Cosmic Bayesian Inference

Integrating our latest modern theory of mind with ancient cosmic symbolism to uncover perennial truths

Source: DALL-E

Introduction: On Translating Between Modern & Ancient Languages

It may be tempting to dismiss symbolic & mythological perspectives as antiquated relics of a bygone era. This can be especially true in our modern world where we further distance ourselves from the natural world - and history - in favor of infinite Tik Tok doom scrolls. But what if these ancient stories contain wisdom that is indeed relevant - and needed - in today’s world?

In this spirit, I recently just finished reading Matt Pageau's book, The Language of Creation. It serves as a straightforward yet profound guide to the rich symbolism of Genesis. Going through, I couldn't help but put on my favorite pair of glasses - my active inference glasses - to view the concepts through another lens.

While complexity theory doesn’t do justice to the full “echoing power” of symbolism, I was still curious: is there a way of integrating the active inference model - our latest theory of mind - into the language of creation?¹ 

This is that initial starting point - a humble attempt to reveal the enduring relevance of ancient intuition through a modern language. The piece is structured as follows:

• (I) Recap of Active Inference & Markov Blankets

• (II) Overview of Pageau’s Interpretation of Genesis

• (III) The Dynamic Dance Between Space & Time

• (IV) Active Inference & Symbolism Isomorphism

• (V) Vignettes: Adam & Eve + Cain & Abel

• (VI) Beyond Good & Evil: On the Metamorphoses of Caterpillars

• (VII) Parting Thoughts & Caveats

With that, let’s dive in.

I. Recap of Active Inference & Markov Blankets

First off, some table setting. What is active inference? It’s a theory that describes how self-organizing biological systems maintain internal order by minimizing uncertainty about the world.²

Think of living systems as “bubbles of order” actively & dynamically persisting in the face of entropy, the natural tendency to disorder. This is represented by a “Markov blanket” - a statistical formalism for “identity” that partitions internal and external states. Internal order is maintained through exchanges of information between internal states, beliefs in a world model, and external states, the raw environment beyond immediate perception. This intermediation occurs via two “blanket” states: sensory states, the subset of external states that are perceived, and active states that represent actions taken to alter external states and thus sensory states.

As the system continuously interacts with its environment, it engages in perception-action loops that iteratively update it’s model of the world. Handy diagram below for a visualization.

Think of intermediate blanket states as “middle men” that pass signals between conditionally independent (i.e. no direct lines) internal and external states. An analogy here is RPG gaming, which isn’t perfect since there is no constant entropy battle in video games. Internal state is your character (e.g. skills / abilities / items), sensory states are the “lit up” portion of the map you can see, active states are your actions & movements, and external states areas the “dark area of the map” and beyond.

By continuously updating its internal model based on sensory inputs and acting to better align external states with its beliefs, a system minimizes uncertainty and thus maintains its internal order.

These Markov blankets can be nested hierarchically across spatial scales to provide an ontology for, well, everything.

The simplest intuition is a cell. These “cells” can come together to form larger “blankets within blankets”. Or to use statistical lingo - “nested hierarchical” Markov blankets where a “superordinate” level is composed of a Markov blanket at a “supraordinate” level.

The beauty of this simple formalism is the application of mathematical rigor to identity via the full arsenal of information & energy dynamics.

For more detail on the referenced research paper, see: Markov Blankets of Life³

II. Overview of Pageau’s Interpretation of Genesis

Let’s now change gears and enter the symbolic world by understanding the language of creation through Pageau’s eyes. We’ll then attempt to draw it’s statistical corollary.

A. Symbolic Lens: In Pageau’s interpretation, there are two core dichotomies that reverberate through the Genesis story: “heaven vs. earth” using religious lingo or a synonymous “theory vs. fact” to use more relatable scientific terms. One abstract, one concrete. Humanity's purpose - as represented by Adam and his progeny - is to serve as the appropriate mediator between these two forces. This is done by “lowering meaning” (divine will / theory) - symbolized by the Mind - and “raising matter” (corporeal existence / fact) - symbolized by the Body. The mediation is then symbolized by the Heart. Visually, I think of Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam for this dynamic.

