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