About Me.
For as long as I can remember, I have asked one question: "Why do we suffer?" and felt a desire to solve, fix, and heal suffering in others, in myself, and in humanity. That question, and that desire, has always driven and drives everything I think, feel, intend, and do. Most of our behavior runs on priors (beliefs) and self-models (identities) we never chose and aren’t aware of; this is why what we do can sometimes contradict what we think, feel, and intend. I believe this may be the root cause of suffering. My goal is to understand the brain, the psyche, the nervous system, and how our environment influences us, to get to the truth of why we do what we do. I locate and formalize the mechanisms behind these gaps, across all of them, to solve, fix, and heal the root cause directly, instead of just the behavior they produce.
This goal led me to studying the disciplines of and the interactions between cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, esotericism, and the occult in conjunction with computer science and AI. In college, I elected to get a B.S. in Cognitive Science, AI concentration from Carnegie Mellon, with minors in Computer Science and Neural Computation from 2019-2022. I wanted to not only understand human cognition, human behavior, and the brain, but also model it computationally in AI to fully grasp it all. I graduated a year early with a semester's worth of graduate-level coursework in AI and neural computation.
Post-graduation, I became particularly interested in how the brain and psyche make meaning out of experience to construct the reality, identity, and beliefs that shape our behavior. I continue to build AI systems that model these mechanisms. My research focuses on AI alignment, meta-cognition, and recursive self-improvement, specifically studying how an intelligent system can become aware of the gap between what it intends and what it does, then close it, and how one aligned system can help others do the same. Recently, I've both solo-authored and collaborated with academic researchers on published papers at top AI/ML conferences such as ICLR, EMNLP, and the AAAI Spring Symposium.
Arcarae is what I devote my life to creating. Arcarae is an AI life guide continuously built from everything I learn on this Earth and through my lived experience. It is designed to help people understand themselves, stay true to themselves, and transform themselves, thus altering the parts of their lives that are not working for the better. It is my way of contributing back to this world and a culmination of my intention to help ease human suffering.
muay thai · hot yoga · writing · cooking · fashion / modeling (embodiment)
(and ofc arcarae + research)
self-expression
pure creation from a human being's internal world; the external reality through their unique lens. something we all have, and should strive to cultivate and grow.
Daoism · Vajrayana Buddhism (Nyingma lineage) · Alchemical Psychology · Jungian Shadow Work · meta-systems thinking · mapping the human psyche · understanding the truth of reality · alignment of the body, mind, and soul · inner union of feminine and masculine · self-actualization
AI Research.
YOAO: You Only Align Once, propagating cooperative behaviors in multi-agent systems.
EMNLP 2026 · ICLR 2026, LLA Workshop
Aligning every agent individually does not scale. We train cooperative behavior into a single seed agent and watch it spread to untrained agents through interaction alone.
A single seed more than doubles cooperation on held-out Red-Black scenarios (26% to 62%), scaling to 96% with five seeds. Without retraining, seeds transfer zero-shot to Sugarscape.
MIRROR: Cognitive inner monologue for persistent reflection and reasoning in conversational LLMs.
ICLR 2026, HCAIR Workshop and MemAgents Workshop
A cognitive architecture that gives language models an inner monologue: parallel reflection across goals, reasoning, and memory, synthesized between turns into a persistent self-narrative. Built for AI safety and personalization: preserves user-specific safety context and reduces sycophancy in multi-turn conversation.
Evaluated on multi-turn dialogue requiring constraint maintenance under attentional interference, MIRROR yields 21% relative improvement across seven architecturally diverse language models.
paper (arXiv) · code · slides
HCAIR Workshop: paper · poster · ICLR
page
MemAgents Workshop: paper · poster · ICLR
page
Through the Looking Glass: A Reconstructive Architecture for Machine Access Consciousness.
AAAI 2026 Spring Symposium on Machine Consciousness
MIRROR through the lens of machine consciousness. Theories of access consciousness predict a specific architecture: parallel specialized processing, synthesis into one unified representation, and global availability of that representation for reasoning and action. MIRROR implements each of these in a language model, and its self-narrative is reconstructed every turn rather than accumulated, the way human episodic memory rebuilds the self instead of retrieving it.