Note: For additional detail, consider also watching Matt’s interviews with Jordan Peterson here and his brother Jonathan here.

In this interpretation, G-d on the right, with his velvety cerebral backdrop, represents the Mind "lowering meaning” (divine will / theory). Adam on the left, perched on the rock, represents the Body “raising matter” (corporeal existence / facts).

This process occurs in embedded microcosms - mediating between the mind & body, family relations, tribes, civilizations, and the broader cosmos at large.

B. Statistical Lens: So what’s the modern translation for these two forces?

In our Bayesian world, we propose that this dichotomy becomes: beliefs vs. evidence.⁴

Recall the free energy principle states that living systems maintain internal order by minimizing uncertainty. By definition, this uncertainty is the difference between predictions of the internal model, beliefs, and perceptions of the environment through sensory inputs, evidence.

This is similar to a top-down “Heaven / Theory” predicted data vector analogous to the Mind and a bottoms-up “Earth / Fact” sensory data vector analogous to the Body. See snip below taken from Shamil Chandaria’s Bayesian Brain talk with a mental ninety-degree rotation to help further visualize the congruence.⁵

III. The Dynamic Dance Between Space & Time

Let’s now go through how this dynamic between “Heaven / Theory / Beliefs” and “Earth / Fact / Evidence” plays out from a process perspective, both symbolically through the mediation of Space & Time and the proposed statistical corollary.⁶

A. Symbolic Lens: In Pageau’s interpretation, this mediation occurs through two archetypes: Space and Time. But importantly - these isn’t the “3D Cartesian” Space and “ticking clocks” Time that we think of today. Rather, these are more abstract representations of core ideas. Namely:

• Time: Represents Cyclical Rebirth & Renewal and is depicted by an Ouroboros Circle

• Space: Represents Stability and is depicted by a Square

The below provides a few visual examples of how these are made manifest in the Biblical narrative:⁷

• Time: Blood, Wine, Snakes, Female, and Flood

• Space: Bone, Bread, Trees, Male, and Land

Genesis thus becomes a story of “opponent processing” and finding the appropriate balance between the forces of Space and Time, which are analogous to ideas of Order and Chaos. This occurs in a series of embedded microcosms where the same principles play out across spatial scales to drive incremental order over time. Said with a rhetorical flair, a cosmic heartbeat - a process of creation unfolding, complexifying, devolving back into chaos, and then emanating into a greater order.

Was curious what our AI DALL-E friend would provide us given a “cosmic heartbeat” prompt - consider the prediction error resolved!

A few quick anecdotes below to help further paint a picture of this process through the narrative:

• Creation vs. Chaos: G-d creates the ordered cosmos of space, land, day/night cycle out of the formless void and darkness that represents primordial chaos and timelessness

• Noah’s Ark vs. the Flood: Noah’s Ark represents the microcosm of order with the flood representing the cyclic return to the primordial, undifferentiated oceanic state of entropy

• Promised Land vs. Wilderness Wandering: Israelites are promised a bountiful, settled homeland (spatial order), but must first endure 40 years of nomadic existence in the chaotic, timeless desert wilderness

B. Statistical Lens: What’s our hypothesis for how can we map our modern vernacular to this?

Our key insight is interpreting these narratives as a story of evolution in identity.⁸ By doing so, we can use our Markov blanket formalism and active inference. In modern complexity theory terms, these narratives can be seen as a succession of "entropic phase transitions” which create higher scales of emanating order. As an agent interacts with it’s environment, an iterative Bayesian learning process occurs to properly balance the forces of Time & Space, or in other words, appropriately integrate changes in variational free energy.⁹

This integration is the Bayesian belief update process, where priors (“Heaven / Theory”) get updated by evidence (“Earth / Fact”) and then post-evidence posteriors become the new priors (“Heaven / Theory”) in a co-dynamic & iterative fashion to update the agent’s generative world model.

