The Architecture of False Gods: William Blake, Professor Jiang, and the Active Inference Corrective to Single Vision

This rapid-publication essay reads Professor Jiang Xueqin’s contemporary YouTube commentary on artificial intelligence — particularly his framing of AI as religion, empire, hallucination machine, and consciousness capture — through the perceptual diagnostics William Blake developed across the 1790s and through the formal vocabulary of Active Inference. The triangulation does not aim to vindicate Jiang’s polemical lecture form, to translate Blake’s prophetic ontology into contemporary cognitive science, or to settle the contested status of the Free Energy Principle. It aims instead to identify the structural-functional convergence across three vocabularies that otherwise do not communicate: closure of the perceiving system around its own top-down expectations, the failure mode Blake names Newton’s Sleep, Jiang names consciousness capture and engagement-prime-directive, and Active Inference names pathological prior dominance and precision parasitism.

I have developed the Blake–Active Inference correspondence at length in two earlier papers (Zenodo records 18600041 and 18807971); the present essay does not restate that synthesis at length but extends it to Jiang’s specific diagnostic vocabulary. What is new here is the mapping of Jiang’s claims — the persuasion machine, the demand for clean data, the suppression of edge cases, the black box as oracle, the engagement prime directive — onto Blake’s Four Zoas and the factorized generative model of Active Inference. The mapping is intelligible as a rapid-publication response because Jiang’s lectures are the highest-profile contemporary statement of a longue-durée diagnosis of cognitive closure, and because the architecture being deployed at scale right now under the labels “AI” and “AGI” is the proximate subject of his concern and the proximate test of any architectural literacy we propose.

The essay carries two explicit limits. The mapping of Blake’s “Newton’s Sleep” onto Active Inference’s pathological prior dominance is a functional analogy across incompatible metaphysics; Blake’s quarrel is ontological, the Active Inference critique is parameter-level. The Free Energy Principle is contested in the philosophical literature; I deploy it as a generative vocabulary, not as established science. Jiang’s lecture form is speculative commentary, not scholarship — I cite the technical literature alongside him for every load-bearing claim, and the conspiratorial material his corpus contains sits outside the methodological frame of this essay.

This paper is, in form and function, an experiment in rapid AI-augmented scholarly publication with society-in-the- loop: a response drafted in the hours after its trigger — a YouTube lecture published earlier today that names William Blake explicitly — using contemporary AI infrastructure for research, drafting, formalization, and figure generation while keeping the author in the loop. It is not a finished argument; it is an attempt to see what becomes possible when publication latency between a cultural artifact and its scholarly response is collapsed from months to hours.

All methods and code available at https://github.com/docxology/blake_jiang .