Rosettes and Revelations Pt.1: The Holy City - Koen Gheuens and Cary Rapaport

[Mark Knowles]

It is extremely rare in the world of Voynich theories to see people reacting positively to negative criticism.

I think people don't react well to negative criticism for obvious reasons. When you have spent time and energy developing a theory to have someone to take it apart and damage or destroy the theory is unpleasant. It is as though you had constructed a house only for someone to reduce it to dust with a blow. Our own ego and identity is often tied up with our own theories. To be told a theory is wrong can feel like a personal insult to one's intelligence like calling someone stupid or foolish; and nobody likes that. When you have worked hard to build something with pride and effort you become attached to it and don't feel happy to have it damaged.

But if there a uni-reality, by that I mean one reality then there is only one explanation and multiple explanations cannot be true. Maybe it would be nicer if all our theories could be true simultaneously like schrodinger's cat, simultaneously alive and dead. Maybe in a quantum world or multiverse they can be.

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It is extremely rare in the world of Voynich theories to see people reacting positively to negative criticism.

So, of course, we all as human beings have a tendency towards confirmation bias. We are not perfect science or history investigating machines. This is true not just of people researching the Voynich. None of us amateur researchers are going to lose our career or our source of income or probably our social status by being wrong. So in some ways it could be argued that we might be less prone to confirmation bias. Human individual personal interests can often stand in the way of collective progress in the advancement of knowledge. On balance we would all prefer our theories to be right not wrong. We are not indifferent machines.