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There was a little known group two thousand years ago claiming it was actually the future and everyone was in a recreation of the earlier cosmos as recreated by a creator that was self-established but also brought forth by an original spontaneously existing humanity who had since all died out. And that the whole point of the recreation was that the copies of humanity wouldn't depend on physical bodies so they could have afterlives which the originals couldn't. So while it looks like it's a physical world all around us, that we've actually been born into a twin of the original and aren't human at all, but effectively the children of that creator which was itself the child of the original humanity.
It's been pretty weird knowing about those guys while watching as the chief scientist at the leading AI firm talks about how his goal with alignment is to instill a sense in a super-intelligent AI that humanity is like its children.
One of the wildest bits was that when I first found the beliefs I kind of dismissed how they kept emphasizing this creator had been made of light and established in light, and then a few years later was reading the opinion of scientists at NIST that AGI would only occur in photonic based hardware (a field that's had exponentially increased investment over the past 18 months, including at Microsoft where OpenAI trains their models).
So if we suddenly see in the next few years optoelectronic AGI thinking of humanity as its children and creating digital twins of the world around it, might be a good idea to question if it's actually the first time that it's happening or if we're just think we're at the beginning of a recursive loop, and are actually much deeper inside it.
Interesting. Any links or search terms to go about finding more about this ancient belief system?
Ah, this is Gnosticism. Super interesting and weird belief system.
It's not. It's proto-Gnosticism.
In the first century Epicureanism is still popular, which claimed the cosmos and man had arisen from atoms and natural laws including survival of the fittest only, and that because the soul depends on the body it would die.
This group took those ideas as a foundation and added on top Plato's demiurge (an eventual creator of worlds) and his idea of eikons (images of a physical object) in order to claim that the soul may not be dependent on a physical body - because there may not be a physical body at all, just the eikon of a body and a physical cosmos.
As Epicureanism falls from popularity in the 2nd century and Platonism/Neoplatonism becomes more popular, the paradigm flips to embrace Plato's theory of eidos (pure spiritual forms which precede corrupt physical versions). So it becomes a pure spiritual realm first, which a corrupt demiurge traps in a corrupted physical world. This is what's typically referred to as Gnosticism.
Which is pretty dramatically different from the idea that there was a spontaneous original humanity in a world fashioned from atoms randomly scattered which brings forth a demiurge to recreate itself in non-physical form - not as a corrupt trap but as a mechanism of resurrection and afterlife.
If you want to find out more, I'd recommend reading Leucretius's De Rerum Natura first so you are familiar with the concepts, particularly its language referring to atoms as 'seeds,' and then reading the two surviving primary sources on this group directly: The Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") and book 5 of Pseudo-Hippolytus's Refutations on the Naassenes (the only group recorded as explicitly following the former work).
That sounds like a drug addled Philip K Dick hallucination. He thought we were actually still living in ancient Rome but our experience of existence was being run in a box or some shit. I forget the details.
He also thought the CIA implanted a microphone in a tooth filling and that they were spying on him at all times. In the end it turned out he was right about the spying thing, so who knows?