| > 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? |
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