# Full Text: MathArt Stream #8 ~ William Blake and Active Inference > Extracted from `WilliamBlake_MathArt-Stream_DAF_9_6_2024.pdf` --- ## Page 1 *[Page 1 appears to be blank or image-only]* ## Page 2 .This Stream:. 0. What might Blake have to do with any of this? 1. A view on Blake’s view on Art 2. A view on Blake’s view on Math 3. A view on Blake’s view on Active Inference 4. ???? ## Page 3 What is, and could be, ____? Art? Math? MathArt? Active Inference? Active MathArtference? Process? Outcome? Self Recognition? Social Recognition? Singular/Plural? Sometimes/Always/Never? Why/Would it have to be? How did you come to feel that way? What would change your mind? What could William Blake have to do with this? How to enter into MathArt Blakeference? Though the images, words, structures, letters, themes, context, criticism? What can/should be done within one short linear livestream? For whom and why? From/Towards where, how, and when? ??? ? ## Page 4 Math Art Active Inference William Blake ## Page 5 Also see…. ● William Blake & Bucky Fuller, Lives in juxtaposition: Daniel Ari Friedman: study in Comprehensivity (Jan 9, 2023 at 52 Living Ideas) ○ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGI0vx_aBdM&list=PL36GDzgklWrnFimKCXb7eiUoLpEHqxnH3& ● Synergetics Livestream #017.2 ~ William Blake & Buckminster Fuller (Lives in Juxtaposition) ○ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJns813Bzrg&list=PL36GDzgklWrnFimKCXb7eiUoLpEHqxnH3 ○ https://zenodo.org/records/7519132 Art & Blake’s Life ● To the right, Blake juxtaposed with life of Buckminster Fuller. ● https://blakesociety.org/blake/ ● https://www.blakearchive.org/ ## Page 6 Blake & Gothic Friday, March 02, 2018 BLAKE & GOTHIC https://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2018/03/blake-gothic.html Marginalia Gothicism and Romanticism in William Blake, by Michael Sloan http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/romant icism/WilliamBlake-GothicRomanticism.html https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526121950/9781526121950.xml The Gothic Life of William Blake: 1757-1827 http://www.lilithgallery.com/articles/williamblake1.html ## Page 7 Math Art Active Inference William Blake ## Page 8 Blake, Math, and Science 1986 1 2 3 4 Kandinsky: “Point and Line to Plane”, 1926 https://www.wassilykandinsky.net/book-117.php https://www.jvascsurg.org/article/S0741-5214(97)70119-8/fulltext (1997) The “Four-Fold vision” is one contextualization of how/where Blake sees Science and formality “Newton’s Sleep” is Techne. With constructed consistency, techniques are like a mono-perspective “single vision” through a telescope or microscope (also see Gödel, and Sri Aurobindo “sleep of experience”) Note that in “geometry of lumps”, Synergetics 4D, Grothendieck, Dobson ∞-diamonds, the 1 is always already composite – as in Blake: “Four Mighty Ones Are in Every Man”. So Kandinsky goes 1→2→3D, we know from 4D about 1-as-4 and 4-as-1 strategies. ## Page 9 Blake, Math, and Science Blake’s Resolution to the War Between Science and Philosophy By Harry White https://bq.blakearchive.org/39.3.white ● Can art instruct science? William Blake as biological visionary https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/william-blake.shtml ● WILLIAM BLAKE AND “NATURE HAS NO OUTLINE”: IMAGINATION, MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, & EDUCATION Victor Kobayashi (2003) ● “Fibres, Globules, Cells: William Blake and the Biological Individual”, Tara Lee (2021) https://ronjournal.org/files/sites/140/2022/06/Ro N76_03_Lee.pdf Blake: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling…How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements?” Line as blanket Blanket as line ## Page 10 github.com/ActiveInferenceInstitute/ActiveInferAnts/tree/main/0_CONTEXT/Systems/William_Blake Blake, Math, and Science For exploration, education, and research: ActiveInferAnts open source package has methods to scan over Blake’s works & pull out references to terms (e.g. System, Math, Science, Space, Time, Eternity…). Too many quotes to show here! ## Page 11 ? ? Math Art Active Inference William Blake ???? ?? ## Page 12 ● Previously we saw a Four-ness related to ways of knowing / states of being (Newton’s Sleep as single vision) ● There are many other aspects and 4-fold concordances in Blake, for example tetrahedral mnemonics are used verbatim and structurally to summarize Systems (physical and cognitive), in terms of a unified-while-compositional geometric nature. ○ How could this connect with the 4-fold “particular partition” in Free Energy Principle? ○ How could this connect with other quartal partitions https://www.theorytranslator.com/index.php?structure=foursome ● Of particular interest for “Striving with Systems”, and Systems within/without Systems (nested gears/cogs): 1. Blake & the Particular Partition “A free energy principle for a particular physics” ● “Particular Partition” = “That One” which “Particularizes” (makes an agent of every Thing, makes it that specific Thing using scale-free framework) ● Leads to “particular kinds”, Particles & Parcels, … ● “he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole / Must see it in its Minute Particulars;” ● "Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones: / And those who are in misery cannot remain so long / If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth" ● “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.” “Minute particulars” and the visionary labor of words, Julie Joosten Blake’s Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion presses the idea of “minute particulars,” discrete, significant units of sound and meaning. Los works with such materials to build a system of signification and reading that answers the Blakean imperative: “Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones” (49: 58, 55: 51). This paper considers how “minute particulars” expose the “dumb,” embedded structures that produce Albion’s melancholy, and it explores how Jerusalem resists “Dumb despair” by creating a counter-melancholic poetics that figures “Minute Particulars” as both the symptoms of and cure for Albion’s melancholy. As the smallest units of sound and meaning, “minute particulars” are