Title page of The Book of Urizen, copy G (printed 1818). In the collection of the Library of Congress.
The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English writer William Blake, illustrated by Blake’s own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the “First”. The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake’s mythology, who represents alienated reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the “primeaval priest” and tells how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and enslaving realm of religious dogma. Los and Enitharmon create a space within Urizen’s fallen universe to give birth to their son Orc, the spirit of revolution and freedom.
In form the book is a parody of the Book of Genesis. Urizen’s first four sons are Thiriel, Utha, Grodna and Fuzon (respectively elemental Air, Water, Earth, Fire, according to Chapter VIII). The last of these plays a major role in The Book of Ahania, published in 1795.
Background
In autumn 1790 Blake moved to Lambeth, Surrey. In the studio of his new house he wrote what became known as his “Lambeth Books”, which included The Book of Urizen. In all these books, Blake completed their design composition, their printing and colouring, and their sales from that house. Blake included early sketches for The Book of Urizen in a notebook containing images created between 1790 and 1793. The Book of Urizen was one of the few works that Blake describes as “illuminated printing”, one of his colour printed works with the coloured ink being placed on the copperplate before the page was printed.
The Book of Urizen was printed from 1794 until 1818 and was larger than his America, A Prophecy. Only eight copies of the work survive, with many variations between them of the plate orders and the number of plates. All the surviving copies were colour-printed.
Poem
Copy G, plate 7. Urizen is cast out from eternity
The story deals with a struggle within the divine mind to establish and define both itself and the universe. It is a creation myth that begins before creation:
- Earth was not: nor globes of attraction
- The will of the Immortal expanded
- Or contracted his all flexible senses.
- Death was not, but eternal life sprung. (36-39)
The creator is Urizen, a blind exile who was kept from eternity and who establishes a world that he could rule. As such, he creates laws:
- Laws of peace, of love, of unity;
- Of pity, compassion, forgiveness.
- Let each chuse one habitation:
- His ancient infinite mansion:
- One command, one joy, one desire,
- One curse, one weight, one measure
- One King, one God, one Law. (78-84)
Copy G, plate 21. Los, Enitharmon, and Orc are depicted; Los with his usual attribute of the hammer
However, Urizen suffers a fall when he creates a barrier to protect himself from eternity:
- And a roof, vast petrific around,
- On all sides He fram’d: like a womb;
- …Like a human heart strugling & beating
- The vast world of Urizen appear’d.
He is chained by Los, the prophet, from whom Urizen had been rent:
- In chains of the mind locked up,
- Like fetters of ice shrinking together,
- Disorganiz’d, rent from Eternity.
- Los beat on his fetters of iron (190-193)
Los forges a human image for Urizen in the course of seven ages, but pities him and weeps. From these tears Enitharmon is created, who soon bears the child of Los, Orc. Orc’s infant cries awaken Urizen, who begins to survey and measure the world he has created. Urizen explores his world and witnesses the birth of his four sons, who represent the four classical elements. From these experiences Urizen’s hopes are crushed and his:
- soul sicken’d! he curs’d
- Both sons & daughters: for he saw
- That no flesh nor spirit could keep
- His iron laws one moment. (443-446)
In response, he creates a web of religion, which serve as chains to the mind.
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Urizen
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In communicating the progress of scientific theories and tests, experimental results are often presented to the public as concrete and indisputable, therefore proving this-or-that idea. This leads to the common misconception that scientific models can in fact become proven, instead of the more nuanced reality that they are only the most precise (sometimes extremely precise) and accurate models approximating what we can discern, and the very notion of evidence always suggest a degree of interpretation.
The results of quantum entanglement experiments are a case-in-point. The results of data from particle accelerators to optical Bell tests (experiments that test entanglement) are statistical, such that conclusions are drawn based on the probability of a series of measurements being random or “true signals”. This goes for detection of Higgs, W, and Z bosons as well as whether two particles are so strongly correlated that they violate local-realism. Because evidence regarding the latter example have serious implications for the underlying nature of reality (implying that “things” are either fundamentally nonlocal or a probabilistic superposition) the results are strongly questioned.
This stems from the fact that as fallible beings, our experiments are not perfect. There are always a certain degree of underlying assumptions and interpretations of the data. In the case of Bell tests, these are often referred to as “loopholes”. Therefore, while quantum experiments have all produced statistical results strongly supporting nonlocality, state-superposition, and other violations of classical physics (superluminal tunneling, teleportation, etc.) all such experiments have certain loopholes that may be giving false-positive results. Therefore, much work has been done in designing and performing “loophole-free Bell tests”.
Such loophole-free tests have become increasingly sophisticated and have produced strong indication that local-realist theories, also known as local hidden variable theories, are not supported by the evidence. Note that nonlocal-realist theories, like de Broglie-Bohm Pilot wave theory, are still valid interpretations of quantum results.
One significant loophole that appears frequently in critiques of quantum experiments regards the idea of free-will, another way in which consciousness becomes an important factor in quantum theory and the objective physical mechanisms of reality. One of those afore-mentioned assumptions in quantum experiments is that the researchers have free-will to decide which variables to test. This may sound strange, but there are several lines of reasoning in science that indicate free-will may be illusionary — that our thoughts and behaviors may be intrinsically deterministic. If this were the case, then experimenters may not be acting of their own stand-alone volition in deciding what variables to test, i.e. decisions are not “random”, and therefore some hidden variable may have been at play that makes a result appear quantum mechanical when it in fact was not.
To obviate this potential problem, physicists have tried to remove the “human element” by using random number generators to decide which property of a putatively entangled quantum particle-pair to measure. Essentially, two entangled particles travel to detectors where a random number generator decides at the last moment which property to measure. This introduced randomness should remove potential pre-determined settings. Yet still, skeptics suggest that perhaps random number generators are not truly random, and again the question of “free will” remains.
To address this, physicists recently used photons from stars 600 light years away, so that the starlight acted as the random number generator. This experimental design comes from the idea that it is unlikely that an experimenter’s choices are at all able to influence photon emission 600 years ago (but again, this is an assumption, and hence another loophole; for example see Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment).
Now, a researcher from the Perimeter Institute who has over 25 years experience working with ideas of human consciousness in quantum mechanics, Dr. Lucien Hardy, has proposed a variation of the freedom-of-choice loophole experiment that would use the gestalt signal from a hundred human minds to make the last-moment decision of which property to test of the entangled particle pairs.
While the primary purpose of such an experiment would be to test the “quantumness” of correlations, providing another test of whether the violation of local-realism is indeed an intrinsic property of quantum mechanics, the implications of the results would be far-reaching into the nature of human sentience and consciousness in the universe. If it were found that such an experiment does not uphold quantum nonlocality or state superposition, then not only are interpretations of quantum mechanics thrown into question, but it may suggest that human consciousness is something above and beyond the information processing technologies of computers, machines, and random number generators.
From RSF researchers’ work in holofractographic unified field theory, in studies such as the Unified Spacememory Network, we would predict that it is unlikely that such an experiment would in fact find a deviation from what is normally observed in quantum experimentation. The reason for this is two-fold: (1) our analysis of the mechanics underlying most phenomena strongly suggest nonlocality, both temporally and spatially; and (2) we disagree with the hypothesis of Cartesian-duality — that the mind is somehow beyond the physical world — and while having many transcendental properties is nevertheless an intrinsic and integral aspect of the natural operation of the physical world. Of course, the only way to see whether this prediction is supported or negated is to run the experiment, which we hope will be undertaken!
Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.04620.pdf
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