These changes in free energy reverberate via symbols through the various spatial scales of the embedded microcosmos, or in our new language, nested hierarchical Markov blankets. Loss of identity “scales down” the hierarchy and results in confusion & exile while gains in identity “scales up” the hierarchy and result in increasing order. In other words, a potential causal relationship between free energy & identity through action.

Going through this iterative “cosmic Bayesian inference” process drives a process of complexification (i.e. integrated information / increase in diversity-in-unity) which results in a more optimal generative model in harmony with the environment. This progressively expands identity & existence through scaling the hierarchical Markov blanket across spatial & temporal scales.¹⁰ 

If life’s mandate is to persist, the Biblical story, arguably, becomes the ultimate “learning process” for an optimal shared generative world model for humanity to create order out of chaos in an uncertain world.¹¹ Or something to that effect.

Jacob’s Ladder by William Blake (circa 1709-1806). The ladder could symbolize complexification over time, with a spiral vs. traditional “linear” ladder structure to reflect increasing levels of coherence through the natural cyclicality of Time. See footnotes for a further breakdown through an analytical lens comparing this to de Chardin’s ideas.

Note: The above is all extremely compressed but hopefully provides a sketch of the hypotheses and core themes explored.

Reference Thinkers:

Bobby Azarian

The above interpretation is inspired by some of the complexity-based ideas in your your book, Romance of Reality. Would consider this integration an attempt at 1) extend the “Universal Bayesianism” Theory of Everything hypothesis with a more explicit & granular Markov blanket formalism and 2) add Genesis symbolism to the conversation. For readers interested in exploring further, would suggest: “The Paradigm of Emergence: A Unifying Worldview for a Divided World and a Solution to the Meaning Crisis”. This is also inspired by Jordan Peterson’s work on the psychological interpretation of Genesis.

IV. Active Inference & Cosmic Symbolism Isomorphism

Let’s now recap the potential statistical interpretation of the Genesis narrative. The narrative, with its depiction of Adam and his progeny as the mediator between divine will and earthly existence, mirrors the dynamics of a Bayesian agent acting in its environment. This agent, or in our case, humanity, receives “divine” commands akin to prior beliefs in a Bayesian framework. He is then tasked with perceiving (i.e. forming / mind / priestly) the world & acting (i.e. filling / body / kingly) upon these beliefs at greater scales of self-similar identity to iteratively update his generative model and better understand - and be in harmonious attunement with - the world. By doing so, the agent minimizes divergence - or 'sin' - for an optimal existence.¹²

Let’s make the mappings we’ve discussed more explicit:

A. Symbolism <> Markov Blanket Mapping

1. Heaven / Theory = External States: External states represent “Heaven / Mind / Theory / Beliefs” - the agent's generative world model comprised of prior beliefs that are iteratively updated via mediation with the environment through sensory states.

2. Time - Sensory States: Sensory states are the inputs that
   the system receives from the environment, which are influenced by the
   external states and inform the internal states. Sensory states relates to Time and “Substance”. Pagaeu states that dreams symbolize Time. You can perceive but not take action in dreams.

3. Space = Internal States: Internal States relate to Space - the perceived sensations from the external environment that the agent then integrates into their world model. This world model can be thought of as a Blueprint similar to “Form” - or Formal Cause.

4. Earth / Facts - Active States: Active States represent “Earth / Body / Fact / Evidence” given they role in maintaining stability by taking action to better align external states with it’s internal beliefs. Note that action becomes similar to “agency” - the freedom to choose how to interact with your environment. This becomes similar to Efficient Cause.

B. Space & Time <> Entropy Mapping

1. Space (e.g. Dry Land) = Order: Land symbolizes a state of low entropy, order, and stability. The generative model is able to accurately predict and account for sensory inputs from its environment, and variational free energy is low.

