This is Spiritual Data's first newsletter. Spiritual Data was conceived as an idea in August of 2022, and we're still at humble beginnings, but about 150 of you have expressed interest in our cause. Thank you! We also have over 200 users on our Discord server.

What is Spiritual Data?

Our mission is to empower informed decision-making and advance scientific understanding by fostering a collaborative, reliable, and accessible source of truth for spiritual questions.

But while answering spiritual questions is our niche and my motivation to start the project, this is about truth in general and even AI in general. AI needs a reliable model of reality and truth, and now AI can help make it. That’s what we’re doing.

Here’s how we stand out:

1. Extremely open. Open data and open methods is necessary for a fully trusted source of truth. Our code, to do items on Notion, and most of our staff Discord channels are also public. We don’t use intellectual property hiding for revenue.

2. Meta-meta analysis of research. We’re researching evidence-reliability and fundamentally changing how research is analyzed when aggregated together as a whole. What matters is establishing an unbiased source of “current best guesses” about the nature of reality, which can continually improve as more data is added.

3. An AI-first approach. With a computational linguist as a Founder, we seek to automate every part of the process while allowing human correction and addition. This is why we’re not intimidated by the enormity of the task before us. Once the method is established, it will scale and people around the world will have motive to contribute to it (to affect everyone else who relies on it).

Spiritual Data exists to serve the following social causes:

• Personal growth: Provide every individual intellectual autonomy through access to undeniable evidence for spiritual answers and truth that may affect their decisions and accelerate personal growth. → Help individuals

• Science: Personalize science to individual subjective experience. Unblock all areas of science by overcoming bias and considering spiritual explanations. → With data

• Education: Teach evidence-based spiritual knowledge and spiritual science in standard education systems. Enable a culture of sharing spiritual experiences in society and education. → To change the world

What is this newsletter?

Most of you filled out a contributor form and stopped there. If you’re still interested in joining the team but not sure how to get started, check out the joining steps at the same form: https://forms.gle/4hc6D1xEjtQ1BaqZ6

On the other hand, if you just want to learn more, I'd love to keep you updated on our analysis of spiritual data as part of this newsletter (at least monthly).

Examples of the type of information you'll receive:

1. An overview of what we’ve accomplished: the data we’ve gathered, our product releases, our research.

2. What you can expect to see next.

3. Key insights learned from analysis of the data.

4. Transparent updates on our funding status.

Want to see something else? Please reply and let me know!

Join Our Board

As you can tell from the subject line, an urgent priority for Spiritual Data is finding board members so we can register as a nonprofit. If you're interested in becoming a board member, you can fill out this form and/or schedule an initial call with me here: https://calendly.com/spiritualdata/15min

Now sure what it means to be a board member? There are great resources available at nonprofitready.org, including this PDF with an overview: Guide to Be an Effective Board Member

Our Progress

Here's an update on our current status:

1. Product: We have an almost working GPT-powered chatbot that uses results in our database of experiences, research, and hypotheses to answer your questions. If you don’t want to wait, you can use the Character.ai version of a Spiritual Data chatbot here at this link!

2. Methodology: We've experimented with potential methodologies for relating spiritual data to analyze hypotheses, including through prompting ChatGPT and answering a set of questions about each piece of evidence.

3. Data: We have 136 experiences that are manually labeled (5025 experiences in total, mostly near-death experiences), 94 manually entered hypotheses, 26 research papers manually added and labeled.

Here's where we're going this next month:

1. Product: The chatbot prototype is ready for you to test in July! (Then launching the MVP product by the end of this year.)

2. Research Methodology: We're conducting surveys to refine our methods. What is reliable evidence to you? Add your perspective here.

3. Data: We plan to integrate a public dataset of research papers.

4. Business: We aim to establish a non-profit board.

5. Potential hiring: We're looking for board members, a co-founder, and any role, as you can specify this on the form.

Supporting Our Cause

I'm super excited about what's to come and the progress we're making now. To bring Spiritual Data's vision into reality through donations, visit our fundraising campaign here: https://givebutter.com/spiritualdatamvp

We’d love for you to complete this survey to inform our research methodology (we seek everyone’s opinion).

Feel free to share this email, and if anyone else is interested in joining our newsletter they can now do so from spiritualdata.org or this link: https://spiritualdata.beehiiv.com/subscribe

You can reply to this email for suggestions or questions.

Thank you for being a part of our quest for truth!

Sincerely,

Joshua Mathias
Founder, Spiritual Data