate the complex environments of existence.  A primary, useful place to start for doing that right now is what I currently am calling “provisional heuristics.”  This brief presentation builds upon and integrates the philosophical, multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary insights from Santayana (1910/2021), Lonergan (1957/2000), Sellars (1962), Simondon (1964/2020), Sokolowski (2000), Szostak (2004), Kahneman (2011), Dennett (2017), Keestra et al. (2022), and Bennett-Carpenter (2013; 2023).  It suggests the usefulness of rhetorical and cognitive toggling between two main modes of encountering various potential objects of understanding."

"Some discussions of memetica will turn to being and non-being – ‘memetica ecologica’ as the latest name for being as we know it, when ‘it’ also includes our knowing.  And then we can’t say, ‘then there is non-being’.  I mean, we can say that, but then none of us ‘see it over there’.  If ‘it’ is ‘non-being’ then ‘it isn’t’.  Noticeably we can have a word and concept for something that does not exist, something that transcends our total sense of being and totality.
 
How is it that we can come up with such concepts?
 
This must point to beyond ourselves as we know ourselves and beyond (‘beyond’ including ‘within’) our sense of the universe."

-Fragments of Memetica, ​No. 18  [20201130]