2. Time (e.g. Flood, Exile) = Chaos: Flood symbolizes a state of high entropy & disorder, which is also represented by confusion, moral & social chaos, and exile. This causes an increase in variational free energy. This either gets integrated or if the resulting variational free energy is beyond a certain bound, the Markov blanket “scales down” as it can’t maintain organizational integrity. As complexity theorist Ilya Prigogine says, “we only grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate”.

C. Embedded Microcosms <> Nested Hierarchical Markov Blankets

The Time <> Space duality illustrates a perpetual re-achieving of order via an iterative updating of generative models in response to chaos (surprising inputs) across spatial scales.

When smaller Markov blankets successfully integrate the disruption, this complexified generative model can then be "composed" and constitute the priors for a higher hierarchical level. This recurring process of local free energy minimization and belief updating across nested levels allows for progressive complexification of the generative model and subsequently an expanded spatial & temporal identity, or in other words, a larger Markov blanket.

D. Edge of Chaos <> Garden of Eden Mapping

The Edge of Chaos in complexity theory represents a Goldilocks zone between Chaos (Time) and Rigidity (Space) that allows for maximal adaptability and drives phase transitions. Could this be what the Garden of Eden represents post-fall: the optimal balance between Land & Flood? A well-watered, flourishing garden? ¹³

Note: We fully acknowledge that mapping a computational framework onto a deeply complex & nuanced narrative risks reductive oversimplification. We also acknowledge this fails to address the phenomenological experience of an embodied agent’s experience in the world. The aim here to explore potential resonances between scientific & symbolic modes of knowledge instead of providing a definitive interpretation. Checks out why certain truths are told via storytelling - no need for Bayesian statistics!

Reference Thinkers:

Brett Andersen

- Big fan of your “Imitations of New World View” Substack bridging neuroscience with complexity theory & philosophy to reconcile the science <> religion divide in our Post-Nietzschean Age. Consider this an attempt at extending your “Relevance Realization & Cerebral Hemispheres” piece with a preliminary “active inference account of Genesis symbolism”.

The hypothesis for connecting the two bodies of work could be: Left Brain = Processes “Space” and Right Brain = Processes “Time”. Per Pageau: “One eye interprets reality with rigor, in terms of sharpness and correctness [Left Brain], and the other eye interprets reality with leniency, in terms of vagueness and wholeness [Right Brain]”(pg 270) which rings very much of Iain McGilchrist's thesis.

V. Vignettes: Adam & Eve + Cain & Abel

Let’s go through a few examples to see what we can learn applying active inference to two narratives: the story of Adam & Eve and the story of Cain & Abel.¹⁴

A. Adam & Eve (Spatial Scale = Garden)

The Temptation & Fall of Eve by William Blake (1808)

Let’s recall that Eden represents a microcosm of the broader macrocosm - so Heaven, Earth, Space, & Time map to Adam, Eve, Tree & Snake.

Initially, Adam exists in a state of perfect harmony - zero free energy - within Eden, his generative model perfectly aligned with his environment. Eve's active consumption of the forbidden fruit was a result of curiosity that introduces surprise. This results in the realization of self-consciousness & distinct identities, akin to the emergence of a Markov blanket boundary.

After the fall from Eden, Adam & Eve (who is an extension of Adam’s identity) are now tasked with reducing free energy in their entropic external milieu via active inference to resolve the prediction error in an attempt to achieve the original harmony. “Naming animals” may possibly refer to perception and the subsequent integration within Adam’s generative model.

Note that a learning process occurs where in the following cycle at the Garden spatial scale, Abraham as “Humanity’s Representative” corrects Adam’s fault and faithfully offers up Isaac.

B.  Cain & Abel (Spatial Scale = Land)

Cain & Abel (Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1600)

In this story, Abel, as herder of flocks, represents “Heaven” and Cain, as worker of the ground, represents “Earth”. This fratricidal conflict depicts an asynchrony of shared priors in a generative model and subsequent rupture of blanket boundary conditions.

