[split] Did the VM go straight from cerebellum to vellum?

[qoltedy]

The conversation here so far seems to have assumed there's a binary choice to be made between "straight from brain to vellum" and "rough draft on paper."  But aren't there other possibilities besides those?

For example, what if some clever encipherment scheme involved moving tokens around a counting board (as people did at the time when working a problem in arithmetic) and then writing down the result only after it had been safely figured out?

There are plenty of "mathematical" schemes I could imagine for enciphering and deciphering text using counting boards.  These processes might seem cumbersome to us, since we're not used to the technology -- but many people were quite adept at using counting boards in the fifteenth century and might have found this kind of work a lot more comfortable and familiar than, say, looking up values in a table.

Given such an arrangement, it might still have been advantageous to prepare a plaintext rough draft on paper, but what value would there have been in preparing an enciphered rough draft on paper?

This dynamic could explain the cases where it looks like text was written out in short discontinuous bursts, and it would solve the problem of how a moderately complex cipher could respect contingent line breaks without a writer risking the "insanity" of composing directly on vellum.

I'm not especially invested in the specific scheme I've just laid out.  But if some details seem hard to square with either the "brain to vellum" or "rough draft on paper" position, maybe it's worth our while to try to think outside that box.

I think that while such speculation is useful for coming up with potential new ideas about the VMS, ultimately a true "solution" would have an overarching, cohesive narrative. If you can come up with an internally consistent narrative which is also consistent with the evidence, then that's great, and could help in developing a potential overall solution.

The reason why this conversation has shifted to a binary, of Brain-to-vellum by an individual, vs multiple scribes copying an earlier text, is because each theory provides an overall narrative which could potentially explain multiple pieces of evidence at once. I think such hypotheses, which create an overall narrative which can explain more things at once, are where VMS speculation should head to potentially develop actually testable and falsifiable theories.

Personally, what interests me most about the VMS is to evaluate a "grand unified theory of the VMS". Some overarching narrative which explains all of the evidence perfectly coherently, makes falsifiable predictions, and those predictions prove correct. If you can come up with a cohesive overall narrative which combines multiple perspectives, I would encourage it and be interested to hear what your overall narrative is. 

Otherwise, I think making piecemeal theories doesn't necessarily explain the evidence better.