**Links to**: [[Reflection]], [[Madness and Civilization]], [[A Philosophy of Madness]], [[Cogito and the History of Madness]], [[Entropy]], [[Thought]], [[12 Negintelligibility]], [[Cognition]], [[Perception]], [[Knowledge]], [[Persistence]], [[Evolution]], [[Predictive processing]], [[Dysconnection hypothesis]], [[08 Active ignorance]], [[Time]], [[Control]], [[Determinism]], [[Noise]], [[Chance]], [[Necessity]], [[Chaos]], [[Doppelganger]], [[Numerology]], etc. >“The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply contributions to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.” > >J. Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village.” _Notes of a native son_ (1955). The link between phenomena we tend to designate as ‘madness’ and ‘creativity’ is obvious, the line separating the two is difficult to draw.^[If there are objections to this: I’d love to hear them!] The argument explored will be this: what certainly does _link_ both phenomena is the psychosocial intelligibility of their respective inferential chain-processes. On the one hand: creative acts (a new mathematical proof, a painting, a good joke) couple with the systems that enable them by—if ever so slightly—challenging established norms (understandings, procedures, styles), and possibly inventing-revealing novel ones. This is sometimes accepted synchronically: a community of agents interprets and understands the creative act as it takes place, but sometimes diachronically: it takes time for an idea to be accepted and understood. (Do note that we speak of agents and/or their creative ideas as having been “ahead of their time” when the latter happens. This implies there exists conceptual consensus that we are talking about the relativities of cognitive speed, i.e., how predictively effective an idea is, and how this implies its psychosocial embedding as acceptance and use). On the other hand, acts we relate to madness (think: the mad hatter, psychotic breaks, social-norm-disrupting behavior) do the same, but the **interpretability** and **speed** of their inferential procedures seems different than that of ‘creative’ moves. They follow a similar—if not the same—logic, but appear to be undergirded by different constraint regimes, mostly in terms of velocities. That is: how much effort, as time, is needed to interpret and enable their appearance on the communicative frameworks that (could) sustain them. The psychotic agent often connects patterns which others are not able to follow (these are read by the community as paranoia, delusion, etc.). Do note that the psychotic agent conceives of themselves as synchronic and coherent. However, from the perspective of a psychosocial community, their generative model is overestimating certain details of an otherwise “agreed upon” reality. The speculation explored in this presentation will thus be: madness is faster and smaller-scale, sometimes residing within a single agent (in terms of communicative frameworks: so fast that it sometimes ’leaves everyone behind’, see: Kusters 2020). Madness can be fleeting or sustained, but is often fleeting. Creativity can be just as fast, fleeting and singularized, but couples with its linguistic and sociohistorical constraints with longer-lasting effects, whether synchronically or diachronically. It’s only the ideological, normative, etc. constraints which enable creative acts to last. However: both types of acts, creative and mad, can be understood as the same process, it’s just that their effects are interpreted and occur at different psychosocial-scales. Examples linking these phenomena abound: all avant-garde artistry is an effect of dislodging from the old. This means: away with (local) tradition, and onwards with something which challenges its norms. Rules and roles change all the time. In the ‘Western’ context, Duchamp is the poster child example for 20th century madness-creativity, or Le Salon de Refusés, slightly earlier.^[Although the glorification of Duchamp’s persona for this gesture has recently come under scrutiny, given discoveries about the idea having originated in the creative madness of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.] Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, etc. Also, clearly: jesters, witches, troubadours, etc. through the ages. In artistically-explored mathematics the prime example of the madness and psychedelia of transformations is Lewis Caroll’s Alice. “Eureka“ moments designate outbursts of madness which is psychosocially enabled as creativity. *Eppur si muove*: the opposite. Or, in our time: the drinking of milk which is not from one’s own mother: pretty damn crazy. All museums today house a vast diversity of illegibly mad phenomena, made legible by the protecting and isolating containment (Markov) blanket that is the museum. Its border keeps the madness at bay, and allows for a psychosocially accepted meta-perspective on these phenomena, it allows for them to be seen-_as_ and not just _seen_. The tortured artist/creator/thinker—all three are the same kind of persona/personality in my book—are the image of creativity; the witch’s brew. Drawing from observations on madness by Wouter Kusters (_A Philosophy of Madness_ 2020 (NL: 2014)) from Yağmur Denizhan’s recent takes on “intelligence as the border activity between the modeled and the unmodeled” (2023), as well as Alicia Juarrero’s reflections on the concept of “constraint” (2023), we will examine how madness and creativity are one and the same actively inferential phenomenon, sustained by different constraint regimes. _Presentation, examples:_ Mirror-masks, Maya Deren, Tarkovsky, mirror EM images, Kusters on rotations and mirroring transformations + madness, Borges and the different characters of creativity/madness: Funes the Memorious, Library of Babel, On Rigor in Science, Beckett’s “Not I”. _Discussion:_ how (and why) do we temper the mad outbursts of creativity (as art: the museum, as science), and when do we fully contain or even restrict the problematic aspects of these outbursts? Wards as ateliers and vice versa has always-already been the case. Important: this is **not** a fetishization of madness. %% Use notes from emails Shanna Borges [[Entrainment-entertainment]] [[07 Phenomenology of Sick Spirit]] [[Dysconnection hypothesis]] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5147460/ New and deviate ideas, evaluations and drives are accompanied by a dreadful attendant — madness. A grain of the spice of madness is joined to genius. Nietzsche “It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece” — Plato Idea for valparaiso Biological and interoceptive regulation may be crucial for affect and emo tional processing (Barrett 2017). During situated interactions, the brain’s generative model constantly predicts not just what will happen next but also what the consequences for interoception and allostasis are. Interocep tive streams—elicited during the perception of external objects and events— imbue them with an affective dimension, which signals how good or bad they are for the creature’s allostasis and survival, hence making them “meaning ful.” If this view is correct, then disorders of this interoceptive and allostatic processing may engender emotional dysregulation and various psychopatho logical conditions (Pezzulo 2013; Barrett et al. 2016; Maisto, Barca et al. 2019; Pezzulo, Maisto et al. 2019). There is an emerging bedfellow for interoceptive inference—namely, emo tional inference. In this application of Active Inference, emotions are con sidered part of the generative model: they are just another construct or hypothesis that the brain employs to deploy precision in deep generative models. From the perspective of belief updating, this means anxiety is just a commitment to the Bayesian belief “I am anxious” that best explains the prevailing sensory and interoceptive queues. From the perspective of acting, the ensuing (interoceptive) predictions augment or attenuate various preci sions (i.e., covert action) or enslave autonomic responses (i.e., overt action). This may look much like arousal, which confirm the hypothesis that “I am anxious.” Usually, emotional inference entails belief updating that is domain general, assimilating information from both interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory streams—hence the intimate relationship between emotion, intero ception, and attention in health (Seth and Friston 2016; Smith, Lane et al. 2019; Smith, Parr, and Friston 2019) and disease (Peters et al. 2017, J. E. Clark et al. 2018). (Parr et al. 2022, pp. 216-7) "... through its attention to inconsis- tency as a fatal flaw in any theory or point of view, logic proves a useful device in disclosing ill-conceived policies in the political sphere and, ultimately, in distinguishing the rational from the irrational, the sane from the insane." (Preface to "A Concise Introduction to Logic", Patrick Hurley) _______________________ [[Resonance]], [[Madness]] "The lyric poet strives to imitate music through rapidly changing, multi-colored images caught up in a mad whirl ... Thus [he] can perceive himself only through the prism of music, can express nothing which was not already there in the music to an extraordinary degree, ...The lyric genius expresses in this way what the Dionysian musician, by identifying himself with the primitive echo of the world, is able to make resonate without having to resort to images." (p. 8 [[Sarah Kofman]] in [[Nietzsche and Metaphor]])