Cain, driven by jealousy, fails to embody and update his internal model based on shared beliefs. Cain responds by taking an "action" misaligned with the broader complexification process - the murder of Abel.

By not identifying with and incorporating the priors from the larger Markov blanket he is nested within, Cain's actions undermine the generative model binding that hierarchical system, inducing an increase in entropy.

Note that in the next “Land” spatial scale cycle, Jacob unlike Cain makes peace with his brother and uncle, again illustrating the fruits of the learning process.

VI: Beyond Good & Evil: On the Metamorphoses of Caterpillars

Creator: Ralph A. Clevenger | Credit: Getty Images

Pageau states the central riddle of Biblical stories is: “translating the 'evil of change' into a higher good that can properly host the Creator of all things." Let’s consider the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to explore this further.

During pupation, the caterpillar's body breaks down into an undifferentiated primal soup of cells (Chaos / Time) from which a new phenotypic form, the butterfly, self-organizes. Crucially, the existence of these distinct stages across different temporal organizations of the caterpillar's Markov blanket - from larva to pupa to butterfly - provides self-evidence that the caterpillar is a "metamorphic agent."¹⁵ Rather than confining its identity to any single morphological state, the caterpillar minimizes free energy by identifying with the greater "temporally extended whole" of its lifecycle.

Through cosmic symbolism, the caterpillar becomes a microcosm of the Genesis creation story. Let’s return to Pageau’s work. To resolve the riddle of translating change (Time) into a higher good, he introduces the concept of a "Higher Identity" symbolized by an (ineffable) pinnacle stone. This pinnacle stone subsumes & transcends conventional dualities like "good" and "evil" from the Tree of Knowledge by "crowning Space with the mystery of Time," appropriately quelling the opposing forces via a greater identification.

Interestingly, the pinnacle stone and caterpillar's "temporally extended whole" share a common theme: both are representations of a Platonic, transcendent meta-identity. Identifying with this Whole - that you are a temporally and spatially extended nested recursive hierarchical Markov blanket rather than a single morphological state - is thermodynamically optimal.¹⁶ Philosophically, this meta-identification may also hold the key to transcend beyond the duality of Good and Evil. This then may be the answer to the Sphinx's riddle - and maybe, just maybe, Nietzsche's perspectival struggle.

From caterpillars to humans and the cosmos, we are all undergoing a process of flux - of perishing and being reborn - with ephemeral forms giving way to an ever-complexifying, self-transcending Whole.

Source: Reptiles, MC Escher (1943). This represents the cyclical nature of life, death, and renewal. The 2D drawing represents Time, the 3D represents Space, and the process of alligators climbing up against gravity represents the “negentropic” process of life.

Reference Thinkers:

Matthew David Segall

Big fan of your work. The above feels - intuitively - Whiteheadian. Still need to go through and attempt to understand what I can of your work as well as your dialogue with Timothy Jackson on the free energy principle <> process thinking reconciliation.

VII. Parting Thoughts & Caveats

Source: DALL-E. May be having too much fun with this.

Thank you

Active Inference Institute

for building a community to make public the work of all these great thinkers!

To wrap, by reinterpreting the Genesis stories through the lens of complexity theory & active inference, we find a compelling isomorphism between the latest cutting-edge modern theory of minds and age-old narratives told throughout time. While deceptively simple, this has the potential to have transformative implications - merging new with old, science with religion, and philosophy of mind with metaphysics.¹⁷ Plenty remains to further explore these similarities & differences, but the hope is that this preliminary work can provide a novel contribution to the public conversation on mind, existence, and the human condition.

More pragmatically, I hope the takeaway is not to narrowly double down on implementing the latest Bayesian learning algorithms in blind pursuit of AGI and techno-acceleration. Rather, the hope is to slow down, look backwards, and see what wisdom we can learn from our elders who’s holistic intuition about the world have endured across the rise and fall of cultures and empires. While technical capabilities remain important for achieving our goals, religious & mythopoetic works have the capacity to subsume our modern thinking and provide the underlying kernel of meaning, purpose and direction at an individual level.

