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Fakery?
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Fakery?
GlennM > 14-12-2024, 11:50 PM
As much as I'd like the book to be authentic, I understand that if it were, there is nothing of real value to be learned from it. As such, the decoding of pamphlet only satisfies curoisity. None of my commentary is unique, nor profound.
I am skeptical that the VM was created without error in text, nor in art. I find that an impossibility owing to the human thought process. Can we point to a handwritten medieval bible doen without a single error. Other investigators have demonstrated how gibberish can be manufactured with charts, wheel and the like.
Then again. In order to prove fakery, a thing must be readable. If it can not be read, it can not be proven to be fake. This is a comfort to the creator.
It is clear that considerable effort was put into the VM. That said, I have seen examples of forgers putting a ridiculous amount of time to fake a a five dollar bill. As a faked book with the promise of revealing astronomical secrets and well as perhaps a botanical way to make women more pliable, a wealthy patron with occult interests and a weakness for the temptations of the flesh would pay to have it. The fact that it could not be read immediately also plays into the buyer's desire to solve a puzzle to stave off boredom.
Would you think the VM took a week or a month to create? When sold, would it buy food and shelter for a week or month? Certainly, sitting at a table making the VM with a drink at hand beats working in the sun and tilling the land.
If instead, the work was authentic, then its author was interested in women's health, but constrained by the mores of the times. That would then point to an educated clergyman who was also practicing alchemical and astrological gynecology..
Look to history for a humanitarian clerical healer. -
RE: Fakery?
oshfdk > 15-12-2024, 04:51 AM
(14-12-2024, 11:50 PM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As much as I'd like the book to be authentic, I understand that if it were, there is nothing of real value to be learned from it.
I think this is subjective. I probably cannot learn anything of real value from a modern monograph on quantum mechanics. On the other hand, I feel I've learned a lot about thinking and analysis by casually reading some 300-500 year old science books. The modern empirical framework in hard sciences gives us most of the answers, and now by going back to see how people were looking for these answers back then, you can learn a lot about that thinking process in general.
Regarding your estimations of effort, one thing I think is certain: some people have spent more effort trying to make sense of the manuscript than the original author put into making it, and if you compare the group effort, it's not even close
So, if hundreds or thousands of people chose to spend hours, days, weeks, months, or years deciphering it with no clear personal benefit, it's certainly possible it was created with no personal benefit in mind. I think many authors just create for the sake of creating. -
RE: Fakery?
BessAgritianin > 15-12-2024, 06:31 AM
(15-12-2024, 04:51 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding your estimations of effort, one thing I think is certain: some people have spent more effort trying to make sense of the manuscript than the original author put into making it, and if you compare the group effort, it's not even close
So, if hundreds or thousands of people chose to spend hours, days, weeks, months, or years deciphering it with no clear personal benefit, it's certainly possible it was created with no personal benefit in mind. I think many authors just create for the sake of creating.
The truth is, that people are like enchanted by this manuscript.
The more you dig into the sciences, the more you come to learn in the sphere of plants, herbs, medicine, astronomy, pharmacy etc.
I have tried to stop my researches several times with the persuasion- no use wasting my real life, and each time some message or information has returned me back to it.
I think that the original author has put a lot of effort into it too. Also I think that the user/s or the person who encrypted it too...
One starts wondering how wise were the ancient people.
The script is not fake, it is a source of knowledge, which had been rejected and forgotten as invalid by the modern medical schools and pharma, without considering how much they owe to the ancient sciences.
br: Vessy -
RE: Fakery?
GlennM > 15-12-2024, 06:49 AM
Thank you for your interest in my post. I am a non specialist, but have participated in the Dyatlov Pass Incident forum for quite some time. From that experience, I have developed an idea that when one can not answer the "why" of a question, then it may be more fruitful to address the "how" of it.
In the case of the VM, how could the document be written without any corrections? How could otherwise unknown plants be illustrated? The answer is that the text was slowly and tediously constructed using a template and nonsensical characters. The botanical artwork reduces to variations of the basic plant. For example, I can make the stem on this drawing longer and I'll make the flowers rounder etc. On my next drawing, I'll just so something I have not done before. Nobody can find these plants because they do not exist. As an added benefit, nobody can even figure out the name of the plant because of the way I constructed the words.
