A blue parallelogram within a row of blue parallelograms seems “normal”. Zoom out and the row of blue parallelograms, within a sea of triangles, suddenly becomes abnormal. Even in this simple world of shapes, normality is inextricable from context. Is mental illness merely a deviation from a “norm”?

The blanket itself is a representation of relativity.  A Markov Blanket is a concept in statistics: the mathematics of uncertainty. It ‘wraps’ around an entity, separating it from its environment and thereby defining it. The Blanket provides a context for its individual elements, creating an overarching stability. This is useful for understanding the perpetual dance between living things like the brain and the constantly changing outside world. Any interactions ‘through’ the Markov Blanket can only be second-hand, indirect. Where there is indirectness there is uncertainty and where there is uncertainty there is inference. The only reality we can know, then, is what we infer from the patterns and deviations we perceive.

The Process