path-dependent mediate conclusions and provisionalities

Consider a collection of evidence arranged as nodes in a computer science tree (in the technical / theoretical abstract data structure sense). Say all of that tree of evidence is already collected, sort of already in your (body)mind, based on previous experiences. But you haven't "integrated" some or any of it, yet. So you start experientially integrating it by "walking the tree," starting from the root. You can go from piece of evidence to piece of evidence along only fixed routes. If you want to get to evidence on a "far away sub-branch" you have to backtrack back some ways towards the root of the tree so you can pick a different branch going back down again somewhere else.

Say evidence is sort of already semi-arranged in a confirmatory way. Like if you start forming a conclusion, based on evidence you encounter, as you touch different nodes / pieces of evidence, as you go down away from the root along some route, this tends to reinforce the concluson you're already forming / holding. But if you'd made a different choice farther upstream, gone down a different "large branch" you might have been reinforcing a different conclusion. If you sort of integrate everything along / within a particular subbranch, when you finally backtrack and start going down different branches, you'll start encountering anomalies and disconfirmatory evidence or at least nuance for your original conclusion.

And it's only when you've walked the whole tree do you sort of eventually get to a fully nuanced and as-best-as-you-can conclusion (for now), that's sometimes pretty different than at least the first half of your evidence integration. "Worst case" (which is sometimes harmless), the eventual last couple pieces of evidence you recollect and integrate completely change the conclusion that you had had the whole previous rest of the time.

So mediate conclusions might be all sorts of things or in all sorts of directions depending the different routes you take, though the "final" (mega scare quotes) conclusion will the "same" once you've walked the entire tree, no matter the order that you touched the nodes.

For what it's worth I wouldn't reify the above too much; you might experience evidence, collecting, conclusions, recollecting, integration, backtracking, etc., in different ways, in some phenomologically-unique-to-you way, maybe not "as such," at all.

But in any case these kinds of experiential or abstract dynamics (which may not be surprising in the abstract) do come up quite a bit in meditation, in the short run and long run and very long run.

Over time, encountering this sort of thing in the big and the small, "conclusions" in general are held more and more lightly, more and more provisionally and strategically, and one gets more and more sensitivity to the likelihood that future evidence (already collected, or not) will change currently held positions (anticipations, predictions, expectations, beliefs, stances, embodiments, etc.). So one becomes more sensitive to the "sensitivity" of current results to future evidence, experiences, surprises, recollections, remembrances, encounters, etc.