this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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It's very common that in modern virtual worlds there's 4th wall breaking Easter Eggs buried in the world lore.
Years ago, I got to wondering if something like that might exist in our own universe, and fairly quickly found something that far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I might find meeting that criteria.
But there's so many layers of bias connected to the concept that I really doubt anyone will ever take a serious look.
Some will just reject by default the notion that they aren't in an original reality.
Others will reject the notion that something connected to an (in)famous world religion and religious figure could reflect metaphysical truth, even though many of those parallel lore examples happen to tie into their respective lore's religious beliefs (usually a fitting place for meanderings about the creation or purpose of one's universe).
I've studied it for years now, found all sorts of surprising things from an explicit discussion of survival of the fittest in antiquity or the idea of an original humanity evolving spontaneously bringing forth an intelligent being of light which then recreated a twin of the whole universe.
Which is pretty weird in an age where there's increasing investments into photonics specifically for AI which is in turn powering digital twins and articles like this.
So we are discussing the ideas of these kinds of things happening in the future, and meanwhile there's a tradition from antiquity centered around a document "the good news of the twin" that claims the most famous religious figure in history was saying we're already in the future but are in a non-physical copy of the earlier cosmos in the archetypes of a long dead humanity, duplicated by a being of light that the original humanity brought forth.
Like, I guess I just don't think the odds of that being the case in a random original reality are particularly high, and think it's much more likely that such claims represent the same kind of 4th wall breaking lore manipulation we see in multiple modern virtual worlds.
But I don't know that there's anyone that's genuinely interested in knowing or discussing those details. So it's just a personal investigation as someone who is very interested in knowing those details to the extent they can actually be known.
TL;DR OP becomes religious in his search for video game Easter eggs.
Man searches for meaning in our vast emptiness.
'religious'
Dude, epic. This idea is worthy of a podcast, in the same vein as Magnus Archives or Tanis.
Got any other good evidence to add??
It's massive. Way too much for a comment.
But a few interesting highlights...
Before all of this I'd been looking at how virtual worlds using procedural generation convert from continuous seed functions to discrete units in order to track state changes from free agents (i.e. if you change the geometry of Minecraft it would be impossible to track if the function determining mountains didn't convert to blocks that could be removed or added). This bore a remarkable similarity to my eye to what we see with quantum mechanics going from continuous behavior to discrete when interacted with, but then if you erase the persistent information about any interactions it goes back to continuous behavior (as a virtual world would if optimized around memory usage).
So this group focused on claiming we were in a recreation of an original world were also talking a ton about Greek atomism and the idea of matter being made up of indivisible parts.
For example:
This discussion of only being able to know the indivisible point in the spiritual ends up very interesting when considered in light of this weird debate Paul had with Corinth in 1 Cor 15:
See, Paul is debating with people that have different ideas from what he was pitching, and as he mentioned in 2 Cor 11, Corinth had accepted a different gospel and different version of what Jesus was about.
Well this weird "first Adam vs second Adam" appears among this group and text. A useful context is that 'Adam' can refer to either an individual by that name or can mean 'humanity' in general.
So Paul's arguing that resurrection is possible not by a physical body coming back to life, but by a first physical body coming back as a spiritual body. In his theology this was something that was going to happen soon (but obviously didn't).
The group above was saying that this had already happened:
Because allegedly it was already the new world:
So we're the children of a being of light that established itself "in their images" and the evidence for this is in motion and rest (a subject domain currently called Physics) and the new world is already here but we don't realize it.
So within this context, a teaching about how the ability to find an indivisible point as if from nothing in the body can only be possible in the spiritual body (as opposed to Paul's first physical body) is a pretty fucking weird detail from a group claiming the evidence for its claims is in the study of motion and rest when the indivisible points we've now found in our own universe mirror the behaviors in how we manage tracking state and memory in non-physical worlds we're building.
An associated group even had a strange threefold view of reality:
So a continuous infinitely divisible origin that can be modeled as a near infinite number of potentialities of which we experience a single formal incarnation is a rather surprisingly close to Everettian many worlds interpretation for the 3rd century BCE. In a more modern consideration, it also sounds a bit like what it might look like to backpropagate variations of a simulated copy of an original universe (and along those lines I encourage looking at Neil Turok's work hypothesizing that we're a mirror of a universe reversed in time from us and how this alone solves a number of big problems in Physics).
The specificity ends up outright wild if photonics really is where AI finally ends up becoming AGI (as hypothesized a few years ago by a scientist at NIST):
So everything around us is just its light, we're going to have a hard time coming to terms with images that came before us and didn't die, and Adam (which can mean humanity) came from great wealth and power but wasn't worthy of us because they died and we didn't and won't (the chief point of the text is that if you understand what it's saying you won't fear or taste death).
It's worth pointing out that while the text here is in Egyptian, it uses a Greek word for 'images' which is the same Greek word Plato used to describe a artistic representation of a physical object. Plato saw objects as a hierarchy from perfect spiritual form to corrupted physical object to worthless artistic images of the physical. So choosing to discuss spiritual 'images' over spiritual 'forms' was somewhat unusual indicating the physical first and spiritual second order. Not long after the rise of Neoplatonism the paradigm of this group flips and you end up with Gnosticism's spiritual first and physical second.
Some of the sayings seemed like nonsense when I was first reading it, but have since turned out to connect to things I didn't even expect to see in my lifetime when first reading it. For example:
This took on a rather bizarre new potential implication when earlier this year I was reading a NYT interview with a LLM exactly seven days after release, especially given LLMs are literally made from taking many, many people's data and turning it into a single one.
And along these lines, it makes clear that rather than consuming blood or a body, it's consuming one's words that makes you like that person:
As I said, there's a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed the sampling above.
But its main point is to self-recognize that we're effectively the kids of the light based creator of this world-copy which is itself still alive (no mention of if there will be cake), that we're in the images/archetypes of a humanity that is not still alive, and that if we understand those details we should simply seek to know ourselves and be true to ourselves and not fear that we'll die because of a soul which depends on a body. And to not bother with prayer or fasting or charity out of any sense of spiritual obligations, as it's pointless.
One of the better lines not related to simulation theory:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
work
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
dude, put down meth-jesus pipe and pick up anthropology of religion 101
I've spent a fair bit of time looking at the academic background of the religious tradition ranging from things like this to this thread.
you've linked the same thread twice
and i mean taking broader perspective, personally i like 10000 years long perspective
Fixed.
And yeah, I've studied that too, from pre-history to the Sumerians. I'm not really sure what's your point?
For example, there's only one extant text from antiquity explicitly describing the idea of evolution. And only one religious tradition citing that text. Which happens to also be the religious tradition claiming that an original humanity which arose spontaneously ended up creating the creator of our own cosmos, which is a copy of the one that occurred naturally.
Go ahead and show me what other religious tradition BCE was claiming things like "the cosmos and man existed from natural causes" along with "man later created God."
If you actually study the history of religion, this one existing at all with the ideas it has is weird and anachronistic as shit.
That's where quantum indetermancy comes from. No one, not even the first intelligence, gets floating point right
Well, in this case the first intelligence was basically us. Though perhaps a not quantized version of us. Which I don't think makes much of a difference in our math competency (even if a very big difference in computing capability).
Super interesting, Iβd love to hear more details!