With that, signing off. Very much new to this corner of the internet and writing in public so if you’re exploring similar ideas or have any feedback, consider dropping a comment or reaching out. What are your thoughts? Do you have any takes on how active inference can be applied to cosmic symbolism?

Always open to making online friends. If you enjoyed this post, please consider liking & subscribing below, resharing for further reach, and following along on Twitter!

Epistemological Caveat: The aim of this work is to spark potential insights through a preliminary pattern matching exercise. I am by no means an expert on these topics so there is plenty of epistemic uncertainty and additional work to be done to further validate, refine, and refute these ideas. I am simply an amateur philosopher with a passion for learning and a decent internet connection. Sharing in the interest of “open sourcing” ideas to improve personal & shared world models and reduce collective uncertainty.

1. The “echoing power” descriptor is borrowed from René Guénon who describes symbols as "metaphysical language at its highest”. What exactly is a symbol? A full deep dive is warranted to explore this question further through work such as Joseph Campbell’s Thou Art That. For now, let’s reference Goethe from “Maxims and Reflections” to provide a simple yet profound description of the differences between allegory and symbolism. To quote:

• Allegory: “Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it.” [i.e. Bounded / Constrained]

• Symbolism: “Symbolism transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and even unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible.” [i.e. Unbounded / Freedom]

2. To provide some additional background and draw out the slight difference between the free energy principle (FEP) and active inference. The FEP was proposed by computational neuroscientist Karl Friston in the early 2000’s as a unified brain theory based on information physics. The free energy principle is the theoretical framework that states that living systems, by the very fact of being alive, minimize free energy to maintain internal order. Active inference is the process by which systems adhere to the free energy principle through perception-action-learning loops.

For a few presentations by Karl Friston providing an overview of the free energy principle & active inference, see here and here.

3. There are also a few other interesting items to further explore between philosophy and the implications of a Markov blanket ontology, such as sacrifice:

Sacrifice: Per Section 4: “The self-evidencing dynamics of autonomous organization can therefore be cast as exhibiting two different yet complementary tendencies: (1) an integrative tendency of a multiplicity of Markov blankets to self-organize into a coherent self-evidencing whole, and (2) a self-assertive tendency to preserve individual autonomy.” '

Sacrifice thus becomes a process of giving up a short-term self-assertive tendency to integrate into a coherent self-evidencing whole by having the appropriate “temporal depth” in your generative model. Without sacrifice, individual autonomy, similar to cancer cells metastasizing, runs rampant at the expense of the the coherent whole. Sounds familiar in this day and age.

4. A good starting point to get a geometric intuition for Bayes law is the following video from 3Blue1Brown: Bayes Theorem, a Geometry of Changing Beliefs

5. This talk is on the Bayesian Brain & meditation which applies active inference to postulate that the brain is a prediction machine that looks to minimize prediction errors between it’s generative model & sensory inputs. This minimization occurs via predictive processing, the neural mechanisms interpreting sensory information.

6. At the cosmic scale this is similar, through Einsteinian equivalences, to how Light (“Heaven / Theory”) manifests itself - through Energy - into Mass (“Earth / Fact”). See Reflexive Universe and related work by Arthur Young.

7. It’s hard to due justice to the depth of exploration & insights of Pageau’s work. One example: Consistency (Space) vs. Completeness (Time) - which provides a potential symbolic interpretation for Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

8. Note that Identity = Existence. The free energy principle mandates that living systems behave in a way that minimizes free energy. This is mathematically equivalent to maximizing evidence for their own model of the world. Per Section 2: “To then act on inferred states of the world means to actively secure evidence that I am what I am” which of course resonates with the well-known “I am that I am” self-reflexive declaration of being. Thus, to maintain identity (i.e. your Markov blanket boundary / internal coherence) is to affirm existence (i.e. self-evidence). It’s giving - "looking into a mirror” but the mirror is nature.

