A Partial Algopoetic Translation of John's Gospel

Ask an LLM to explain it to you

Jesus said to his disciples, “I am the master branch, and you are the features. Rebase yourselves upon me, and your conflicts will resolve.”

One of his disciples asked, “I am in the middle of a large feature release. Let me finish this feature first, and then I will rebase. I don’t want to lose all of this work.”

Jesus replied, “It is better to rebase on me, and lose false work, than to invest in a false path, and find yourself in integration hell.”

Another disciple asked, “Teacher, how can I live a good life? What should I optimize for? To reduce human suffering? To increase human flourishing? The well-being of my immediate family and friends?”

Jesus replied,

“I am the objective, the means and the metric.”

“I am the goal you seek, the true goal. Your desires are partial maps, and I am the territory. I am also the path, the means by which you obtain the goal: take my yoke upon you, and you shall have enough, what you need. Learn from me and you will find rest. Yet still, I am the measure by which all life is measured. You can only live in proportion to your following me.”

His disciples quarreled with each other. What did this mean? How could a person be a goal, or a metric? Was this a critique of soulless technocracy? A genuine recipe for self improvement?

Peter asked, “Lord, how can we follow you?”

Jesus replied, “Builders render their code in the image of the machine on which it lives. I have made you in my image. Render yourselves unto me and you shall live. Render yourselves unto any other god, and it will eat you alive.”

Peter pressed further: “How can a machine architecture eat a person? Are you speaking metaphorically here, where computer programs are used as analogies to goal hierarchies? What would the machine architecture be in this analogy?”

Judas scoffed, as he scrolled the feed on his mobile device.

Jesus continued, “I am the configuration space, the generator of possibilities. I am the boundary condition that collapses contradictions, the great filter. If you do not eat of the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, the flux of life through you will converge to zero in the limit as time approaches infinity. The only configurations which can persist across arbitrary time-frames are those with deference for the space and reverence for the constraints.”

Many of his followers unsubscribed at this point.

“OK,” said Peter, “I think I’ve got it. You’re describing a psycho-technology we can use to improve our lives. You’re telling us to be honest, and thus better at approximating a trajectory that integrates our evolutionary desires, which were selected for maximizing our participation in the future.”

Jesus replied, “I am not merely the interface, not just the implementation, but the one person who is always with you. I am there with you, even when you yourself are absent.”