Yeah, cuneiform was interesting in terms of the medium and how much and how broadly it survived. Their folk tale in terms of how they received the writing was that someone from the ocean arrived and was trying to communicate and pressed reeds into the wet mud.
I sometimes wonder if there was an Aegean earlier Bronze Age/prehistory writing system (like the one found on the Dispilio tablet) that has been lost to the ages because it was on a temporary medium and then the Sumerians ended up with a version of writing that persisted in a loosely similar way to their folk history.
I’ve been looking into a tradition for the last few years that died out nearly 1,500 years ago that has me wondering the opposite.
How in the present day with the clear trajectory of science and technology we are currently working on do we not realize this ancient and relatively well known text isn’t some mystical mumbo jumbo but is straight up dishing on the nature of our reality?
I think there’s a stubbornness of thought that exists among most humans regarding what they think they know about life which blinds both the religious and non-religious.
It probably won’t happen until we move to new hardware architectures.
I do think LLMs are a great springboard for AGI, but I don’t think the current hardware allows for models to cross the hump to AGI.
There’s not enough recursive self-interaction in the network to encode nonlinear representations. So we saw this past year a number of impressive papers exhibiting linear representations of world models extrapolated from training data, but there hasn’t yet been any nonlinear representations discovered and I don’t think there will be.
But when we switch to either optoelectronics or colocating processing with memory at a node basis, that next generation of algorithms taking advantage of the hardware may allow for the final missing piece of modern LLMs in extrapolating data from the training set, pulling nonlinear representations of world models from the data (things like saying “I don’t know” will be more prominent in that next generation of models).
From there, we’ll quickly get to AGI, but until then I’m skeptical that classical/traditional hardware will get us there.
For me, there were several dollar store trinkets that already broke, and one toy for my kids that was a huge sparkly styrofoam mess waiting to happen, so I threw it out rather than curse anyone else with it.
I don’t, and I’m not sure where you get the sense that I do.
There’s a very wide gulf between thinking that a historical person named Jesus existed and that the New Testament depiction of that person is accurate.
There’s a ton of things in there that are pretty clearly BS, but the way in which they are BS seems much more like an attempt to spin historical events than to invent them from scratch.
For example, Peter’s denials.
Dude is nicknamed after a “hollow rock” which is actually a terrible thing to try to use as a foundation, but it’s an incredible nickname for someone regularly missing the point and arguing with you.
Then around the time Jesus is being tried approximately three times Cephas is also denying Jesus three times, even seen going back into a guarded area where a trial is taking place to do so.
But it’s all okay because a rooster crowed?
That sounds a lot more like there had been earlier eyewitness testimony or rumors about “hollow rock” having had a more prominent role in testifying against a historical figure which needed to be spun to be a lesser offense which was explained away as acceptable than it sounds like a fabrication originated by a religious organization owing itself to “hollow rock.”
There’s many places where the earliest layers of the NT are sort of engaged with a phantom tradition we can no longer see directly, and only in reflection of its opposition. Things like Mark pointing out that the women saw the empty tomb but didn’t tell anyone or that Thomas doubted the resurrection but then changed his mind. Given Paul was combating the disbelief in physical resurrection in Corinth in 1 Cor 15 among what was a community following some version of Jesus, maybe traditions later on that owed themselves to female teachers, prominently had females receiving sayings from Jesus separate from the other disciples, and had an over-realized eschatology such that it rejected physical resurrection like the proto-Thomasine group were a bigger deal earlier on than the church would like to let on?
My point is that this kind of undermining and spin - “yes Cephas denied him but it was prophesied” or “no, the women actually saw the empty tomb they just didn’t tell anyone, we pinky swear” - is the kind of thing we should expect from a very early split around a cultush origin and not something like Mithraism where a mythologized narrative is adapted and embellished from purely fictional origins.
As for publishing - I’d like to and plan to one day probably at least do a video series on the topic. But this is a hobby and people take religion very seriously to an irrational degree so I’m probably not going to be comfortable linking my real world self to a counter-cannonical Christian public stance until I’m retired. On the upside that gives me many more years to continue to find out more nuances.
Extra-canonically he was certainly talking a lot about dank images:
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"
Gospel of Thomas saying 84
[…] Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, […] an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
Gospel of Thomas saying 22
(This was more relating to Plato’s concept of eikon and what was effectively a version of the simulation hypothesis in antiquity, but if we throw out the context it could potentially be talking about making memes.)
For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. I think that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles.
2 Cor 11:4-5
Corinth then later on full on deposed Rome’s appointees which led to the letter from the bishop of Rome, 1 Clement that’s almost entirely devoted to trying to damage control the schism.
And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”? Their judgment is deserved!
Romans 3:8
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!
Galatians 1:6-9
You can even see some of the specific concepts that there was a schism about, such as whether there was an over-realized eschatology:
As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-2 (likely a bit later than Paul)
Avoid profane chatter, for it will lead people into more and more impiety, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.
2 Timothy 2:16-18
So I’m not sure where you get the notion there was one big happy family of Christian thought in Paul’s time and the later 1st century CE when literally the earliest records of Christianity we have are so concerned with competing traditions and ideas. You may be mistaking the survivorship bias of cannonical Christianity eradicating most competing thought later on for a picture of unity (as that’s what they try to project) which is why a closer read is warranted.
