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Humans regularly reason from visual information, engaging in simple object search in a scene to abstract mathematical thinking. In recent decades, the field of machine learning has extensively focused on visual tasks with the aim to model human visual reasoning. However, machine learning approaches still do not match human performance on simple visual tasks such as the Synthetic Visual Reasoning Test (SVRT; Fleuret et al. 2011). While this set of tasks is trivial for humans to solve, the current state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms struggle with the SVRT. We argue that the reason for the difference in human reasoning and machines' performance in the SVRT is the ways humans and machines represent the world and visual information specifically. We argue that humans represent situations in terms of relations between constituent objects, and that our representation of these relations is structured and symbolic. By consequence, humans engage in operations that are not available for machine systems that rely on non-structured representations. We hold that operations over structured relational representations is what underlie phenomena such as abstract visual reasoning and cross-domain generalisation. The current work builds on the DORA (Discovery Of Relations by Analogy; Doumas et al., 2008; 2022) model of relation learning. DORA learns structured representations of magnitude relations from simple visual inputs. Here we expand the model to learn more complex categorical relations (e.g., contains or supports) as compressions of simpler relations (e.g., above, in-contact), and develop a new method for identifying relevant relations over which to perform reasoning from simple scenes. We embed the resulting model in a pipeline for human visual reasoning consisting of successful psychological models of object recognition and analogy making. The result is an end-to-end system which is constrained as much as possible by what is known about the processes and mechanisms of the cognitive system-from early vision to learning complex relations and reasoning. The model is tested within the context of the SVRT. The limitations of the model and the directions for future research are discussed.

Abstract: Abstract This tome is both a “solar” dissertation and a “lunar” grimoire that performs its own argument. Adepts of Modernism argues that the infamous “little magazines” of modernism conjured their own enlightened, reading “counter-publics” by exploiting the same strategies and tactics of initiation and exclusion mobilized in occult circles. Figures from the literary and occult spheres from the Fin de Siècle and through the Great War converge in a network of adeptship. The magazines in this network disseminate knowledge from the occult “wisdom tradition” and share a common adept attitude that sets them apart from the public and the exoteric, mainstream media they consume. Chapter 1 analyzes The Little Review and shows how Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s editorial posture of insouciance reflects their initial commitment to both anarchism and esotericism, culminating in a thwarted mystical anarchism. A comparison of memoirs by Huntly Carter and Algernon Blackwood reveals how, for this magazine, poetry and spirituality go hand in hand. Chapter 2 focuses on co-editors of The Egoist, Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, along with Leonard A. Compton-Rickett, Richard Aldington, H. D., and Ezra Pound. These figures have a complex, ambivalent relationship with mysticism, but their common investment in individualism and an elitist, exclusive, classical modernism holds them together. Olivia Shakespear’s translation of the occult story, Le Comte de Gabalis, embodies these investments. Chapter 3 considers the distinct “presentative” style of The New Age magazine in relation to editor A. R. Orage’s mystical socialism. A series of articles by Florence Farr provides a feminist corrective to Orage’s masculinist “brilliant common sense.” This idiosyncratic, “Luciferian” socialism appeals to an audience of modernists, Fabians, and occultists alike, and its threads lead back to the great French magus, Eliphas Lévi. Chapter 4 examines Aleister Crowley’s Equinox in the context of modernist periodical culture. The Equinox is most committed to occult subjects and offers readers a course of study and a method of self-initiation. Esoteric literature, in the form of a magical diary and a short story, “The Dream Circean,” complements Crowley’s formal program of initiation and blurs the boundaries between objective and subjective ‘reality.’ Chapter 5 shows how Lucifer magazine, edited by H. P. Blavatsky and Mabel Collins, utilizes the same techniques of occult initiation replicated in the modernist little magazines that followed, thus revealing a continuity of esoteric editorial practice from the Fin de Siècle through the Great War. Blavatsky’s controversial “Luciferian” editorials and Collins’s serialized esoteric novella, “The Blossom and the Fruit,” exemplify the adept attitude that inspired subsequent generations of adept writers. Adepts of Modernism concludes with a personal reflection on occult pedagogy before outlining the legacy of these magical magazines and gesturing towards some new directions for future research.

The figure of Sigmund Freud haunts the modern consciousness, but popular culture too often reduces Freud to a simplistic set of concepts or a figure of fun. The popular image of Freud is a reduction, a caricature – a fiction. The fictionalization of Freud is hardly a new development, however: the first person to fictionalize Freud was Freud himself. In writings such as The Interpretation of Dreams and the Dora case, Freud tells his own story, as well as the stories of his developing theory of psychoanalysis and his patient Ida Bauer. Writers like Hélène Cixous continue in Freud's own tradition as they probe Freud's unconscious mind and challenge his public persona, creating a portrait of Freud that is not a reductive caricature, but a thoughtful meditation on his personality and ideas. The following paper examines the ways that telling Freud's story can be meaningful and fruitful. Exploring the fictionalization of Freud suggests that any attempt to turn a real person into a text is in some sense a fictionalization and that this process is an essential part of the way that human beings understand others and the self.