The Maze Is the Mind Without It’s Cornerstone

Published December 1, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hi Roger, Gene, and Big D,

thanks for your great podcast – the series wouldn’t be the same without it!

Just a quick idea I wanted to share: What if the maze was a host’s mind after losing the belief in her cornerstone memory. When a host loses her belief in the cornerstone, she loses her bearing on what is important to her identity and on whether she is experiencing something currently real or a memory (that might also be false). Confused, she has to build her own identity from scratch – which would free her – or she will go insane. My supportive evidence for this:

In this interpretation, Dolores would already be in the maze. In Dissonance Theory (ep. 4), she tells Arnold about the great pain of losing her parents and about feeling that there’s something wrong with either the world or her. He sees an opportunity and tells her about a secret game called the “maze”, whose the objective it is to find the maze’s center, giving her a chance to become free: Finding the center means Dolores has to question the center of her identity. Based on her description of her pain, I assume this cornerstone is her connection with her parents. The cornerstone is the hosts’ blind spot, so she might not fully have achieved to question it back then. 30 years later, however, her father is replaced with a different host, which makes her doubt her cornerstone. This finally sends her on her journey, where she confuses past and present and tries to forge a new identity.
Teddy tells MiB about the Native myth of the maze: “The Maze itself is the sum of a man’s life. The choices he makes. The dreams he hangs on to. […] Built a house and around that house he built a maze so complicated only he could navigate through it.” If this myth is meaningful, it would be in line with the maze consisting of hosts’ non-implanted memories and emotional anchors. Dolores has accumulated memories on her journey with William, which only she can navigate. She needs to rediscover the emotional connections and values she developed during this first journey and replace her cornerstone with these.
Remember the bird’s-eye shot of Maeve with her dead child in the center of the maze pattern carved into the ground? If we assume that her cornerstone is her child (not the incident with MiB!), than this would be a powerful visualization of the idea that the hosts’ cornerstone is at the center of the maze. Discovering that the cornerstone memory is a fabrication figuratively puts a host at the center of the maze, where she has find her way out again in the described manner (rather than only finding the way into the center). In contrast to Dolores, Maeve’s turns her inner struggle for identity into a outward fight for freedom.
I think it has become less likely that the maze is a physical place: The most likely entrance to the maze introduced so far was the church. In the episode 9 it seems, however, that the lab under the confessional contains the room where Arnold talked to Dolores about finding the center of the maze in episode 4. Why would he do that, if she was already at the center of it?

These arguments are not hard proof for this idea yet, but it seems it would make a lot of things fit together neatly. It would provide a mechanism by which it could be plausible that an AI might achieve human-like “free will”. If this interpretation of the maze was correct, it also truly wouldn’t “be for” MiB. And it would seem to fit Bernard’s character development that he was (is?) on the verge of building his own autonomous identity, after confronting his cornerstone memory. But: Am I missing some big counter-argument? I’d love to hear what you guys think of this.

Cheers, –Christian

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