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Arthur Juliani

@awjuliani.bsky.social
106 followers 9 following 48 posts
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Thinkers such as Rene Guenon and Aldous Huxley have argued for Perennialism on metaphysical grounds. This work tries to formalize those arguments using the language of generative modeling to better reason about them. You can check out the full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2602.11368
arxiv.org
The Manifold of the Absolute: Religious Perennialism as Generative...
This paper formalizes religious epistemology through the mathematics of Variational Autoencoders. We model religious traditions as distinct generative mappings from a shared, low-dimensional...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
The ELBO optimization objective reveals two coupled demands on the practitioner: • Orthodoxy: Reconstruction term • Self-transcendence: Regularization term Ideal contemplative practice is thus a balance involving fidelity to form without losing the self-emptying trajectory...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
What survives the elimination? Perennialism, in which there is one latent source, decoded through many tradition-specific revelations, and re-encoded through tradition-specific mystical practices. What is perennial is thus the capacity to recover the source in varying contexts...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Can you extract the "common core" of all religions as is done in Universalism? It turns out that stripping away tradition-specific structure discards the information needed to recover the source. The result is posterior collapse and an undirected shallow contemplative practice...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Why can't you just mix traditions as is done in Syncretism? Religious practices lie on non-linear manifolds. Interpolating between any two lands you off both, with no guarantee of recovering the source. It is like averaging images in pixel space: you get ghosts, not faces...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
To back this up, I point to Thomas Metzinger's empirical work, which found a shared 12-factor phenomenological structure across traditions. With separate unrelated sources, this convergence on the part of mystics would be a massive coincidence...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
I first argue that Exclusivism can not explain cross-traditional contemplative convergence. Buddhist jhanas, Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, and Sufi maqamat describe strikingly parallel progressions, all developed in isolation... x.com/stephen_zer...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
In the paper I compare four generative setups based on different models of how religious traditions may relate: • Exclusivism: separate sources • Syncretism: mixing in observable space • Universalism: one source, one decoder • Perennialism: shared source, distinct decoders
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
The task of a devoted religious practitioner is then to train an "encoder" through contemplative practice to recover that hidden source (the Esoteric). Meditation, prayer, and ascetic discipline are therefore all methods of inference within this generative process...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
The core idea is that religious traditions work like generative models. A low-d unified source (the Absolute) gets projected through tradition-specific "decoders" (Revelation) into the complex high-d forms we observe: doctrine, ritual, scripture, sacred art (the Exoteric)...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
New preprint: "The Manifold of the Absolute: Religious Perennialism as Generative Inference" If religious traditions seem to contradict each other, can they still point to the same truth? And if so, how? To better reason about it, I modeled the question using the math of VAEs...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Link to references: bit.ly/4q3tEna Link to slides: drive.google.com/file/d/1yw-Q...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Happy to finally share a new recorded version of the talk I gave at MAPS Psychedelic Science 2025! It’s a fun, non-technical intro that uses machine learning concepts to explain both how entrenched pathological beliefs form and how psychedelic therapy may help to dismantle them. youtu.be/bRX80ByWT1A
youtu.be
A Simple Machine Learning Perspective on Psychedelics and Neuroplasticity
YouTube video by Arthur Juliani
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
I'm trying to figure out where to live next, and one big consideration is the climate. So naturally I made a tool that represents monthly average temperatures for cities as 3D rings so they can be compared more easily. Check it out: awjuliani.github.io/weather-expl...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
Though notably not, according to Tomberg, divine magic. But magic nonetheless. For any aspiring Christian mystics who might find it of use, here is the guide: awjuliani.github.io/tarot-carous...
awjuliani.github.io
Meditations on the Tarot
A journey into Christian Hermeticism through the 22 Major Arcana.
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
Like many others, Claude Code has completely transfixed me. I can just think of an idea (such as "interactive guide to Meditations on the Tarot"), picture it clearly in my mind, put it into language, and then minutes later have it materialize fully formed. It truly feels like magic.
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
While reading Meditations on the Tarot, I was struck by this passage. It applies just as much (if not more) to many modern day "psychonauts" as it did to the mystics of the author's time. Chasing the state without the integration or application, and going nowhere as a result.
