Torsten: re-reading your 2019 article and looking at your source code, you term certain high-frequency pairs of glyphs (such as ‘ol’ and ‘dy’) as ‘ligatures’, and yet treat them in the same way as ‘o’ and ‘l’ (i.e. individual glyphs).
* Why was it necessary for you to treat these ‘ligatures’ in a special way in your paper?
* Why would the original person doing the auto-copying have treated them in a special way? (They are not consistently physically joined on the page, so are not actual ‘ligatures’.)
* Why are there so many manually added substitution cases in your code on github?
* Do you not suspect that the presence of so many enforced manual adjustments might be a result of overfitting on your part?
* When your analysis code is so intensely manually manipulated, how is it that you can describe your explanation as simple?
If the text is meaningless, why does anyone want to spend so much words on something that is meaningless?
With that being said, I am not referring to the scribe, but to those people here, who argue for many many many years that the text is meaningless.
If I have something meaningless, like a photo, a text document, or an old book. I throw it out and never talk or look at it again.
Suppose our life is meaningless, would those that argue that, are willing to set up a church in order to promote that viewpoint?
I think not. The energy and research must be on discussing the possible meaning of life, eh text. Not the other way around.
YES, there is repetition. YES, there is a small edit distance. We can all see it. Now, what does it mean? Or could it mean?
The possible explanation: "the scribe is just a repetitive medieval person, who just wants to copy letters, or half-words, and want to spend his time over a long period in meticulous small writings, on expensive material. And he makes these drawings, and he has zero intend to embed anything worthwhile inside the manuscript. As a matter a fact, he avoids any reference to anything that could depict a meaning."
I do not believe that it is possible for a human to do such, hundred of pages. Especially for an educated person.
On the other hand, I see a lot of repetition here on the forum on this subject, over and over again, year after year, the same is being proposed and discussed, hmmmmm, perhaps I am now convinced after all. Yes, yes, I see now, the text is meaningless!! Ok, and now what?
I look forward to the inevitable paper describing a text generation method for forum posts about meaningless text!
One needs to distinguish the meaninglessness of the text and the meaninglessness of the product that contains that text. The text can be meaningless while the book as product is meaningful (sell it and obtain money).
So the discussion of the meaninglessness is not meaningless.
The outcome of such an exercise is also meaningful, as any tests that can identify meaninglessness would have great value when applied to other unknown scripts, languages, ciphers, etc.
Davidsch: Torsten's theory is both interesting and sincerely held - he believes it is sufficient to explain many (though not, I believe, all) of the features of Voynichese text. He is an astute observer, and (I believe) has run tens of thousands of statistical tests to provide the evidence supporting (or, at least, consistent with) his views.
But this also offers a splendid challenge to the rest of us: if we can find things that disprove his autocopying theory (and I think there are several areas where Voynichese is not as straightforward as his presentation makes it out to be), then the things we find to do that might well advance our understanding significantly.
(29-08-2019, 03:20 PM)doranchak Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The outcome of such an exercise is also meaningful, as any tests that can identify meaninglessness would have great value when applied to other unknown scripts, languages, ciphers, etc.
There is no test that can identify meaninglessness in general. Trying an infinite number of known and unknown codes, ciphers and steganography methods with all possible combinations and variants, keys, parameters, on an infinite number of meaningful texts is impossible.
People offering Voynichese "solutions" rarely study the VMS text. They choose an approach and run at it barrels blazing.
But Voynichese has a structure all its own and those who are looking for quick answers don't seem to notice how it differs from natural language patterns. They rarely study or even acknowledge the idiosyncrasies. They shoehorn meaning into it, whether it fits or not.
Torsten is taking a good hard look at it and while I see some aspects of the structure in a different way, I do agree with many of his observations. I only wish those who claim to have solved it would give half as much time and attention to studying the text as he has.
The autocopying theory is a very good example for what i call ahistorical, like the hoax or the fake theory. It has nothing to do with a 15th c. ms., it is a concept of the 21st c. projected onto the 15th c.
(29-08-2019, 03:20 PM)doranchak Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.identify meaninglessness
Wouldn't this be trying to prove a negative, though? I'm a scientist who has never worked in academe or research, but I thought that statements put to the test by scholars are stated in positive terms, that is, they propose something *more* than what's apparent or established, and they get put to the test by scholars trying to prove them wrong. The longer a statement gets tested and fails to be knocked down, the more confidence one can have in assuming it true and given for all practical purposes. The null hypothesis is that the text of the VMS contains no written communication from one sentient and literate being to another. So far, no one has been able to show this statement to be definitively false. There certainly is much *information* in the VMS, and the symbolic forms this information takes certainly *looks* and *feels* communicative and linguistic. But the inability of both scholars and laymen, including skilled and cutting edge information scientists, to parse this raw data in a way that reveals any sort of communication whatsoever is frankly awestriking. Because the null hypothesis, miraculously after some heavy and strategic bombardment, still stands.
I'm sorry to nitpick, it's just that your use of *meaningless* strikes me as imprecise. *Non-communicative* is what I think you're trying to say. On the contrary, I would argue the VMS has been very meaningful to... all present company, really, and a long chain of brilliant and imaginative minds that we remember and whose legacies we carry on. It's a rabbit hole into Wonderland, where nothing is quite as it seems and we look at ourselves and the whole human condition in some odd mirrors. Because as long as there is some new way of processing the VMS's information, there is some new hope that it will yield a message, through centuries of time.
One type of meaning that some who've gone down this rabbit hole have come out with, is that others need to be warned, lest they waste large amounts of time and effort, and come away with nothing but frustration. Since the lack of any apparent message in the VMS's symbols already goes without saying until proven otherwise, what might move someone to state it anyway, in some cases *ad nauseam*? Frustration definitely comes to mind as one possible motivator. The label of *skeptic* does not suit me, but I've read opinion pieces by self-described skeptics defending themselves against stereotypes of curmudgeonly and spoilsport tendencies, and talking about what motivates them to be skeptics. And although my temperament is different, I can see how for them, habitually challenging and investigating any statement of fact that isn't readily apparent or established is a part of their mission in life and an important part of how they engage with the world.