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+--- Thread: Exploited savant hypothesis (/thread-3611.html)
Exploited savant hypothesis - byatan - 27-07-2021
While describing how the large number of rules the text obeys should preclude, in the event of a hoax or gibberish text, a generation without external aids, I had to stop for a second, because usually human brains decide on "can't" before physics actually forces it.
In the event that the text is (at least mostly) meaningless, could it still have been generated without (or mostly without) external aids, in spite of being incredibly regular?
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With these capabilities in mind, it doesn't seem of the question that a human brain could do something on the order of complexity of generating the ms text.
Savants have been mentioned before, but as far as I'm aware this is always in the context of the savant directing (for whatever reasons) his execution of the work. I think this is very unlikely because the kind of abilities like this tend (as far as I'm aware) to exist in people with very low general intelligence. Such a person would likely be directed by others, if at all.
Although Steve Wozniak is not exactly a savant, he is an example of someone with incredible powers whom another human used as a tool to accomplish their own goals. And maybe you are using the product of that venture to access this forum. It is not hard (other things equal) to imagine an enterprising person in the early 1400s who knew a savant who has an ability to produce real-looking nonsense text. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create (for whatever purpose) a work of art that other humans would go nuts not understanding.
First point against this hypothesis is that it might be a stretch to imagine a savant who has the circumstances where he is able to access writing materials and show / develop this talent, and then meet the right person to take it to the next level.
Second point is that it's hard to imagine such an oddly idiosyncratic rulebase coming out someone's intuition, although that should be a predictable consequence of savants having very different capabilities and possibly architecture.
Third point is the odd illustrations are still hard to explain. *edit* Actually, I no longer think this is the case, because anyone capable of organizing the creation of this thing would predictably want weird drawings and that should be within the capabilities of some available artists.
Fourth point, separate hands. But, maybe the savant dictated, maybe his writing was absolute crap and others actually copied it to the ms, etc.
I'm not sure how anyone would ever prove this without additional historical information coming to light, but a very good start would be to find present-day humans who can intuitively generate large amounts of valid looking (or at least intriguing) but completely nonsense text. Luigi Serafini comes to mind, but as far as I'm aware he's neither a savant nor of low intelligence. I also don't know anything about the properties of the text and it's not clear from what I can find whether or to what degree it was actually generated intuitively. But, as far as I know, the CS text is only superficially similar to the VMS text in the sense that they are both unintelligible and does not have anywhere near the same regularity.