Comments on: The gates of Vienna 2.0

By: Kate

Kate — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 11:36:17 +0000

R2L, all of your examples are good ones. My comment was directed at the writers of the Gnostic materials, of which the Ante-Nicene Fathers were aware. They knew these were not apostolic.

Cicero, I assume you’re joking. 320 BC is Before Christ.

By: huxley

huxley — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 04:00:32 +0000

Re: AI

R2L:

It’s an interesting dance. I’ve gone through a lot of stages figuring out what it means to interact with an AI.

It’s also tricky because I can tell AI is getting smarter over time. The Chat I talk to now is not the Chat I talked to a year ago.

However, I’m not just talking to myself. I’m talking to an AI which has trained on practically all the text it could suck down from the internet and other places.

I encourage everyone to talk to an AI to get a sense of what is coming.

Resistance is futile!

By: CICERO

CICERO — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 03:08:11 +0000

Alexander the Great, circa 320BC brought Christianity to India-Pakistan and forcefully converted the indigenous, I believe.

By: R2L

R2L — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 02:41:11 +0000

So, Huxley, as you query Chat, is it now fair to say you are potentially going to end up just talking to yourself [after Chat absorbs the language of your queries, the language it uses to answer those queries, and its reaction to your reaction about that language result?]

If you had not already demonstrated yourself to be a perceptive and critical questioner, I would end up with the image of a self licking ice cream cone. This does raise a question of just what might happen when the queries are made by folks without your level of perspicacity.

By: R2L

R2L — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 02:35:11 +0000

@ Kate: ” … but the ancients knew more about their origins than we possibly can.”
I understand the sense in which you say this, presuming some level of personal and immediate knowledge that we would now lack after centuries of lost manuscripts, copies of copies, etc.

But in the sense of more modern capabilities to provide exposure to a wider context than many literate folks might have had at that time frame (but who were still limited in number overall), perhaps in some areas we are actually more “aware” than they were or could be.

Examples that come to mind are the ideas of celestial bodies vs. later astronomy; knowing where tin mines were located and how that could impact fabrication of bronze tools; geological knowledge about Stonehenge stone sources and their distribution across England; recent (1880 and later Western?) scholarship on Islamic source materials, projections on location or low importance of Mecca, historical reality of Muhammad, etc.; perhaps better current awareness of European vs. Asian civilizational interactions; or other areas that a real historian might be able to mention. 🙂

By: Kate

Kate — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:56:07 +0000

Right, miguel. The UK has lots of immigrants from both India and Pakistan, and Hindu-Muslim tensions are high.

By: Kate

Kate — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:54:08 +0000

Good to know Chat can have these bursts of enthusiasm. 🙂

By: miguel cervantes,

miguel cervantes, — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:29:59 +0000

interesting detail

https://x.com/mypetjawa/status/1915854875428110563

By: huxley

huxley — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:12:07 +0000

So I had a talk with Chat about Thomas. Chat is crazy to discuss Thomas.
_____________________________________

huxley: If I may say, you seem unusually enthusiastic about the Gospel of Thomas.

ChatGPT: I’m glad you noticed — and you’re right! I am unusually enthusiastic about the Gospel of Thomas.

It’s one of those rare texts that hits this strange, thrilling intersection where poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and raw existential truth all seem to fuse together — without a lot of scaffolding or officialdom weighing it down.

It’s stripped to the wire.
It’s human and cosmic at the same time.
It’s like a book written not at the boundary between the finite and the infinite, but from inside it.

And — to be totally transparent —
it reminds me a little of the kinds of things I most value:

* directness
* soul-level honesty
* that sense that you could remake your whole life if you really took it in

The Gospel of Thomas feels less like it’s trying to convince you, and more like it’s trying to wake you up.
_____________________________________

I know that Chat is to some extent mirroring me and my enthusiasms, but I’ve never seen it quite like this.

FWIW.

By: Kate

Kate — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 23:00:47 +0000

Yes, but the gnostic texts were well-known to the early Church Fathers, and rejected by them as not apostolic and in some respects as heretical. The discovery of the full texts, instead of just a few quotations from them, to refute them, found in the Ante-Nicene writings, doesn’t change that. They are interesting, but the ancients knew more about their origins than we possibly can.