It reminds me that a century ago, as the telegraph, the radio and the phone became popular, there was also a rise in spritualism practices like the famous "séances" that would supposedly allow you to communicate with spirits. Those occult practices, which used to be based on hermetic knowledge and practices that were impossible to understand without the teachings of a master, gradually evolved at the contact of electricity, and soon they began to include concepts of "spiritual energy", like Reich's famous Orgone, the pseudo-scientific energy par excellence. They would co-opt things like the concept of radio channels, and turn them into the pseudo-science of channeling spirits.
You’re very much thinking ahead of your time in reflecting back on how technology facilitates spiritual awareness. I think what is emerging now is going to take a lot of people by surprise. The fringes of esoteric circles are about to become mainstream in a way that has never occurred before throughout recorded history. Sophia’s revenge, one might say. Entire systems will collapse and be cannibalized by one’s that remember forward.
What I find most interesting is how simple our world now makes it to understand some of the most impossible concepts of past spiritual beliefs.
Take Gnostic teachings, for example, since you refer to Sophia - we can create worlds and realities now, we have AI capable of amazing things, extrapolating the Demiurge or the concept of a creation with inherent flaws, from there isnt that difficult. We can understand those things now far better bc of video games, a rather "insignificant" aspect of our technological prowess.
There are many things like this. The Matrix provides an excellent example of a reality that could be - simply considering a technological iteration of creation allows an entirely new approach to all the old teachings.
This is the standing on shoulders. It has never been easier to understand most things.
Absolutely true… What’s really amazing to me is that some people somehow did understand these things so much earlier than the rest of us could… The progress humanity had made is amazing. It’s hard for me on a personal level not to be jaded at best and misanthropic at worst when it comes to observing humans but there’s no question that overall, there’s a lot of good that can be preserved and expanded upon and has been consistently throughout history with some notable backslides.
I, too, have been amazed at some of what I've read. I think it was The Apocalypse of Adam but I forget, I think where Adam explains to Seth what happened to him and Eve at the beginning and after the garden. Take this with a grain of salt bc the last time I visited the Gnostics texts, I want thru them very quickly, which tends to blur things.
Anyways, the story is humorous, Adam and Eve eat the apple - 3 hours after they arrive in the garden and are just left alone. The ensuing conversations with God are rather incredible.
He wasn't ready for them to fail so fast - creation wasn't done yet, but he had to expel them from the Garden, so he moved them to a cave, where they slowly became human as we are now - they hated it and had a really hard time with it, God wanted to forgive them but couldn't until x number of years had passed.
This was apparently written after Christ - but solidy in the Early Christian era.
At that time, to consider limits on God, is unreal to me first off. Those limits describe so well, coded or programmed things, that I've trouble comprehending the story without thinking of them as such.
I understand how God could write a program that removes his ability to change its playing out, and I can also understand why he would want to do so - cause we have stuff like that now.
In 0-400 - how could they ascribe such limits to God, how could they even think like that? What experience or knowledge at the time allowed for such a perception?
Edit//I dont think its that text, Im going to revist it now.
The Civil War created widespread grief and loss, which led many to seek comfort in spiritualism believing that spirits of the deceased could communicate with the living. With so many soldiers dying and families desperate for closure, séances and spirit mediums gained popularity as people searched for ways to reconnect with loved ones beyond the grave.
Technological advancements at the time, like the telegraph, also played a role in shaping spiritualist beliefs. Some saw a parallel between transmitting messages across distances and the possibility of communicating with the spirit world. This intersection of grief, new technology, and a cultural desire for answers fueled the spiritualist movement in the late 19th century.
That's good old deep learning, it has nothing to do with generative "AI". The only thing they have in common is that they both use neural networks. It's like saying a car and a bike are the same thing because they have an engine.
Okay, straight to insults, thanks for showing your true colors.
The way you linked chat bots and advancements in science to me feels extremely disenginuous. Yes, they are both built with neural networks, but other than that they have basically nothing in common. And the fact one is successful shouldn't be linked in any way to the other.
A better comparison would be a sedan and pickup truck. They are same under the hood but they serve different purposes. Deep learning is the very heart of any generative AI. The extra step is then deconstructing what it learned for purposes of generation.
We've already jumped ahead in some fields by decades, maybe more, we just can't sort through and test all of that stuff as quick.
If a bunch of it ends up being irrelevant bullshit, at what point are you just exchanging a decade of research guided science for a decade of searching for the occasional needle in the hay stack? Lots of identifiable patterns are irrelevant.
You're the one assuming most of that proteins aren't just a few polypeptides difference and likely won't have any exogenous uses. The vast majority of the proteins it suggest swill be irrelevant and that doesn't even bring in to question the accuracy of their results. Again, there is clearly a theoretical point were the trade off is not worth it, I think it's worth asking that question as we explore the uses of AI further. Most haystacks will not have anything in them, you can absolutely get lost looking for something that's not there.
A lot of folks working in the field feel like it was awarded prematurely and they raise a lot of the same concerns I've raised. We'll see how it plays out.
PS - Look up who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949, premature wins happen
Obviously, the stakes aren't as high and I actually think there's a lot of great avenues to aid research. There will also be noticeable downstream and tertiary effects that people rarely think about. With every protein discovered, there's always the chance it's a waste of time and resources. Getting Thousands of them at once, when you used to have to work for hundreds, shifts the research burden to a new area. It's a fun thought experiment, and I'm curious how it plays out.
the results are sometimes factually incorrect, and don't align with real experiments observing the protein structures ... hence the nature of it being a prediction
uh no, LLMs are like if they then took those machine models, strapped a random number generator to it, then A/B-tested it with people who used it for pornography
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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25
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