Mazes

So clearly, there’s some directed-ness to the way our minds are navigating our internal webs of ideas – good thinking is effective navigation through the idea maze.

If thinking is navigating the idea maze, then good ideas may be interesting paths through the maze. This very essay you’re reading is a kind of a purposeful wandering hike through my own idea maze, laid out in a way that’ll hopefully plant some new seeds in your own garden of ideas. Ideas are paths through idea mazes, and writing is a way to chart those paths for others to follow.

...It seems to me that if we want to model our minds as “graphs of ideas”, which a lot of thinking tools do these days, we should think of “thinking” as a purposeful pathfinding process through this graph, where we wander in search of satisfying latent connections with high explanatory power or aesthetic value.