Notes on Oscar Wilde and Markov Chains

I am interested in Markov chains, the free energy principle, entropy, and their relevance to empirical psychology. Because of their apparent relevance to empirical psychology, they also have interesting philosophical implications. As I have been doing an in-depth study of Oscar Wilde, I would like to share where my research is at.

In "The Burden of Itys" Wilde talks about how our inner worlds are the result of our surroundings, both the physical environment we are in at the moment and our past experiences, especially our past experiences with people. The character in the poem has a stream of thought made entirely of what he had heard from others, with only minor spurts of potentially original introspection. He mostly focuses on Greek/Roman myth, Catholic imagery, and the river Thames he is sitting by.

This reflects the Fristonian perspective that one might abstract an organism into a Markov chain which is fully dependent on its past and the information it is receiving in the moment. Friston likes to talk about how one can perfectly anticipate the external world from a partitioned internal Markov chain. We might think of the character in "The Burden of Itys" as a steady state, flowing between different states in a chain. I call it, "The Chain of Itys."

To discover it, I first went through the poem and marked when he was pondering on the four main subjects that cross his mind throughout the poem: Catholicism, his surroundings (Oxford and the Thames), Greek/Roman myth, and his own personal introspection. A screenshot:

Yellow is his surroundings, uncolored is Greek/Roman myth, and red is Catholic imagery. There was no original introspection in this passage.

I then counted, not the number of instances of thought, but the number of transitions. I defined a transition as Wilde switching between one mode of thought to another. Each line counts as a single thought, though he is able to switch thoughts within a line. In the example above, he starts at surroundings, then transitions from surroundings to surroundings twice. He switches from surroundings to Greek/Roman, then from Greek/Roman to Greek/Roman, etc.

Here is the final count:

The top section is total transitions, the bottom section uses the same data to make proportions. This can then be used to make a Markov chain in R:

And a simulated proportion of instances can be generated next to the actual count, to ensure the model is functional:

What is the philosophical relevance to this?

In other parts of Wilde's work he talks about making life into an art, primarily comparing it to the narrative arts. However, I am skeptical that Wilde's theory of art can actually be applied to life, both for practical reasons and because I think that narrative and life are categorically different. However, this does not mean that thinking of life as art is a dead end for thinking. If I can connect Wilde's ideas to Markov chains/the free energy principle, I can easily connect that to the neuroscience of Mark Solms, which can then be directly plugged in to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, especially Jungian psychoanalysis, is not empirical psychology, for good reason.

While Jung's thought is about as far from science as schools of thought come, I think it has potential as a framework for life as art. This is especially the case if I can leverage both Wilde's ideas and contemporary psychology to critique/build on the weaknesses in Jung's thought.

This is where I am at now. I put together an essay on Wilde's theory of art and why we should focus not on life as art, but self as art, claiming that sculpture is a better metaphor for life than narrative. I will post that as well, eventually my plan is to draw a bridge from the sculpture argument to the psychoanalytic one I mention here.