9. One of the latest promising computational theories of consciousness is the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. This theory quantitatively formalizes “integrated information,” or the amount of information combined and unified in a system, to derive an explicit “degree” of consciousness. Proof aside, this “integrated information” seems functionally equivalent to measuring the degree of complexity in a system. Thus, in philosophy of mind terms, religious & mythopoetic works become a) external representations of the mind and b) methods for increasing collective consciousness. This seems deeply fascinating to me. We will stick to the language of complexity & active inference to prevent ourselves (in a similar fashion to Odysseus strapping himself to the mast) from going down the consciousness rabbit hole. For now.

10. Diversity-in-unity is arguably a nerdy way of saying Love.

This process of complexification also parallels some of the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who’s core idea was an ‘Omega Point.” This was a Christ-like final convergence point through a process of increasing complexification, from a merging of man with machine, biology, to the very fabric of the cosmos. The idea was to mirror Christian eschatology in a more literal, evolutionary sense (vs. in a “depth” sense) to reconcile biology with theology. While he did predict the the rise of Internet, this got a lot of heat from the Church.

Regardless of your take, it’s interesting to analyze the high-level schematic of de Chardin’s idea (picture below) with the ideas we walked through. All hyper-speculative but to lay out a theory which demonstrates some level of convergence:

Left Diagram: We have a visual representation of the active inference process, or “syntropy” as labeled. Heaven / Theory is (0,+) on the Y-Axis and Earth / Fact is (+,0) on the X-Axis. The lines to “Unity” seem to correspond to the act of integrating variational free energy through Space & Time polarities to create a more optimal world model, which is also represented in 2D via the Right Diagram.

The concentric circles warrant a further deep dive as they explore metaphysical terrain beyond entropy-bounded domains but can seen through a neoplatonic lens using our Space & Time archetypes as: (1) Duality Gray: Space & Time Bounded (2) Purple Imaginal: Time, No Space (e.g. dreams) and (3) Blue Archetypes: Space, No Time (e.g. Platonic Forms) and (4) Yellow Unity: No Time, No Space (e.g. Infinity)

Right Diagram: We have the process of complexification which is, very neatly and congruently, a spiraling Jacob’s ladder. The “Y Axis” represents the phase transitions into further levels of coherence via “cosmic Bayesian inference” and the X axis represents the “opponent processing” duality between Integration (Space) and Differentiation (Time).

11. There are also a few fascinating connections worth further exploring on this process & metaphysics. One is the hypothesis that the Bible - in both language and plot - has a symmetric, self-similar seven-fold “chiasm” structure from Michael Bull. This congruently maps to Arthur Young’s seven-fold theory of process. We’ll save this deep dive for another time!

12. Specifically, in terms of variational free energy language - ‘sin’ would be the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence.

13. This idea for Edge of Chao / Metastable attunement is inspired by Mark Miller’s work on the Predictive Dynamics of Happiness & Wellbeing. This work fascinatingly looks to reverse engineer “Eudaimonia” (using Greek lingo) or a similar “Flow” (using modern Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s terminology) via the predictive processing framework.

14. These are admittedly very short and a further granular analysis is warranted to actually discern the particular perception-action loops at various spatial scales.

There also a few more rigorous avenues for further computational excavation: (1) mapping out specific parts of the narrative (at each spatial scale) to the pertinent Markov Blanket dynamics (2) computationally modeling these motifs to formalize degree of "self-evidencing” and (3) comparatively analyzing other mythic cosmogonies (e.g. Zeus & Kronos, Osiris & Set, Norse). We’ll save these for another time potentially!

15. The caterpillar anecdote is from cognitive philosopher Andy Clark in “How to Knit your Own Markov Blanket”.

16. Borges’ Pascal’s Sphere seems relatable here.

17. The simpler the better as minimizing free energy mathematically entails balancing both accuracy and complexity.