Pratyabhijñā Creative Engine v0.4
A mechanism study of recursive self-reflexivity layers for LLM creative cognition.
PCE v0.4 is a pre-registered, mechanism-level study of a recursive self-reflexivity layer for large language models built on the Pratyabhijñā philosophy of Abhinavagupta and a deliberately small subset of active inference. We do not claim to have re-engineered creativity; we claim to have isolated which sub-mechanisms inside a five-śakti cascade carry the load and which do not, with all numbers visible on this page and reproducible from the open repository.
The headline is mixed and honest. The cascade-vs-bare contrasts (H1 through H4, pooled in H5) do not move at n = 25 paired items per protocol; the pooled effect is g = 0.14 with a 95% CI that crosses zero. The recursive revision pass is, however, robustly positive on its own (H8a: g = 0.65, p = 1.2e-4), and a learned commit gate outperforms the v0.3 event-driven gate at predicting when a revision is worth committing (F1 = 0.65 vs 0.52). The proxy scorer disagrees with a calibrated Sonnet-4.5 LLM-judge at ρ = 0.0, which we treat as a methodological flag rather than a refutation.
Headline numbers
Shadow revision improves the surface
Paired score(revision) − score(draft), pooled across all cascade items.
Fixed-effects pool of cascade-vs-bare
Inverse-variance fixed-effects meta-pool of H1–H4 (ADR-005).
Forest plot — primary contrasts and pooled effect
Where to read more
- Results — every hypothesis with prose, charts, and per-item drill-downs.
- Discussion — the seven-subsection mechanism reading, including the H9 sensitivity flag.
- Showcase — nine creative outputs (Sanskrit chandas, English poetry, scientific creativity) with the full five-śakti trace animated.
- Plugin & CLI — install paths for Cursor, Claude Code, and the standalone pce CLI.
- Paper PDF — the v0.4 mechanism-study paper.
This site is the second project in an ongoing program that grounds agent design in classical Indian darśana. The first, Pratyākṣa, is a context-discipline plugin. PCE is the recognition+creativity counterpart.