To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
— William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
I read this as a statement of the world-model aspiration, which is almost certainly not what Blake meant.
Every line makes the same move: something vast revealed by something small. A grain holds a world, a flower a heaven, a palm infinity, an hour eternity. That move, the whole inferred from the detail, is the problem I care about, stated as an image instead of an objective function.
The first couplet is the cleanest version of it: a world recovered from a fragment, the rest of it implied by one local observation if you can see correctly.
The second couplet is the one I keep returning to, because for a world model it cuts two ways. As a design principle: the route to the infinite runs through the details. You don’t reach the whole by reaching for the whole, you get the small things right and the rest follows. As a test of success: when a model really can hold infinity in a palm, recover the vast from a sliver, that is the evidence it worked. The same image is both the aspiration and the way you would know you had met it.
Blake meant something mystical, innocence, the divine glimpsed in the small. I’ve swapped in a claim about representation learning, and I don’t think he’d recognize my version. I like it anyway. Sometimes an image is true in a register its author never reached for.
The aesthetic under World models as shared substrate and What even is a world state?: the grain, seen rightly, was the world all along.