Samkhya says the effect pre-exists in the cause, the substrate is inert, and discernment comes before the self. Read as a design note for AGI, it says most of our alignment vocabulary is pointed at the potter and the clay decides more.
AI and agentsYoga and the mindScience and technologyWriting
Essays and notes. Nature, yoga and the mind, AI and the society of agents, mathematics, philosophy, beauty, science, music, and the side research I cannot put down.
- EssayOct 17, 2026Every mind has a material cause
- EssayOct 10, 2026Simple rules, whole societies
Three local rules give you a murmuration. Slightly different rules give you a stampede. The rules between agents deserve the same care as the capabilities inside them.
AI and agentsMathematicsOptimization - ResearchApr 1, 2026Chitrakāvya: poems that are programs
Sanskrit poets encoded knight's tours, magic squares and palindromic surfaces into verse, a thousand years before Euler. The archive, with the tour you can step through.
ChitrakāvyaMathematics - VedāntaFeb 22, 2026The seer who saw both
The end of the Veda and, its teachers insist, the end of thought. One set of texts read four ways: the world as appearance, as God's body, as God's dependent, as God himself.
PhilosophyYoga and the mindBeauty - MīmāṃsāJun 15, 2025The act keeps its own books
The school that defended the Vedic rite when the Buddhists had all but buried it: the word is older than the god, a text with no author cannot be wrong, and nobody is needed to pay out the fruit of an act.
PhilosophyThe human experience - VaiśeṣikaNov 3, 2024An inventory of everything
Nyāya's partner: the realist's list of what there is, down to the atom, with space and time counted as things rather than gaps.
PhilosophyScience and technology - NyāyaApr 21, 2024Where there is smoke
The school of how we know and how we argue: four roads to knowledge, one shape for every inference, and a complete catalogue of the ways a losing opponent cheats.
PhilosophyAI and agentsMathematics - YogaOct 8, 2023A road out of the clay
Sāṃkhya explained how consciousness gets caught in matter, and admitted it had no way out. Patañjali's Yoga is that way: a discipline rather than a theory, and the word does not mean what the studios think it means.
PhilosophyYoga and the mindThe human experience - SāṃkhyaMar 12, 2023The clay before the pot
The oldest of the six and the one most often called scientific. Its first move is the question every creation story skips: a maker can shape a pot, but where did the clay come from?
PhilosophyScience and technologyYoga and the mind