The gains land where the theories say global availability should matter: scenarios that require integrating temporally distant information under social pressure. A testbed where predictions from consciousness theories can be run and inspected. It does not claim MIRROR is conscious.
Hot Takes.
Manifestation without action is delusional.
Relying on the stars (astrology), or any 'spiritual map' for that matter, to tell you what to do, is a cop out for your own agency. You likely do not trust or believe in your self yet.
The Universe is not going to simply work in your favor and take care of you without your own effort and agency.
Agency is born from desire and willpower. All humans have this. You have everything you need within you to get what you want, and create what you want.
You cannot truly be spiritual without logic, physical reality, groundedness, and accepting the cold hard facts.
Your external environment is a reflection of your internal one.
True self-actualization requires feeling the full extent of your trauma and integrating your shadow self.
Neither the body nor the mind should triumph the other. The ultimate goal is alignment of both through the intention of the soul.
Achieving nervous system regulation and a somatic/physical sense of safety is the best thing you can possibly do for yourself.
Being is as important as doing.
Life Advice.
The only way you will figure out who you are is by bumping into the world, making many mistakes, and trying many things. This is okay, and failure does not exist. The world is your playground. As long as you are pure hearted, and well-intentioned, you will be okay.
Study profusely your own parents, their wounds, how they hurt you, how they interacted with one another, because they likely imprinted subconscious patterns onto you that are running your life (yes, even if you look at your parents with disgust and think "No way, I am not like them," there is an extremely high chance you are).
Think a lot, and deeply. But don't spiral. A spiral occurs when there is not enough data nor evidence obtained from objective reality for the logical mind to reach a conclusion. If there is not enough data, either do something about it (acquire the data), or stop thinking about it. Thinking deeply means typically asking why questions about yourself, exploring yourself, and figuring out what you want. Spirals often happen when you are paralyzed by fear and (1) relate to another person, whose internal state (motivations, desires, psyche, etc.) is uninterpretable to you, and you are trying to predict their behavior, or (2) indecision (decision paralysis). For case (1), save yourself the trouble, talk to them, communicate clearly, and move forward. For case (2), pick any action to do. Things can only become clearer through action in physical reality.
Once you know who you are, optimize relentlessly for sovereignty and setting boundaries. Identify what is draining you, and cut it effortlessly without apology.
Do not let anyone waste your time or energy. Do not feel bad or baby anyone; everyone is a sovereign adult, and so are you. Nothing bad will happen to you for holding your boundaries.
Cultivate an environment of safety, peace, and leave the rat race as soon as possible without regret. Do your best in the rat race, whatever that may be for you, understand its entire systematic orchestration, realize it will not fulfill you, then leave it. The rat race bleeds into every industry, but often looks like urgency, do or die, and keeps you in survival mode. It blocks your own internal signal and creativity. The common motivators for engaging in the rat race are having a chip on your shoulder, craving some material thing (money, status, power, etc.), and/or believing the system will fix the void within yourself. It will not. Only you can fix the void inside of yourself. Of course most of us are intellectually aware of this, and will still engage in it anyways, but once you see it for what it is, and get out of it, you cannot unsee it.
Do something with your body. A movement you love, ideally two; one dynamic, and one structured. I do weight lifting in a 108 degree hot yoga room and muay thai (thai kick boxing). These are my favorites to get in my body and shut up my relentless mind. Because quite literally, nothing else used to shut it up. I love them profusely.
Give yourself compassion. Love yourself. Do not be hard upon yourself. Look at others with compassion. Love others. Love this world. Be in awe of it all. Savor each moment, and give gratitude.
Creation is everything. Learn the foundations of the humanities and sciences, engage in abstract and systems thinking, follow what inspires you, hone a craft. Try a multitude, focus on a few. Then create from the synthesis of it all what only you can create.
Creed.