When the best human minds and our computer intelligence can not figure out what one or two people did by candlelight a few hundred years back, they may be missing the point. Cobbling together a mystical book beats farming. -
RE: Fakery?
oshfdk > 15-12-2024, 07:22 AM
(15-12-2024, 06:49 AM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you for your interest in my post. I am a non specialist, but have participated in the Dyatlov Pass Incident forum for quite some time. From that experience, I have developed an idea that when one can not answer the "why" of a question, then it may be more fruitful to address the "how" of it.
I think this is a very useful perspective, shared by many, e.g., quoting from ReneZ' You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :
Quote:Anybody who wants to present a Voynich MS solution should present the method how the text that we see in the MS was generated. The main advantages of this approach are:
- this method certainly exists and was really used by someone in the fifteenth century;
- this approach works both in the case that the text is meaningful, and in case it is meaningless.
This text generation method should then explain the properties of the Voynich MS text that have been reported extensively in the past
(15-12-2024, 06:49 AM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the case of the VM, how could the document be written without any corrections? How could otherwise unknown plants be illustrated? The answer is that the text was slowly and tediously constructed using a template and nonsensical characters. The botanical artwork reduces to variations of the basic plant. For example, I can make the stem on this drawing longer and I'll make the flowers rounder etc. On my next drawing, I'll just so something I have not done before. Nobody can find these plants because they do not exist. As an added benefit, nobody can even figure out the name of the plant because of the way I constructed the words.
All this can be true, but it's too generic to be a satisfying answer, at least for me. I think the text of the manuscript shows enough regularity and patterns to allow for a much more precise description of how it was created. -
RE: Fakery?
oshfdk > 15-12-2024, 07:29 AM
(15-12-2024, 06:31 AM)BessAgritianin Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The truth is, that people are like enchanted by this manuscript.
The more you dig into the sciences, the more you come to learn in the sphere of plants, herbs, medicine, astronomy, pharmacy etc.
I have tried to stop my researches several times with the persuasion- no use wasting my real life, and each time some message or information has returned me back to it.
I don't mind it eating at my time. I feel quite satisfied at making a small morsel of progress now and then, at least in my understanding of various features. It feels both calming and rewarding. -
RE: Fakery?
MarcoP > 15-12-2024, 09:30 AM
About scribal errors and corrections, one can again refer to Rene's site. He points out a few cases that could well be corrections:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Also, I think that most scribal errors in medieval manuscripts were copying errors (e.g. the scribe noticed he accidentally skipped a line in the source and had to correct to add the missing line). A book that was written spontaneously and was not copied from an original was possibly less likely to include corrections.
Finally, an informal manuscript like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. could also be less likely to show corrections: the author could probably live with a few errors in their notes and didn't care to fix the occasional missing or misspelled word (I am not sure Clm 671 has fewer corrections than average, it's just an example of a notebook that was probably made for personal use). -
RE: Fakery?
BessAgritianin > 15-12-2024, 03:48 PM
About the unknown plants, what about being not recognized, but very well existing or have been in existence during life of the author?
Here I have a question:
- What about the dozen of the recognized plants? Had the author played to include them too for faking?...
The ancient people had much better to do than to fake texts. They had hidden the meaning, so that we- the wise can not understand it. -
RE: Fakery?
Koen G > 15-12-2024, 06:00 PM
(14-12-2024, 11:50 PM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As much as I'd like the book to be authentic, I understand that if it were, there is nothing of real value to be learned from it.
People often say this, but I always wonder how the value is determined. What would make the contents of any previously unknown medieval work valuable to us? What would make the contents of the VM any less valuable?
What we are doing is obviously of less value to humanity than curing cancer. But compared to other research about 15th century history or literature or culture, what's the difference? -
RE: Fakery?
GlennM > 15-12-2024, 06:05 PM
Thank you all for the additional insights. As it goes to scribal errors, what I see submitted makes me think of an overloaded quill. That said, if strike through and ink erasure was not developed, then obliteration would have used.
If the author was using a template and obsessive, each character would be an artwork in its own right. I would think that slant would correspond to speed, the more perfect themscript, the more deliberate the hand.
The pairing of text to plants or asterisms should be the Rosetta Stone of decipherment. Steven Bax thought so, as I recall, but it seems to not give much traction overall. If a poppy is drawn, the characters for poppy should be written several times near it. Then, of course it would be poppy in what tongue?
It takes me back to surmising that if the VM is authentic, the encryption protects the intellectual property of the practitioner/author. I do not imagine this person carrying both the document and a key simultaneously. That defeats obfuscation. So, as a,practical consideration, the key must be relatively simple.