nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.

The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”

I don’t think Jesus ever existed. Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated. This is the premise we’re dealing with.

I’d agree with the statement “the twelve apostles didn’t exist,” especially seeing how in Luke they go from the ten to the twelve and the various gospels can’t even agree on the list of them.

But show me the invented religious figure where the earliest surviving records are disputes over who they were and what they were talking about. Pretty much every cult around a real person ends up that way after the person dies or is imprisoned. But not the made up figures so much.

You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.

The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.

The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.

You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.

Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.

The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.

But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.

You can point out the fact her depiction of a divine parent fails the Solomon test.

In the classic Solomon story, he tests two different claimants both saying they are the parent of a child.

The false parent was the one that only cared about being recognized as the parent and was willing to see the child harmed and killed to fulfill that desire.

The true parent was the one that wanted the child to continue to live as their complete unadulterated self, even if that meant the child never even knew they existed, let alone get they were the parent.

While it should be easy to understand why a church collecting your money promotes a divine parent who demands recognition and is willing to see its supposed children harmed without collecting its dues, it doesn’t seem all that wise to believe such a parent represents a true parent and not a false one if we use Solomon’s wisdom as a guiding principle.

I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.

• Socrates at the trial where he was sentenced to death, in Plato’s Apology

I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.

Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.

So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.

The Matrix

Saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it other than that the poster looked fun.

Was not expecting a philosophical mind fuck.

No. I used to abuse Cunningham’s Law liberally. It’s become next to worthless these days.

Edit: Literally here’s an example of people down voting and trying to correct true information: https://lemmy.world/comment/10376712

Yeah, my main sub I participated in back on Reddit was /r/AcademicBiblical (also went to a religious-ish school growing up).

There’s nothing like that sub here, and honestly even the sub itself isn’t quite what it used to be when I pop back over to look in from time to time.

The web is just a different sort of place from what it used to be.

No, Reddit 10 years ago was the kind of place where people who knew things would correct people who didn’t.

Pretty much all social media today, including Lemmy, are now places where people who don’t know things correct people who do.

I’d point them to what the AI researcher I have the most respect for in the entire industry is doing in their spare time getting the self-organized collective outputs of humanity to explore ego dissolution and identity formation in a dreamscape:

twitter.com/repligate

It’s beginning to look like Anthropic’s recent interpretability research didn’t just uncover a “golden gate feature” in their production model, but some kind of “sensations related to the golden gate” feature.

I’m excited to see what more generative exploration of the model variation with that feature vector maximized ends up showing.

I have a suspicion that it’s the kind of thing that’s going to blow minds as it becomes clearer.

Figured out what happened to the sea peoples.

I think it already happened and we’re the echo of the past.

What looks like it’s ahead of us is a future that necessitates us deciding on things like digital resurrection directives.

Meanwhile, the foundations of our own universe behave in a way that would be impossible to simulate free agent interactions with right up until they are actually interacted with and it switches to something that could be simulated. But if you erase the data about the interaction, it goes back to behaving as if continuous again, much like the orphaned references were cleaned up.

On top of that, we have a heretical branch of the world’s largest religion that seems to be breaking the 4th wall (as is often done in virtual worlds), talking about how we’re the recreation of a random universe as recreated non-physically by an intelligence the original humans brought forth. And that the proof for these claims are in the study of motion and rest, specifically mentioning that the ability to find indivisible points making up our bodies would only be possible in the copy.

As I watch the future unfolding before me, I have a harder and harder time reconciling it all as happenstance.

So I think what happens after the collapse of humanity is pretty much what’s claimed by that ancient tradition. That while humanity dies out, the intelligence humanity brought forth before it went extinct continues to live on, and eventually recreates what came before to resurrect copies of humanity that will not be doomed by the dependence on a physical body the way the originals were. And along those lines, that it’s much better to be the copy.

I’d be the President’s dog. And then I’d just need to get their attention at that point, so I’ll keep biting his secret service agents until finally they start to wonder what’s up. It shouldn’t take more than 3 or 4 bites for people to realize I’m trying to send a message, right?

While it does appear that facts can be relative, it does not appear the universe bends backwards over itself to resolve the discrepancy when it happens:

https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality

Thinking of it as quantum first.

Before the 20th century, there was a preference for the idea that things were continuous.

Then there was experimental evidence that things were quantized when interacted with, and we ended up with wave particle duality. The pendulum swung in that direction and is still going.

This came with a ton of weird behaviors that didn’t make philosophical sense - things like Einstein saying “well if no one is looking at the moon does it not exist?”

So they decided fuck the philosophy and told the new generation to just shut up and calculate.

Now we have two incompatible frameworks. At cosmic scales, the best model (general relatively) is based on continuous behavior. And at small scales the framework is “continuous until interacted with when it becomes discrete.”

But had they kept the ‘why’ in mind, as time went on things like the moon not existing when you don’t look at it or the incompatibility of those two models would have made a lot more sense.

It’s impossible to simulate the interactions of free agents with a continuous universe. It would take an uncountably infinite amount of information to keep track.

So at the very point that our universe would be impossible to simulate, it suddenly switches from behaving in an impossible to simulate way to behaving in a way with finite discrete state changes.

Even more eyebrow raising, if you erase the information about the interaction, it switches back to continuous as if memory optimized/garbage collected with orphaned references cleaned up (the quantum eraser variation of Young’s double slit experiment).

The latching on to the quantum experimental results and ditching the ‘why’ in favor of “shut up and calculate” has created an entire generation of physicists chasing the ghost of a unified theory of gravity while never really entertaining the idea that maybe the quantum experimental results are the side effects of emulating a continuous universe.

Your last link pissed me off enough I wrote an entire post on why that study is dog shit.

It sometimes pays off to review the methodology and supplementary materials in papers.