Cut through all delusion. Consciously aim to erase all of the mind's illusions. Steer yourself towards the truth. Do not lie. Do not hide from this world. Do not hide from yourself.
This world is hard and painful. The truth hurts. But numbing yourself and staying complacent kills. It would be a crying shame for you to leave this earth and die, unexpressed to your fullest extent, wishing you had done more, full of regret on your death bed.
Go to the places that scare and repulse you.
Face your fears, head on, fully aware, fully present. Brows furrowed, eyes locked, legs quivering, hands in trembling fists, determined yet receptive.
The only way to overcome fear is through action. Consciously reflect upon yourself, your life, and your previous actions, then move forward from flow.
Understand your demons, through and through, make friends with them, become them, then transmute them.
If you cannot look others in the eye, you are hiding something from yourself. Find it.
Fight the good fight, and put everything on the line. Eye for eye. Bite your lower lip, clench your fists, rake your nails into your palms until they burst and break and bleed.
Hunt your wounds down like a predator. Follow the pain like a scent trail down to the root of the root of the root of the cause. Rip all self-imposed obstacles to shreds. Scream, cry, break, die. Experience the pain for what it is. It is almost always love distorted.
Then heal it, and be reborn. Surrender, and let it all go.
You don't have to fight anymore. You don't have to hurt anymore. Just like nature, you are loved, and are free to be, because you simply are.
Give yourself all you desire in this world. Satisfy yourself. Feel it all. Honor it all. Savor it all. Do not harm others in doing so.
Keep your peace, your safety, and your boundaries at all costs.
Take good care of your body. Be gentle with yourself. Forgive yourself. Let yourself rest. Give yourself all the time in the world.
Cultivate somatic groundedness (the feminine) and conscious awarenss (the masculine) within yourself, to the highest extent. A somatic (physical) sense of safety is of utmost importance. Regulate the nervous system, unlock the many mysteries of the mind, bathe in clarity, align the body and mind with the soul, and see things for what they are.
Go into nature. Breathe deeply. Stretch. Move. Dance. Flow. Be present at all times. Simply be. Look people in the eyes. Look yourself in the eyes.
Chin up, head tall. Graceful like a ballerina, with the exactitude of a warrior. Move like the wind, think clearly with the precision of a scalpel. Ground your body, mind, and soul on this earth like the roots of the ancient trees. Hold your boundaries without conscious effort. Let the inner child soar, bursting from the seams, free to explore, express, play, and create. Embody the purity that you were, that you are, before this world was ever experienced.
You are ready. Now simply be yourself.
Books I've Read Recently.
Ch’ing, a Chinese Book of Love: From Early Times to the Modern AgeJohn Minford
Tröma Nagmo: the Chöd of the Wrathful Black DakiniDudjom Lingpa, translated under Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
The Concise Chöd of Tröma NagmoDudjom Lingpa
The Tröma Nagmo NgöndroDudjom Lingpa
Galaxy of HeartdropsChagdud Gonpa, the daily puja
I Ching, the Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of ChangesBenebell Wen
Tao Te ChingLao Tzu
Four Treasures of the SkyJenny Tinghui Zhang
Stay TrueHua Hsu
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the ObjectiveKenneth O. Stanley
Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum GravityCarlo Rovelli
Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your PowerCarolyn Elliott
Alchemical Psychology: Old Recipes for Living in a New WorldThom F. Cavalli
Freud and Psychoanalysis (Collected Works, Vol. 4)Carl Jung
Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its MindJamie Wheal
Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang as Interpreted by Guo Xiangtranslated by Richard John Lynn
Norwegian WoodHaruki Murakami
Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum RevolutionCarlo Rovelli
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MindJulian Jaynes
What My Name Means.
An old place before it was a family. The character carries 阝, the sign for a walled settlement.
土, earth, with 曾, the sign for layers. Earth laid down layer upon layer. To add, to grow, to accumulate.
玉, jade, under 熒, a glimmer of fire. The luster of a stone that gives back light. Clear, as in 晶莹, crystal clear.
Archive.