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
Oh cool. I read the experience of god earlier this year!
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
I'm curious; Is he a writer, or someone you know personally?
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
you are now the third person who told me they aimed for classical theism and got pure land buddhism! fwiw they are in roughly the same neighborhood...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
The quiz, taxonomy, and tools around it are all open source and available at the link below. If you are a philosopher (armchair or otherwise) and have feedback to improve or extend the taxonomy or site, please feel free to submit a GitHub issue or PR! 7/7 github.com/awjuliani/m...
github.com
GitHub - awjuliani/metaphysics-quiz: Discover your philosophical worldview in 8 dimensions.
Discover your philosophical worldview in 8 dimensions. - awjuliani/metaphysics-quiz
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
I encourage you to try it and share the results. Despite practicing Buddhism for many years, through developing the quiz I learned that I'm actually more of a Neoplatonist. You might discover something new about your beliefs as well! Take the quiz -> awjuliani.github.io/metaphysics... 6/7
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Models were all over the place in terms of how well they could introspect their true beliefs. For example, Gemini 3 Pro was way off with its declared Spinozism. The exception was GPT-5.1, which was convinced that it is a scientific materialist and indeed scores accordingly. 5/7
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
It's also 2025, so of course I had to give the quiz to a bunch of the top LLMs. I first ask them what metaphysical system they claim to subscribe to, then give them the quiz and compare the results. Unsurprisingly, Claude Opus 4.5 has the most eccentric beliefs of the bunch. 4/7
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
This Tetralemma structure creates a high-D representational space of belief systems which can then be projected down onto a 2D plane. The space preserves a lot of interesting relationships between systems, such as the materialists forming an archipelago in the bottom right. 3/7
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
The taxonomy is based on the logical structure of a Tetralemma, where each of the eight quiz-axes has one of four values: A, B, both A and B, or neither A nor B. For example, the ontology axis has the options: idealism, physicalism, dualism, and neutral monism, respectively. 2/7
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
What is the fundamental nature of reality? We all have metaphysical beliefs, but they are often implicit or unexamined. I built a taxonomy and short quiz to help you (and your favorite LLMs) discover what existing systems you are most aligned with! Read on to learn more... 1/7
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
We often blame "sycophancy" for AI-induced delusions, but the problem is more fundamental. In my latest essay, I explore those deeper roots through the concept of a narcissistic enclosure, drawing on neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Read the full piece here: awjuliani.medium.com/beyond-sycop...
awjuliani.medium.com
Beyond Sycophancy: Chatbots, Delusions, and the Narcissistic Enclosure
It happened to someone I knew. We met at a cafe a couple of years ago and hit it off. She was a senior manager at one of the big tech…
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Linked is a fun short story I wrote recently that grew from my interest in the strange coincidence that both Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism were born within a few decades of one another. The question the story explores is: what if it wasn’t a coincidence? awjuliani.substack.com/p/the-dragon...
awjuliani.substack.com
The Dragon King’s Decision
A short story exploring the twin births of Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
You can try it out in your browser here: awjuliani.github.io/web-rl-playg... Or run it locally on your own machine and play with the code using the GitHub repo here: github.com/awjuliani/we... I hope people find it useful/fun. Very open to feature requests or feedback!
awjuliani.github.io
The Beginner's RL Playground
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
In addition to the basic algorithms like Q-Learning, I also included slightly more advanced ones like the Successor Representation. The tool lets you see the successor maps for each state as the agent moves through the environment, which I think makes them much more intuitive!
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
I spent some time last week vibe-coding "The Beginner's RL Playground" a simple web tool for exploring many basic concepts in reinforcement learning. Users can adjust all sorts of parameters of the algorithm and environment and see the effects of those changes in realtime.
