The Manifold of the Absolute: Religious Perennialism as Generative Inference

The paper uses the mathematics of Variational Autoencoders to formalize religious epistemology. It models religious traditions as distinct generative mappings from a shared latent space to observable cultural forms. The authors define four configurations—exclusivism, universalism, perennialism, and syncretism—and argue through abductive comparison that perennialism best explains cross-traditional contemplative convergence. Exclusivism cannot account for such convergence, syncretism produces incoherent artifacts, and universalism suffers from posterior collapse, discarding structural information. The paper contends that strict orthodoxy is a structural necessity: contemplative practices must match the specific tradition whose forms they interpret. The unity of religions, if real, requires depth rather than breadth.

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Abstract

This paper formalizes religious epistemology through the mathematics of Variational Autoencoders. We model religious traditions as distinct generative mappings from a shared, low-dimensional latent space to the high-dimensional space of observable cultural forms, and define three competing generative configurations corresponding to exclusivism, universalism, and perennialism, alongside syncretism as direct mixing in observable space. Through abductive comparison, we argue that exclusivism cannot parsimoniously account for cross-traditional contemplative convergence, that syncretism fails because combining the outputs of distinct generative processes produces incoherent artifacts, and that universalism suffers from posterior collapse: stripping traditions to a common core discards the structural information necessary for inference. The perennialist configuration provides the best explanatory fit. Within this framework, strict orthodoxy emerges not as a cultural constraint but as a structural necessity: the contemplative practices that recover the latent source must be matched to the specific tradition whose forms they take as input. The unity of religions, if it exists, is real but inaccessible by shortcut: one must go deep rather than wide.