Literature as Uncertainty Practice – Creative Encounters with the World

hello and welcome it's December 10th 2024 we're in active inference art stream number 4.1 with Karin kinan and federo and Bruno guests today we'll be discussing literature as uncertainty practice creative encounters with the world there will be a presentation followed by some comments and discussion so thank you all for joining and to you Ken for the presentation thank you thank you Daniel for inviting me um I'm speaking here from the Norwegian Institute in Rome um and I'm very much looking forward to the responses from Bruno and Federico and um whatever questions may come up uh in the chat later on I'm going to talk about predictive Pro procing in relation to literature from the one side looking at ways in which we can use the framework of predictive processing in order to make sense of what literature is and what it does um but also going the other way thinking about what elements of predictive processing literature might um pose a challenge for or um provide a very interesting case study to perhaps provoke further discussion a lot of what I'm going to say is based on my book probability designs which came out with Oxford University bre in 2020 um I'm going to introduce the concept um I'm going to relate it to the concept of form which is a concept from that is much used in literary studies um I'm going to raise the question of what makes literature different from other art forms and I'm going to link that to a very particular kind of cognitive work that literally form the long form written of um a novel enables um and then in a final move I'm going to talk about the ways in which literature works as an uncertainty practice in the world and what this has to do with um the general experience of contingency so let's start with the probability designs um and being a literary scholar I'll start with a textual example this is from Virginia W's novel Orlando um which is a novel where the main character starts as a man in the Renaissance then suddenly turns into a woman in the 18th century and Carries On as a woman until um about the 20th century at this point in the book we're still in the Renaissance young Orlando has decided to become a poet until one day he looks out of the window and see he sees the splendid natural Green in the garden after that and here I quote Virginia wol of course he could write no more green in nature is one thing Green in literature another nature and lce seem to have a mutual antipathy bring them together and they tear each other to Pieces the Shade of Green Orlando now saw spoiled his rhyme and split his meter so what we have here on a very basic level is of course a prediction era he wanted to become a poet um he looks outside of know he sees something surprising and he changes his plan in terms of a narrative such prediction errors would be plot events here something happens that changes fundamentally the trajectory um of the further course of the narrative orando leaves his desks and his plans of becoming a writer and what is likely to happen next in the novel has just changed these prediction errors are of course um modulated with Precision with our sense of how just how good that information is just how reliable it is and in litery text that is quite often tied to the character's perspective um so it's Orlando who sees that green is part of his perception um and it's very often also tied to the embodied experience of the characters and the way in which they're positioned in the fictional World in particular in the long form of the novel and this has been discussed in military studies for a very long time at least since M B's idea that the novel is a polyphonous genre genre of many voices you usually have multiple different perspectives on the Character level but also on the level of the narrator who can be more or less reliable so that's very much um part of a standard uh setup for the novel to have these multiple different um perspectives but it's not just the spatial position um that gives um…