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Shamil also inspired a Hasidic nigun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpUJn7yZnJQ

note how the theme of the Nigun Shamil is echoed by cyberpunk computer cowboys:

> "For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." —WFG

Lagniappe: my current favourite music video performed by caucasians that references (however unintentionally) Lancaster vs York would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg

[kragen]

it's tempting to think that our ways of thinking about mathematical objects such as software and data files—liberation from the contemptible flesh into the bodiless exultation of eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, or as https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/music_cdo/aid/1692239/jewi... expresses it in its exegesis of the nigun, "the soul cries and yearns for her former glory, her sanctity now tarnished as she dwells among mere mortals"—represent a secularization of an essentially religious discourse that originally pertained to theism, an absolutist monotheism that identifies the fleshless and changeless with the divine and sacred

but when i read parts of the torah like ספר שופטים, which are mostly about 2700–2800 years old, i don't see any of this fleshless and changeless or universally accessible stuff. people don't consecrate themselves or places by contemplating sacred truths, meditating until mystical revelations present themselves (though angels do make appearances), or experiencing bodiless exultation of any flavor. instead, the sacred is pursued through abstaining from pork, eccentric hairstyles, animal sacrifice, ornamentation with precious metals, carrying around wooden boxes, and spilling torrents of blood in the name of tribal deities; and it is manifested through victory in battle and material plenty. divine and sacred beings are conceptualized as partisan, constantly changing their opinions, and often even physically solid, though immortal; and alignment with them brings not liberation from the contemptible flesh but bestowal of victory and riches on that flesh. texts from that period from other cultures like the rig veda, the mahabharata, and the iliad agree on this, though the avesta may be an exception (there seems to be a significant amount of yearning after bodiless exultation in an afterlife after liberation from contemptible flesh in there)

even in the slightly older rig veda, where agni (for example) is described as undecaying/ageless and everywhere visible (an empirically valid description of the sun), and where mental attention to the gods is lauded often, what the worshippers are asking for is cattle, battle victories, and gold, not bodiless exultation and liberation from flesh, and their means for achieving it is singing songs, sacrificing food and drink, and performing rituals with their bodies

it's about 2500 years ago when we start to see people aspiring to bodiless exultation and liberation from flesh through mental contemplation of eternally absolute and changeless beauty, and we see it in two places: in the tipitaka and in platon, who apparently got it from the pythagoreans. in both places it's coupled with a belief in reincarnation, which, together with the close temporal coincidence, suggests a common historical origin. as for the divine beings of older books, shakyamuni apparently accepts that they are partisan, constantly changing their opinions, physically solid, but denies that they are immortal or worth worshipping, while platon takes the opposite tack, condemning the poets for describing them as partisan and constantly changing their opinions

so perhaps the current ran the other way: cyberpunk abacus and sand-table cowboys had humanity's first encounters with eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, and the resulting bodiless exultation changed their outlook forever, and eventually everyone else's?

a great difficulty for this hypothesis is that the tipitaka doesn't contain, as far as i can tell, so much as the simplest seked calulation, much less theorems about angles and prime numbers

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> cyberpunk abacus and sand-table cowboys had humanity's first encounters with eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, and the resulting bodiless exultation changed their outlook forever

Now that's an interesting idea.

I need to check out the Avesta[0] and track down Platon's Nuptial Number[1] before commenting more, although some obvious replies to your difficulty are that accounting and scribing[2] have traditionally been priesting-adjacent, so there could well be more orally-transmitted relation than we have textual evidence for. (speaking of the latter: my hypothesis up until this point is that even ancient Sumerians had their own geeks who had their own analogies for abstraction, but the reason we now rest the abstract/concrete duality on Platon's broad shoulders is because he was in the first generation[3] who bothered to write their ideas down[4])

[0] although it seems like it took https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism#Manichaeism (after Mani 216–274) to really run with the material/spiritual distinction? (instead of good/evil)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_number

[2] the spoken word can certainly provide examples of object-attribute lattices that should bootstrap abstract thought, but maybe it was too closely related to our conscious processes for early human fish to notice the water? By the time one is making arbitrary marks for numbers, or even arbitrary clay blobs for numbers with units ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)#Origins ), it should become obvious that both {Bossy,Daisy,Buttercup} and {Cupcake,Ebony,Fiona} can be mapped to "3 cows". Literacy (where one stamps a number for 3 followed by a sign for cow into the clay) makes it even more obvious?

[3] compare Socrates' complaints about literacy, which remind me of our current arguments about LLMs: "but what if someone reads something which has just been hallucinated"?

[4] which might help explain your "and eventually everyone else's"; before writing, it would be difficult for a small fraction of geeks in a population to remain motivated, but after writing it would be possible for them to think "even if I know no one else from my village like me, there have been others, and there probably will be more..." and decide to participate in the literature?

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any chance you could provide me with entry refs for the tipitaka?

The zoroastrian Ahuna Vairya and (especially) Ashem Vohu do seem to contrast following asha with worldly power. (compare med. {bellatores, laboratores, oratores} or PIE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis )

Given the relative dates, I'm proceeding with the very tentative hypothesis that Zoroaster (who does seem to comment, in stuff I have yet to read, on immortality?) might be the common source for both?

(oddly enough, the "silk road" as such is supposed to be more recent than all three, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Chinese_and_Central_... suggest many possibilities for bits to already have been travelling back and forth across eurasia even if trade in atoms had not reached its later heights)

As for the nuptial number: at this point I'm not convinced it isn't just technakos barbar (technobabble)? IIRC elsewhere in the Republic it's argued that the guardian class will reproduce by sending its youth to the ancient greek equivalent of open-air music festivals, where they will camp together letting nature (as with bulls and cows) run its course, so the passage here seems to be a deliberate contrast. (but to what end?)

Edit: think I found it, via source attribution. The speaker of those lines is neither Platon, nor Socrates (whom he supposedly quotes), but the Muses (as "quoted" by "Socrates"): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... in which case technobabble makes perfect sense.

[at one point I ran across a Soviet book on religion —because a colleague had relied upon it in the 01960's to follow the Western CS literature and their use of Easter calculation as a running example— and was amazed at how much detail it went into on minor european sects but disappointed in how relatively broad its coverage was for other continents]

Edit: HN can express the sumerian signs for 3 and cow! 𒐈𒀖

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Have you read any of the older Upanishads? (although I guess for our purposes they seem to be, at earliest, contemporaneous with Zoroaster)

I'm an idiot about the tipitaka: escaping samsara (or least loosening the fetters of maya) is kind of the point; eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39128233