Project Vision 21

Under certain circumstances, completely disparate and unconnected stories suddenly seem to intertwine in such a way that, in doing so, they reveal something about reality that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. That is precisely what happened to me recently when I read almost simultaneously a story about archaeology in Turkey and another about an ancient historian.

One story focused on recent archaeological findings in southeastern Turkey revealing T-shaped pillars, similar to those at Göbekli Tepe, in Adıyaman and in a wider region known as Taş Tepeler.

These megalithic pillars are associated with early Neolithic ritual architecture, and their distribution suggests a broad cultural and symbolic horizon long before the emergence of cities or writing, challenging previous models that considered Göbekli Tepe an isolated phenomenon.

The other article explained the use of AI to determine whether two passages included in the work of Flavius ​​Josephus, a 1st-century Jewish historian, that refer to Jesus, are authentic passages (i.e., belong to the original text) or were later interpolated or modified. According to the new hypothesis, the passages would be authentic, and not added later.

At the same time, the study of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum would indicate that, although real, the mentions of Jesus in Josephus's work would be, at best, ambiguous and most likely contrary to the central figure of Christianity, so the traditional translations of Josephus would be incorrect.

But what do these stories have in common? A superficial connection is that both focus on the past, whether 12,000 years ago at Göbekli Tepe or 2,000 years ago. Another, also superficial, connection is the use of AI to conduct the respective research. With a little reflection, another, deeper connection emerges: we are constantly reinterpreting the past. In other words, these are stories that remind us how limited or ambiguous the evidence of the past is, and that, for this very reason, it must be reinterpreted, challenged, and reestablished through continuously emerging historical narratives. And this is not a matter of historical revisionism, but rather that new evidence leads to a re-examination of all previous evidence.

At the same time, these stories show us that everything we know about the past we know in the present, and everything we know consists of fragments of the past. That is, every past is reconstructed from partial and fragmentary evidence that, if it doesn't fit perfectly into current narratives, will be condemned to a peripheral existence in the historical narrative.

And that led me to think that our relationship with the future is even more fragmented than our relationship with the past. In both cases, we only have clues, but not truths. Therefore, we construct stories and narratives so that the uncertainty that surrounds us does not become intolerable.

The past has become destabilized, and the future has become unrecognizable. Narratives have become external and disconnected from all wisdom.