Book of AI-braham
I consider a great many (not all, but many) AI concerns to be in the same vein as Caveman Science Fiction. It is a psyop to keep us from challenging existing power structures. But if we are cavemen (and women), and we have been handed fire, then we ought to learn how to use fire. So… just what do you do with fire, anyway?
We are going to search out the deepest Mysteries of the Book of Abraham.
Years ago, my mother gave me a copy of the Book of Breathings, that has close relationships with the Book of Abraham. At first, I was terrified and bewildered and my testimony was temporarily shook. But as I studied, I realized just how much depth there is in Ancient Egyptian, that we don’t understand. Sure, an image might have a snake-god and Horus-Min and the eye of Horus… but what does that mean? It is as if hieroglyphics say, “Shaka, when the walls fell.” We know the words, but our understanding is very surface level.
If you said, Jesus was the Lion and the Lamb, no one would suppose this means he can turn into a four footed mammal. Yet, everything in the Book of the Dead, Book of Breathings, Pyramid Texts, etc, is called a Spell. Yet, Israel and Egypt are two closely related Semitic cultures. One of the Savior’s parables began as an Egyptian story, for instance.
So, just what do these ‘spells’ mean? How can we get the deeper insight we need? I propose we use Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning. We use a big pretrained Large Language Model, like Llama 2, or ChatGPT 4 or similar model.
Training such as model from scratch would be in the millions of dollars. But fine-tuning such a model could be done on a single decently powerful GPU, though we may want to spend a few hundred on cloud GPUs.
We will need a model that is multi-modal – one that can read both text and images, because we will be ingesting texts in hieroglyphics, both as blocks of text and images, like our Book of Abraham Facsimiles. As well as other Ancient Egyptian scripts like hieratic and demotic.
We will need a large dataset of texts and known translations as well as much other untranslated texts for the AI to read.
We will need to train it to detect metaphorical uses of words and to explain how it came to a conclusion.
There is a story about Nibley looking at a certain image, and thinking pretty strongly that it was the Book of Joseph… but having no idea what the elements meant.
I want to know.
And I think we could use AI to figure it out.
Postscript:
There are already some tools working on this, such as Google Fabricus.
https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/fabricius/gwHX41Sm0N7-Dw?hl=en
Other languages (like Akkadian) are getting attention with other models
https://decrypt.co/147176/ai-ancient-language-translation-cuneiform-akkadian
This suggests the real problem is an insufficient dataset to train the model on. Just not as much translated hieroglyphics as there are modern languages.
https://wired.me/technology/artificial-intelligence/google-translate-for-egyptian-hieroglyphics/
Filed under: Deseret Review,Things unutterable, Hidden from the foundation of the world,We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
Rozy
September 28, 2023
“One of the Savior’s parables began as an Egyptian story, for instance.” Are you sure it isn’t the other way around? The Gospel of Jesus Christ was taught in the beginning to Adam and Eve; echos of that gospel exist in every culture. So perhaps the Egyptians got the parable from Ham who was raised by a righteous prophet named Noah. Just a thought. And it’s the thought I have every time someone says that the Bible is a collection of stories or fables from the cultures the Israelites encountered. No, the creation and flood stories happened before any other cultures did.
I think the use of AI could be an interesting exercise. I’m waiting for more records to come forth–hopefully as part of the greatest show of Jesus’s power yet to come (or however Pres. Nelson said it.)
Zen
September 28, 2023
In this case, I think we can be reasonably confident that the Egyptians came up with this story, and the Savior adapted a well known story into Lazarus and the Rich man.
But yes, I think the Egyptians had more than we normally realize. Apostate in general, but remnants.
I am also waiting for more records to come forth, but I am not very patient. That is why I am delving hard into Isaiah. Perhaps Abraham will be next. AI can read at a human level, and give it a year, and it could be well beyond that. We should put it to work.
William James Tychonievich
September 29, 2023
Why would you trust a literally soulless language model to tell you the true meaning of a sacred text?
If what is “spiritually discerned” is beyond the reach even of the “natural man,” what chance could an artificial man possibly have?
Zen
September 29, 2023
WilliamJT – that doesn’t worry me at all because I don’t see that happening. AI is just as soulless as the branch that Joseph used to lift the stone off of the stone box that held the Gold Plates. It has no more soul than the pen Isaiah used when he wrote. AI is just a tool. But it is a useful tool.
We can translate the hieroglyphics in the Book of Abraham. At at first glance, they don’t seem to have anything to what Joseph said. Yet… yet, there are hints, intriguing hints that Joseph was more than right about the whole thing. There is a surface meaning that we can translate, but we don’t understand what that means. We are stuck on the surface of the ocean and only get glimpses of the depths below. And in order reach those depths of understanding, we need to understand what they meant.
I say this as someone in the field. It will take effort, thought, inspiration and the grace of God to make it work at all. And when it does, it will make connections between obscure documents that no mortal person could have done alone. Some connections will be inane or useless or nonsense. But some will suggest insights we could not have found any other way.
So, worry not. This is not autopilot or a full Tesla Self-Driving experience. This is a treasure map to a far off land with deserts and jungles, terra incognito, without guides or interpreters. This is our chance to be Indiana Jones (or Lara Croft if you prefer). There be dragons here, and I intend to slay them.
You know, right after I finish my Isaiah project and a few other minor projects.