A Reasoned Guide to Labyrinths

Labyrinths are not built to get you lost. You can get lost in unknown situations. And when I’m putting you in a labyrinth, I’m generating an unknown environment for you. But the similarity ends here. If I’m challenging you with a labyrinth you could not finding the exit OR not playing at all and remain steady. Same outcome? Of course not! That’s why labyrinths are not made to get you lost: they are designed to make you explore complexity.

A designer wants you to try. The eventual success is not per se a lost for the designer. The fact you walked through the expected path and complete in the expected time, it’s a good reason to consider the designer happy. Moreover, labyrinths are not simply in the space. The concept of a labyrinth can be text, or a love. An object can be labyrinthic. The designer wants the exploration: that’s why if you solve the labyrinth in unconventional way, you pissed off the designer: if you go through the walls, you are not following the orthodox path (unless, of course, that kind of labyrinth must be solved that way!).

The fact is, a designer of labyrinth, testing your complexity, is asking to be tested. So, while you are exploring the complexity of your resolving abilities, you are chasing the complexity of the designer.

Until now the implicit definition of a labyrinth designer was of an intelligent one. But what about not-intelligent designer of labyrinths? What about random, chaotic labyrinths? At the end of the day, a mind understanding herself through the exploration of her own complexity, is playing the cognitive labyrinth designed by chance.

Indeed The struggle to solve the mind labyrinth consists mostly in the absence of finding anybody. The mind during her own exploration generates the expectations to find the agent of the cognitive being. Call it the subject, god or simply the author. Step by step in getting her bearings, a mind keeps telling herself: there’s must be somebody. But the self-consciousness of the mind is the self-representation for herself. Walking the labyrinth of mind, generates the mind. But if you expect to get out, you’ve fallen in the tricks of the designer: chance, the mere falling of things in the universe, is laughing of this ambition. Pure contingency put us in the mind, pure random made us the mind to explore the complexity. Here we are. Bearing in mind: labyrinths are not made to get you lost. So, enjoy your complexity, you deserve it!

Homo narrativus:Exploring Latest Frontiers Endowed with Narrative Tools

The Man of Similaun is a guy, who lived circa 5000 thousand years ago in the Alps. If you think our ancestors were only hunters, dressed with animal skin, naïve and with a very limited technology, well, think again.

This man was very brave and wise, a kind of shaman in charge of impossible missions. He had a couple of amulets, the ancient version of I-phones, GPS, MP3 gadgets. He embarked alone in crossing the Alps (that would be difficult for us WITH our technology), carrying on a mission, dangerous and sensitive. In fact he was either spying or chased by spies. In the Alps. 5000 years ago. They wounded him to death, but they weren’t able to catch him. Did he succeed or fail? We don’t know.

Our man was a mix of Gandalf and Jason Bourne, an expert, a rainmaker (probably in the literal sense), a specialist. He was simply the protagonist of a thriller adventure.

If animals of the same species can stand such a monstrous load of convoluted risks, they have good reasons, hyper reasons. For a cognitive system in order to be involved in such a complexity of situations like being part in an intrigue amongst two or more groups defined by equally complex set of information, can only mean one thing: he has a very sophisticated device to control, manipulate and generate multiple and multiverse set of information. In order to navigate in this complexity, you need to be able to generate it: to be part of that story, you need to be able to tell it.

The cognitive system of our ancestor was going really fast. He used conceptual highway to move fast in a multiverse world of information. To project multiple information in our environment is to perceive and manipulate an augmented reality. The human way is narrativity.