Plus you know we have no evidence that Buddhism had that fighting after Siddharth death
It had that fighting even before Siddhartha’s death when his brother in law Devadatta broke away to form his own group.
Mormons didn’t break out into civil war after Smith died.
Fictional constructs don’t end up having bitterly opposed factions splintering off within decades of their supposed death, but that’s an extremely common feature of nearly every cult organized around a historical central figure.
The specific depiction of Jesus canonized likely has many fictional elements, but the idea that there was no historical figure in the first place is pretty ludicrous.
It’s about the evolving picture of the universe over the past 300 years and how so much about that picture changed so quickly and is still left with very big open questions.
Recently I’ve been catching up on tv and some of the more mature/adult shows, which I’ve been…Enjoying? Seems like the wrong word, but they’ve all generally been cynical or dark....
Looking at the two big news publishers in my country. One isn’t reporting about the current bombings at all, while the other one is phrasing their words mostly anti-Palestinian....
The most neutral coverage I’ve seen was from The Intercept.
It has a fairly anti-establishment bias, but that includes both Hamas, the PA, and the IDF.
They basically give a crap about civilians, but not about any of the institutional interests causing them to suffer, and spread that evenly across the various players.
While it doesn’t address the topic of consciousness, you might find some of how this sort of “backwards in time change” is being applied today interesting:
Which led to what’s currently my favorite titled paper, Stable facts, relative facts: arxiv.org/abs/2006.15543
So one of the challenges that would arise from layers of delayed/hidden observations would be whether you’d even have universal agreement at the final review. i.e. The computer might have observed the cat as alive and baked a cake celebrating it, but then you open the box to a dead cat, each having correctly observed a result, just separated enough that they didn’t need to agree.
Which is why QM interpretations are considered to be part of Physics philosophy as you can see the link to the weighty writeup on the Copenhagen Interpretation is part of Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
But all interpretations are part of philosophy and are currently not falsifiable. Not just the ones someone may not like.
Also, their interpretation of what’s happening largely falls apart with the quantum eraser variations.
If it’s collapse from mechanical measurement side effects, why does it go back to an interference pattern when which path information is erased by a polarizer?
Yes, effectively the photon goes through both slits, and the interference pattern or ballistic pattern relates to when decoherence occurs, either at the point a which slit measurement is made or at the point it hits the detector.
So how do you explain the quantum eraser experiment (note for those who might be excited to respond with recent YouTube physics videos, this is not the delayed choice quantum eraser, and has nothing to do with retrocausality claims)?
Right, Roger Penrose and Eugene Wigner and a host of other physicists who subscribe/d to consciousness collapse interpretations aren’t people who care about evidence…
It’s wild how many people are so quick to be confidently incorrect about something that sounds correct and science-ish but doesn’t at all reflect the actual subspecialty nuances.
Literally none of the QM interpretations have evidence supporting their particular interpretation.
At best there’s a handful that have been abandoned due to falsification, like interpretations predicated on local hidden variables.
There’s no more evidence for Copenhagen or many worlds than there is for consciousness collapse.
There’s simply different inherent assumptions that different physicists are willing to entertain, but it’s entirely a personal choice and ultimately not evidence driven.
And the picture of assumptions changes over time. For example, post-2018 all popular interpretations other than many worlds have a new “pick at least one of three” assumptions that must be embraced following a new paradox. But currently that’s pretty much the only guiding factor, is what assumptions one is willing to entertain.
When which slit a photon goes through is unobserved, it behaves like a wave and self interferes so many photons create an interference pattern with stripes where self-interactions prevented any photons from appearing.
When the photon is interacted with in a way which leaves permanent information about which slit it went through, it behaves like a particle and the pattern from many photons looks ‘ballistic’ like you were shooting tiny balls through each slit.
So in the meme when he’s not looking at the slits, there’s stripes, and when he’s looking it’s a ballistic pattern.
We must record everything (lemmy.world)
Via Poorly Drawn Lines
How much for cuddles? (lemm.ee)
The Perfect Solution (programming.dev)
Why in the year 2024 and with all the knowledge humans have now do people still believe in religion?
GTA: Real life (v.redd.it)
What are some tech predictions for 2024 that actually could happen?
What gifts that you received for Christmas this year are already in the trash?
For me, there were several dollar store trinkets that already broke, and one toy for my kids that was a huge sparkly styrofoam mess waiting to happen, so I threw it out rather than curse anyone else with it.
The Jebus Said So. (startrek.website)
AMEN!
*screams exestentially* (mander.xyz)
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/science-4
Nintendo has officially announced a live-action 'Legend of Zelda' movie. (www.nintendo.co.jp)
Sleeping Beauty Trolley Problem (mander.xyz)
OC just for you! ♥️
Lighthearted, upbeat shows for adults?
Recently I’ve been catching up on tv and some of the more mature/adult shows, which I’ve been…Enjoying? Seems like the wrong word, but they’ve all generally been cynical or dark....
Where can I NEUTRALLY keep up to date about the Palestina/Israel situation?
Looking at the two big news publishers in my country. One isn’t reporting about the current bombings at all, while the other one is phrasing their words mostly anti-Palestinian....
Double-slit (lemmy.ml)
Can lemmy be used as a blog (with comment section)?
I am looking for a fediverse solution for a blog and I tried it with writefreely, but it has some disadvantages I can’t live with....