The Rinzai school of Zen, in Japanese Buddhism, has an unusual tradition of higher thought. As astrophysicist David Darling explains in his book Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation, it puts "the intellect to work on problems that have no logical solution." The point of such exercises, Darling writes, "is to induce a kind of intellectual catastrophe," or a "sudden jump which lifts the individual out of the domain of words and reason into a direct, non-mediated experience."
It's a kind of holy rite for the super-cerebral: problem-solving as religion.
Darling's account of the "intellectual catastrophe" in Buddhism appears toward the end of the video game The Witness, hidden on a tape recorder that only the eagle-eyed will find and play. It proves very illuminating. "It's not exactly a mission statement," Jonathan Blow, the game's reclusive, ridiculously brilliant creator told me several years ago, when I spoke with him for a profile. "But it is an analogy. We can do some very interesting things if we put down language as a crutch for communication. That's the experiment of this game: just don't use language at all. I wanted to see what kinds of knowledge and experience we could build up without it."
Released in 2016, The Witness is a puzzle game. Rather it's the puzzle game. By the standards of scale and complexity, it seems pretty much definitive, an unimprovable exemplar of the form. The Witness is set on a large, uninhabited island furnished, maybe by the hand of God, with an enormous number of gridded, chessboard-sized puzzles, elaborately wired and fixed to various doors, walls, fences and trees. Each puzzle has the same objective: to maneuver a slim line from one end of the board to the other. The obstacles introduced over the course of the game to impede that objective, however, are wildly frustrating and utterly ingenious — a catalogue of impediments involving sound, light, and colour that'll challenge, and ultimately blow, your mind. There are more than 600 puzzles arranged across the island. It could take a hundred hours or more to solve them all.
What say you, Era?
