Life is an Adventure! An agent-based reconciliation of narrative and scientific worldviews



word, the verb advenire, means “to come about, to arrive, to happen to (someone)”.
This refers to the (in general unpredictable) diversions that an agent encounters on its
journey. The future participle of this verb,
adventura, means “(the things) that are
about to happen”. From this, the word got its modern meaning of a succession of
essentially unintended or unpredictable (and therefore potentially dangerous)
encounters. According to the American Oxford Dictionary, “to adventure” means “to
engage in hazardous and exciting activity, esp. the exploration of unknown territory”.
More generally, an adventure may be defined as a course of action that involves risk
and surprise, while producing exciting experiences. This includes the fundamental
concepts of
action, risk or uncertainty, and excitement or emotion.

Emotion is the only concept that we have not yet discussed in our ontology of
action. An emotion can be seen as a state of “action readiness” [Frijda et al., 1989;
Frijda, 2007], in which mental and physical resources, such as muscular tension,
arousal and attention, are mobilized in order to deal with an important situation.
According to cognitive theories of emotion [Simon, 1967; Oatley, 1999b], excitement
or arousal is typically produced by a deviation from the normal routine, or what I have
called a “diversion”. As long as things go the way they are expected to go, there is no
need for excitement—just for quietly focused continuation. Therefore, an adventure,
as an activity that includes surprising deviations from the course set out by the agent,
will necessarily bring about emotional arousal.

This brings us to another clear difference between the scientific and narrative
cultures: the former insists on cool, rational analysis; the latter is most interested in
subjective, emotional reactions. While there is definitely a great value in rational
thought, the fact that evolution has given us such a sophisticated sense of emotion
should remind us that feelings and intuitions are often more effective than logic in
quickly coming to grips with a complex and especially novel situation. Modern
science has started studying these inevitable deviations from rational thinking under
the label of “bounded rationality” [Simon, 1982; Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996;
Kahneman, 2003].

In conclusion, building further on a variety of novel scientific theories and
insights, I propose to replace the fundamental metaphor “
the universe is a clockwork
mechanism
”, by the metaphor “life is an adventure”. This metaphor, I believe,
provides a more accurate picture of life as a sequence of goal-directed, but uncertain,
actions that frequently meet with surprises, positive as well as negative. Moreover,
since a story is a rendering in language of an “adventure” that happened to some
agent(s), this immediately explains why narrative exerts such a strong power on our
feeling and thinking [Oatley, 1999a]. Let me now go back to the narrative worldview
and try to map our new ontology of action and adventure onto its most enduring
component: the
myth.

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