Man searches for meaning in our vast emptiness.

'religious'

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:

That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only.

• Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4

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:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven.

• 1 Cor 15:42-47

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:

The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"

Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.

Because allegedly it was already the new world:

Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'

If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'

If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"

His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"

He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."

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:

These allege that the world is one, triply divided. And of the triple division with them, one portion is a certain single originating principle, just as it were a huge fountain, which can be divided mentally into infinite segments. [...] And the second portion of the triad of these is, as it were, a certain infinite crowd of potentialities that are generated from themselves, (while) the third is formal.

• Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.7

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):

Jesus said, "Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father's light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light."

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!"

Jesus said, "Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, [he would] not [have tasted] death."

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:

Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one."

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:

Jesus said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him."

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:

The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, 'When will they come and take what belongs to them?'

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).

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.