essential to Blake’s production of a liberated poetics, for “he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole / Must see it in its Minute Particulars” (91: 20–21). ## Page 13 “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ● Was William Blake the first neuroscientist? Iain McGilchrist | 18 Feb 2015 ○ The title page of Blake’s great prophetic book Urizen bears the caption : “Which is the Way/ The Right or the Left”. What did he mean? Blake is full of contraries both in his poetry and in his life. Perhaps only Nietzsche is harder to talk about without contradicting oneself. Indeed Blake it was who said that “without contraries there is no progression”. ○ Although dealing with what the structure of the brain has to tell us about Blake’s poetry, my aim is not in any way reductive. Rather it is to indicate the remarkable parallels between what Blake was able to intuit about how his brain works – “brain” was one of his favourite words, occurring 64 times in his work – and what neuroscience reveals, and to show that some three hundred years before we could demonstrate this, he was aware of divisions in the psyche which were and are important not just for individuals but for the growth of a society at large. As he prophetically wrote: “what is now proved was once only imagined”. He saw these forces played out on a cosmic scale, as well as in the rapidly industrialising world of eighteenth century England. This explains the “difficulty” of some of Blake’s poetry, and the observation that it revolves round dualities of a number of kinds: Reason and Imagination, Heaven and Hell, Innocence and Experience. ● “Blake and the Mark of the Cognitive: Notes Towards the Appearance of the Sceptical Subject”, Sha 2019 ○ This essay seeks to understand the implications of the distribution of cognition across the arbitrary boundary of skull and skin into the environment so that cognition can be partly offloaded onto the environment, and in so doing, open up new areas of inquiry for distributed cognition such as subject/object relations and scepticism. It reframes William Blake’s ‘London’ so that we can look afresh at his speaker. Blake’s blurring of where inputs and outputs begin and end make him an ideal candidate for such an inquiry, and he highlights the stiff price to be paid for all this cognitive efficiency: the inability to distinguish between affordances and ideology. ● WILLIAM BLAKE’S INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY: READING BLAKE AND KEN WILBER TOGETHER, Adams (2006) ○ Both William Blake’s poetry and Ken Wilber’s Theory of Integral Psychology articulate a grand path of individual, interrelational, and collective awakening: moving beyond one-dimensional caverns of habit, convention, and defense; realizing the holy, multi-dimensional nature of self, others, and world; and responding with awareness, wisdom, love, and justice. ● William Blake and the Metaverse – The Mental Fight to be a Person, Mark Vernon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOqCp8aqkeQ ● Opening the Doors of Perception: Using William Blake's Writings to Enhance Student Understanding of Cognition ● “From out the Portals of My Brain”: William Blake’s Partus Mentis and Imaginative Regeneration by Annalisa Volpone (2024) ○ Partus mentis (the parturition of the mind) brings together the following two significant aspects of Romantic culture and ideology: the exploration into human generation, and the process of how imagination forms an idea and makes the mind creatively productive. This article suggests that analyzing William Blake’s portrayal of imagination through the partus mentis trope can enhance our comprehension of how he illustrates and employs this faculty in his works. In Blake’s partus mentis, the analogy between the brain and the womb is pivotal. The brain is seen as a host for ideas that are conceived through imagination, and once they are brought to life, they become art. ● Opening the Doors of Perception: Using William Blake's Writings to Enhance Student Understanding of Cognition (2021) ○ While psychology and psychological concepts are frequently employed in the teaching of literature in college classrooms, it is much less common for literature to be used in the teaching of psychology. The author has experienced success in using literature in the teaching of educational psychology. The writings of William Blake provide a promising resource for use in this way. The major part of this presentation consists of specific applications of William Blake in the educational psychology classroom. A sample lesson plan is also provided. ○ Finally, there are implications for using a range of other literary sources – from a variety of genres – in the teaching of educational psychology. As mentioned in the introduction, it is common for psychological examples to be employed in literature classes, moreso than for literature to be used as a vehicle for teaching psychology. Perhaps the example of William Blake could serve as motivation for others to design – and assess – college-level courses and lessons that integrate literature with the teaching of educational psychology ○ “In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors.” 2. Blake & Cognition (Perception, Cognition, Action, Agent-Niche, Extension) Link Blanket as door? Separating and Connecting the rooms and inside/outside? Security blanket/door? Locking blanket? ## Page 14 3. Blake & “Narrative Unbound” (1987) Structure Learning // Learning Structure Many fascinating examples of Blake scholarship, archival work, criticism, application, etc. – Here, some Figures, then next slide with focus on just one embodied page. ## Page 15 Mirror & Mirrored Mirror & Mirrored ## Page 16 “agree but why go on?” Narrative universe beyond “Single vision” Min2 time concepts (linear, non-linear) ● “Deep structures” are misnomers of “unstable structures” (consider hierarchical “depth” in Active Inference generative models) ● “Perspective transformation operates on itself” ● “Self-reflexivity of perspective transformation produces narrative branching” Spoiler: they may have gone on – the rest of book contains at least multiple pen/sessions, if not multiple annotators. ## Page 17 4. --- *Extraction method: pymupdf*