Here in the Iconcurchaic Age, the Bard's influence once again thrusts into, parries with and is lovingly parodied for a quickening of reality beneath the surface of what light touches and illuminates with modernized archaic language ideas, images and poetic usages in the mysterious operatic container of the antique sonnet form.  This trilogy, centrally contained in Shakespeare AI, concludes with an in depth collection of essays on the elaborate sources of its encountered development.  An in depth emersion from the ideas considered there can enlighten, invigorate and challenge any open minded masters level university study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in the context of any age, through the "new AI" of active inference according to Dr. Karl Friston's proposed "Free Energy Principle" like a double exposure AI. 

 

“The New AI” essay is a delight.  I do not pretend to follow all the threads but was compelled by the artful stream

(or perhaps eager torrent) of consciousness.  This stream emanates the physics of self-organizing, sentient systems, through the

structured composition of Shakespearean prose and back again to the author’s inference about his own (natural) intelligence.  I

particularly liked his conclusion: “my work fits the theory as a predicted outcome in itself.”  This has all the beauty of Quine’s

desert landscape and echoes the (almost tautological) simplicity of all great existential ideas – from quantum mechanics to

natural selection.  I was also taken with the word “iconcurchaic”.  I fully endorse the proposal that it should be in the dictionary

(it is now in my spellchecker).  If we have words like “Google,” as semantic celebrations of epistemic foraging, we should certainly

have “iconcurchaic”.  This word is particularly fitting for the free energy principle, which has basically been around since the days

of Plato –and keeps enjoying renaissances –in one form or another –in the writings of Kant, Helmholtz, and a host of great thinkers

of the 20th century.  It is now iconcurchaic –in the 21st century –as underwriting the promise of ‘third wave’ artificial intelligence. 

And perhaps “Shakespearean active inference.”

   

   –Dr. Karl Friston,  Oct. 2, 2019,  Physicist/Psychiatrist, Scientific Director,

                                                              Functional Imaging Labs, University College London