The Manifold of the Absolute: Religious Perennialism as Generative Inference

A viral arXiv paper titled 'The Manifold of the Absolute' uses the mathematics of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to model religious epistemology. It frames different religious traditions as distinct generative processes mapping from a shared latent space to observable cultural forms. The paper argues that the 'perennialist' configuration—which posits a common, hidden source—best explains cross-traditional similarities, beating exclusivism, universalism, and syncretism in its formal model.