23-11-2025, 05:47 AM
(23-11-2025, 04:41 AM)Mark Knowles wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Those criteria make it unlikely you will ever accept it is genuine.
1) "which cannot be mistaken for anything but the Voynich". This gives you a lot of room to deny it. Firstly there is likeky to be no comprehensive description surviving and even if there were you could easily claim it wasn't sufficient or that Voynich might have been aware of it and was influenced by it.
It surprises me that you also feel "... there is likely to be no comprehensive description surviving...", which of course means that you don't feel the descriptions in the Carteggio, the 1903 catalog entry, and the "Wildmann" references are sufficiently comprehensive. And also, that you don't feel it likely that a sufficiently "comprehensive description" will turn up.
So we do agree sometimes. But I think I was very clear what I would consider proper evidence, and why that level has not been reached. You are welcome to not believe me, I can't do anything about that, I can only tell you what my standards are.
Quote:2) "which was provably out of reach for Voynich in his lifetime" It is was probable that none of the missing pages survive and I suspect that very few documents were provably out of reach to Voynich which could certainly give you enough wriggle room to give he may have seen it or a reference to it.
Why do you assume I would WANT "wiggle room"? I don't care if this turns out to be genuine. Not at all. It matters not at all to me what it is, and I have demonstrated this by having my opinion changed several times already. Each time, I didn't mind at all, and I wouldn't again.
Quote:3) They is no reason to believe that the Voynich was part of a collection of texts and so to expect that it was is a mistake. Even if it was you could claim that Voynich saw one of the sister works and that it was what he based his forgery on.
Again you are deciding that my reaction would be different than what I have told you it would be. But in any case, you missed the point I was making in finding any of this evidence, should it exist: That any such evidence be in a place which it would have been impossible for Voynich to have seen it. In fact, the last "wall" to my believing Modern Forgery the most likely possibility was the incorrect assertion that the letters of the Carteggio were "Under lock and seal". I did believe that, for a time, and it held back my theory.
But when I realized that was not at all true, it made me realize all my other suspicions were now plausible problems. But if some other, and obvious, evidence was found, and out of reach of Voynich, of course I would accept it, as I once did accept "Under lock and seal". I'd look to see if he could have seen it, of course... and I would hope you would, too... but if not, then it would be proof the Voynich was real.
Quote:4) Your criteria for textual content is so vague that you could easily deny the Voynich text fitted them.
Clearly, the overwhelming probability from what we currently know is that the manuscript is geninue. However, I really find it very hard to conceive of any plausible evidence that could exist that will can your mind. And as in the case of your dodecahedron theory I don't find your arguments persuasive.
I have no problem with that at all. We have vastly different standards of proof... everyone does. Mine may be much harsher than yours, fine. And I don't claim my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to be the correct one... there are several others I consider very plausible also. But whether you or I consider mine or anyone else's ideas the correct one is not up to us: They are what they are, and we can't change that.
And that might sound like an obvious point, but I often get the idea that many have a sense that if they can convince others that something is true, then it will be true; and if we convince them it is false, then it will be false. I think that is the root of the mistaken idea that "Consensus is Science": That if enough of the right people believe something, then it is that something.
I reject that illusion, and warn myself against it constantly. This is the reason I have used the internet screen name "proto57" for over 20 years... the "proto" is for Protagoras (the 57 is my birth year). Anyway, Protagoras was a humanist, and his famous saying was, "Man is the measure of all things- what is, that it is; what is not, that it is not".
That was not saying that man could make things what they are, it was only a reminder that their perception of things was not reality, not the truth... only a man-made illusion, which may or may not be true. I can't, you can't, no one can "make" the Voynich or the Roman Dodecahedron anything they aren't, we can only try to figure out what they really are. Again, I know that may sound obvious and simplistic to many... but from thousands of such discussions over the years, I have long come to believe that many don't actually realize this, or think about it, and are under some illusion they are deciding what the Voynich actually is.
Nope. Not at all. So I don't care what the Voynich is, because I understand that I am not deciding what it is, I cannot make it something it is not. I can't, and no one can. Whatever it is, it is, and that is not up to me or you.
Rich