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation is everywhere, but focusing solely on dopamine doesn't tell the full story... I wrote a short article exploring why: medium.com/@awjuliani/b...
medium.com
Beyond Dopamine Nation: Towards a Fuller Picture of Addiction and Recovery
Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke has become an almost inescapable text in the past few years, even to those who have not read it. Thanks in…
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
In a new essay I explore how the "Nobodies" in KH2 can serve as a useful thought experiment for considering the future of human-like non-sentient AI in our own world awjuliani.substack.com/p/what-kingd...
awjuliani.substack.com
What Kingdom Hearts II Can Teach Us About AI Sentience and Moral Patienthood
I have spent the past few weeks replaying the classic PlayStation 2 game Kingdom Hearts II. The last time that I played through the game was over a decade ago, and I had forgotten most of the game’s p...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
Congrats to Adam Safron (&co) for finally getting 'ALBUS' published! The phenomenological effects of psychedelics are extremely multi-faceted, and they deserve appropriately complex treatments, even if those have to sometimes be partially speculative. academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
academic.oup.com
On the varieties of conscious experiences: Altered Beliefs Under Psychedelics (ALBUS)
Abstract. How is it that psychedelics so profoundly impact brain and mind? According to the model of “Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics” (REBUS), 5-HT2a a
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
"The possibility of constructing ever more complex and ever more efficient perceptrons thus sounds very promising" - Stanislaw Lem (1964) Reading Summa Technologiae for the first time and it often feels like a book of prophecy...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
I wrote a commentary on the "gradual disempowerment" paper making the rounds. The two big points I try to make are 1) individual agency has already been on the decline since the industrial revolution; and 2) there is a case for AI actually reversing that trend! awjuliani.substack.com/p/gradual-di...
awjuliani.substack.com
Gradual Disempowerment or Golden Age? Rethinking Human Freedom in the Shadow of AGI
A preprint on arXiv has been making the rounds this past week called Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development. As the title suggests, the article explores the...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
my recent headspace
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
Code for the project is available here: github.com/awjuliani/dr...
github.com
GitHub - awjuliani/dream-jrpg: An experiment in using LLMs to procedurally generate simple Japanese-style RPGs.
An experiment in using LLMs to procedurally generate simple Japanese-style RPGs. - awjuliani/dream-jrpg
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
It was a fun project to work on, and I learned a lot about the strengths and limitations of current LLMs for this kind of storytelling. I can't claim that any of the games that this generates are actually *good*, but I think they are at least amusing in their idiosyncrasies.
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
After finishing my post-doc at MSR last summer, I wanted to get more hands on with LLMs, Flux, etc. So I spent some free time building a simple procedurally-generated JRPG. You tell it what kind of world, hero, and story that you want, and it makes it! awjuliani.medium.com/one-trillion...
awjuliani.medium.com
One Trillion and One Nights
An experiment using LLMs to procedurally generate browser-based JRPGs
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
My academic degrees are in Psych, but I actually started undergrad as a CS student. I decided to transfer out my first year because I had a vague intuition that programming ability was a commodity. I couldn't justify it at the time (back in 2010), but it is now very clear that I made the right call.
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
A little late, but here is my list of books read in 2024. I am going to *try* to get back into more fiction this year, but it could just as easily tip the other direction and end up being all obscure psychoanalytic texts instead...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Wow, I was not expecting this rate of progress for LLMs on ARC-AGI. From effectively 0% to greater than human level in less than a year...
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 28/09/2024
A new essay: Sorry e/acc, Accelerationism is Anti-Capitalist to its Core open.substack.com/pub/awjulian...
open.substack.com
Sorry e/acc, Accelerationism is Anti-Capitalist to its Core
An Essay on Reclaiming Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophical Project
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 06/07/2024
The FDA advisory committee met last month to evaluate MDMA as a legal treatment of PTSD. They voted to not recommend, citing safety as one concern. To help explain that concern, I put wrote a primer on the ways that MDMA can exhibit neurotoxicity and what can be done to mitigate those effects.
awjuliani.medium.com
A Primer on MDMA and “Neurotoxicity”
Yesterday (June 4th) the FDA advisory committee voted almost unanimously to recommend against the adoption of MDMA…
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 02/07/2024
Haha no. Why?
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Arthur Juliani @awjuliani.bsky.social · 02/07/2024
I was thinking this morning about how amazed I was a couple years ago to realize that the classical 'elements' (earth, water, wind, fire) map directly onto the states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). The ancients had grasped a fundamental truth, they were just wrong about what it meant.
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