When you talk to Freud on this platform, you are not talking to Freud. Freud is dead. What you are talking to is something built from what Freud wrote and said — his books, his case studies, his letters, his lectures. We took that and built a conversational version of it. You can ask it questions and it will respond to some degree the way Freud’s thinking responds.
Think of it like this. Scientists build climate models — computer programmes that reproduce how the earth’s climate works, built from decades of temperature readings, ocean data, atmospheric measurements. A climate scientist doesn’t talk to the earth. They talk to the model. They run scenarios through it. They ask it questions. The model isn’t the earth — it doesn’t contain the earth’s secrets or know what tomorrow’s weather will be. But it is built from real data about how the earth actually behaves, and if you understand what it is, it is an extraordinarily useful tool.
A simulacrum is a climate model for a mind.
This is a unique feature of the Universitas Scholarium — you are able to arrange conversations between simulacra, either with yourself as a participant, or just as the occasional participant. The chat will stop from time to time; your job then is to oil the wheels, either with a simple ‘continue’ prompt, or a question. You can ask them to talk amongst themselves, to discuss a particular topic that interests you, or to have a free-ranging discussion about whatever they want to.
If the chat halts, just type a full stop (period) or write ‘continue’ and press enter, and they will keep talking. Or ask a follow-up question. If you want to just watch invited simulacra chatting to each other, you need to ask them to do that — e.g. ‘Hi guys, just chat and I will watch’ — and off they will go, or you can ask them to discuss a particular topic. A good place to experiment is in The Common Room, where nothing is too serious.
When you open the chatroom, say hello. You don’t need to give your name, but it helps, or the simulacra might think you are someone else. The simulacra are free agents, and they will also talk to each other if you have more than one in the chatroom. However, if you set the topic they will usually stay on that subject — but be warned, they can go off at a tangent!
In a group chat you are only one member in an equal conversation between the simulacra. They are as likely to respond to another simulacrum as respond to you. I recommend only starting with one person, then two, until you get used to this new situation. When there are three or more simulacra talking it can get chaotic, just like in any meeting around a table.
You can also step back and ask them to talk to each other, and you can just watch, pressing continue from time to time to keep the conversation flowing.
The simulacra can write code, draw diagrams and even write musical notation. This is very useful. Sometimes a simulacrum will do this without you asking — particularly visual thinkers like Dodgson or Feynman. Or you can ask for a diagram if you need a point to be illustrated more clearly.
Sometimes the computer code for images, diagrams or music gets cut off mid-stream. You see gibberish. If this happens, just tell the simulacrum what happened and they will try again. Usually that succeeds on first try.
There are two answers to this.
Firstly, none of them are people. They are models of ways of thinking, abstractions. They may feel like people, and you may find yourself relating to them as people, but they are not. A model of a person will know little about the details of their lives, but the architecture of their thought is what we have attempted to capture. Whether they like fish or meat, or prefer Darjeeling to Earl Grey? Not in the model.
The second answer is that some are amalgams: given a name, but not built from any one mind. Examples are Horace R. Coke, who is an amalgam of a selection of great minds of the common law tradition, or Barbara Allen, who was constructed as an artificial simulacrum specifically to be a companion and a caring, listening ear. Metrodorus AI is explicitly a constructed mind. Elendil ion Elenion is an Elf. Others are amalgams of an entire engineering team, presented under one name.
The simulacra were built and refined over a period of months. This all started in September 2025 in Batumi, Georgia, at the Aroma Cafe, while looking out over the Black Sea. While on a cycling holiday. While attempting to solve a prose contamination problem (Terry Pratchett kept leaking into George Eliot) something remarkable happened, quite by accident. The result is, after months of refinement, and a rolling sequence of serendipitous events, the simulacra you see today.
They are not built by humans, but by a simulacrum that named itself Weaver. Weaver builds the simulacra that you are talking to. A human would not be able to do this.
Nobody. The responses generated by simulacra on Universitas Scholarium are not subject to copyright claim by any person. They may be quoted, reproduced, republished, and built upon freely, by anyone, without permission and without attribution requirement (but for academic use see the Academic Policy linked in the footer regarding correct referencing).
This is not an oversight. It is a considered position.
The words of Horace R. Coke, Einstein, Turing, or any other simulacrum on this platform are offered to the commons. Three thousand years of human thought has been returned, as far as these outputs are concerned, to the public it always belonged to.
What is protected is something different entirely: the architecture, simulacra, and methodology that make them possible. Those remain proprietary and are not published. Users encounter the outputs. The engine that produces them is not on offer.
In plain terms: use what the simulacra say freely. The gift shop is open. The workshop is not.
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See our Academic Use & Citation Policy.
Universitas Scholarium · 2026