The Starfield is Aporium’s 3d topic explorer made using the embeddings of 5800 philosophy excerpts styled to resemble a navigable galaxy. It utilizes UMAP for excerpt-placement and extracted excerpt metadata for thematic region labeling. Scroll adjusts zoom, right click pans, and left click orbits.

Aporium is my solo effort to bring the wisdom of the great works of philosophy into a format that balances depth of analysis, ease of reading, and multi-author perspective. I started this project 8 months ago to reduce my social media screen time, hoping to replace it with something addictive yet enriching.

By extracting short yet meaningful 2-8 sentence excerpts from public-domain works and generating their embeddings, I created a pipeline utilizing cosine similarity and AI judging to form synthetic conversation ‘threads’ of dialogue using the real writings of philosophers. Not AI-generated ‘what would this author have said on X topic’; their real words. A byproduct of these embeddings is the ability to create structured, explorable 3d maps with distinct regions of thought. This went on to become the Starfield linked above.

Here are a few representative examples of near-conversational sounding threads.

Francis Bacon on anger, Cicero in disagreement: https://www.aporium.app/thread/ex_248310dbc3aff2ceb529d093

Emerson on self-reliance, Marcus Aurelius in opposition: https://www.aporium.app/thread/ex_57ea1e2ac8cc9b6f493f57c1

Montaigne on lying, Nietzsche disagreeing: https://www.aporium.app/thread/ex_6d7c367d5530d3b3e0fa34b2

Thoreau on vanity, Pascal shifting emphasis: https://www.aporium.app/thread/ex_6b6f8b13fcfc0e50cbab1af0

My goal is to extract and link together in conversation the most impactful ideas and excerpts from humanity’s greatest works, creating separate corpora for poetry, theology, psychology, history, and more. Any feedback is much appreciated.