Joshua Mathias founded Spiritual Data in 2022 after a transformative learning experience which resulted in leaving the Mormon / Christian religion and diving into spiritual science (for more details, see https://psychicjourneys.substack.com/p/a-journey-of-psychic-journeys-part?r=51t7hh and Joshua's Spiritual Data Story).
Realizing that subjective feelings were not enough to be certain of truth, Joshua sought more objective data and scientific research to inform spiritual questions. He found near-death experiences. Using his coding skills, he created a copy of nderf.org’s database and started analyzing these against potential hypotheses as evidence for or against. Using Notion, he divided data into three databases: experiences, research, and hypotheses. Through manual searching, he ranked the evidence for and against his personal spiritual questions, to have some reasonable basis for his life changing decisions. But this was just a short-term solution. As a computational linguist, he knew such hypothesis testing could be automated.
Spiritual Data started as a Discord community, and then Joshua recruited others to the cause through WellFound. Steadily, more and more people join out of interest, and a few contribute effectively to the cause. For 2023, Joshua’s goal was to create a chatbot for people to interact with the data (at this point, primarily near-death experiences). Through assistance from the product manager Saad and the full stack developer Hassan, this effort was successful by the end of the year. The following year, Spiritual Data also published a a custom GPT called “NDE GPT” to interact with the experiences database.
Spiritual Data’s initial chatbot has gained a small amount of interest and users, but the long-term goal has always been to use AI to automatically calculate and rank “truths.” In 2024, Joshua had a goal to spend 100 hours focused specifically on R&D for the truth estimation algorithm, and he accomplished that. This resulted in extensive technical and conceptual diagrams, meditation to solve the toughest technical questions, and then a draft of the code for the Concept AI framework. With AI assistance, this effort continues to accelerate at a rapid pace.
If you’re interested in our AI technology, check out https://conceptai.solutions for more details and to sign up for our API waitlist.
Input: A question or statement
Output: A list of hypotheses with how likely they are true, based on a knowledge graph filled with evidential data
In 2024, a new board member Petra Frese suggested we use mental health as an opportunity to apply Spiritual Data in a meaningful way and to seek donations. Consequently, we decided to prioritize the “Outcome Chat” AI experience. The outcome chat uses the Concept AI trust estimation framework to understand a user’s subjective situation, understand their desired outcome, and then recommend solutions based on.
Not only does this enable the combination of spiritual data and mental health research. This outcome chat can be used for other personal development goals, psychic ability development, and learning.
Typical AI chat bots can provide great plans. However, how likely am I to actually achieve the outcome if I follow the plan? Is it taking every research field into account and all historical data, not just the top results? By taking reliability to the next level, not only are the recommendations more accurate; we’re also more motivated to follow them and to ask in the first place.
Spiritual Data seeks to revolutionize science. To do this, we seek to assist researchers and receive their feedback. The parapsychologist Patrizio Tressoldi is encouraging this effort and collaborating with Spiritual Data to:
In addition, we expect researchers to play a key role in verifying Concept AI’s domain knowledge and to add ideas, theories, and hypotheses for the AI solution to confirm against current data.