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Science Historian Deciphers Plato's Code

Posted by kdawson on from the rewriting-the-foundations-of-western-civ dept.

Reader eldavojohn tips the news of a researcher in the UK, Jay Kennedy, who has uncovered a hidden code in the writings of Plato. From the University of Manchester press release: "[Dr. Kennedy said] 'I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato. This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.' ... The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea — the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. ... Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure — it was for his own safety. Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher [Socrates] had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death." Here is the paper (PDF), which was published in the journal Apeiron: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy and Science.

27 of 402 comments (clear)

  1. Socrates, not Aristotle by jjohnson · · Score: 4, Informative

    Aristotle was a student of Plato, and lived a long life that didn't end in execution. Socrates was the teacher of Plato who drank Hemlock after being sentenced to death the by the Athenians.

    --
    Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
    1. Re:Socrates, not Aristotle by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 4, Informative

      Furthermore, as if it weren't wrong enough already, Socrates was not executed for heresy but for corruption of youth.

    2. Re:Socrates, not Aristotle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      What's even worse, the circumstances of his death weren't just for corruption of youth, but also for his lack of remorse for his "crimes". In Athenian law, the condemned is permitted to suggest an alternative sentence - exile, imprisonment, a fine - Socrates suggested he pay about the equivalent of $5. The tribunal then voted on whether or not to sentence the condemned to death or this other sentence. He was sentenced to death by a larger margin than he was convicted :).

    3. Re:Socrates, not Aristotle by cheesybagel · · Score: 3, Informative

      You are probably joking, but some of his pupils were some particularly nasty, infamous bloodthirsty tyrants. When Athenian democracy was restored people associated with the tyrants were purged, as per custom.

    4. Re:Socrates, not Aristotle by Capsaicin · · Score: 5, Informative

      Socrates never existed at all. He was a fictional character used as a tool to propose ideas.

      Plato is not the sole reference to Socrates. Xenophon, who would have been around 30 at the putative time of Socrates' death similarly "preserved" Socratic ideas in a series of dialogues.

      Plato's works are all Plato's ideas.

      It's true that we can't safely distinguish the two. However the ideas, and indeed the character of Socrates portrayed in Plato's Apology, differs markedly from those in later works such as The Republic. It seems that Plato began by trying to keep alive the memory of his mentor, but ended by using him as a mere vehicle for his own ideas.

      --
      Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
    5. Re:Socrates, not Aristotle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Plato is not the sole reference to Socrates. Xenophon, who would have been around 30 at the putative time of Socrates' death similarly "preserved" Socratic ideas in a series of dialogues.

      Not to mention Aristophanes; and also sources that are relatively later but derive from independent material, like the Aristophanes scholia, Aristoxenus, Pausanias, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, ...

    6. Re:Socrates, not Aristotle by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative

      A quick check of which editor did the work is almost always a guarantee of how poorly done you can expect it to be. Some of them regularly add an editorial sentence with a spelling error, some are known for cheesy jokes, and one in particular nearly always goes out of his way to make things factually incorrect.

  2. Riiiiight by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Right, and Dan Brown is always right in his books.

    According to Wikipedia

    The oldest surviving manuscript for about half of Plato's dialogues is the Clarke Plato (MS. E. D. Clarke 39), which was written in Constantinople in 895 and acquired by the Oxford University in 1809

    So lets see here, our oldest manuscript is over a thousand years old and we still think that we can accurately "decode" his code? Because everything was faithfully reproduced? Lets see here, some books of the Old Testament of the Bible were written in later than 500 BC and the dead sea scrolls date from around 150 BC - 70 AD depending on who you ask, making the Dead Sea Scrolls a more faithful reproduction more likely than our copies of Plato's writings.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Riiiiight by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Informative

      By over a thousand years old, I was referring to a thousand years after Plato had died, not just the age of the manuscript.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:Riiiiight by vonWoland · · Score: 2, Informative

      Luckily, we have numerous texts and hundreds of years of scholarship. There is good consensus on what is and what is not authentic. This is not some sort of code like in an Enigma machine; you don't need a decoder ring. RTFA.

    3. Re:Riiiiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      at least a billion people (including most of the USA) believe #1.

      I'm fairly confident that most of the USA barely knows anything about Ezekial beyond vaguely recognizing his name as one of those guys in the old testament, much less having a clue what his wheel was.

    4. Re:Riiiiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      You know how I know you didn't read the paper?

      First off, because the author (Kennedy) doesn't ever talk about decoding anything.

      The author uses previous research into Platonic line length to arrive at 35 characters per line on average, and then he uses this line length as a metric into which to divide up the dialogues. So far he's very safe.

      He finds that numbers of lines in dialogues suddenly become very, very round and that the works can be broken apart easily, usually into twelfths. That's his first conclusion. The only major problem here is that he doesn't show his data but keeps pointing to "works in progress," which undermines his credibility somewhat, but not fatally. If what he publishes later bears all this out, he's golden.

      Later on, he uses spurious works attributed falsely to Plato as a control group to see whether or not the roundness of lines and the twelve-fold structure is valid, and he finds that the control group, in which he didn't expect to find the same characteristics as the experimental, indeed does not conform to the same principles. So far, so good.

      Kennedy looks at the twelve part structure and determines that ideas or shifts of tone seem to follow a progression strongly correlated to what we understand of ancient musical theory, which makes a lot of sense given that Plato knew some of this (Plato mentions Damon of Athens, a math/music theorist, repeatedly). Basically, he's connected a lot of dots that classicists already had in front of them but hadn't assembled yet.

      I have no clue where the fuck the Slashdot summary came from, but it's horribly, horribly wrong both in terms of summarizing the research and in terms of general history (Aristotle as Plato's teacher?).

      As for the age of the manuscripts—the whole point of the exercise is to work on larger chunks of ideas, not on individual characters like in those BS "Bible Code" shenanigans. While the exact character for character accuracy of ancient texts is a problem at times and for some texts (we call that textual criticism), it's not such a big deal for Plato, and it's definitely trivial when working at the scale of ideas and moods rather than individual characters.

    5. Re:Riiiiight by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Informative

      Pretty close to most. I've read estimates that place evangelicals at around 40% of the population, maybe a little less. That's just evangelicals; another 25-40% consists of other religions, though not fundamentalist. While non-fundamentalist Protestants may not believe the earth is 6500 years old, and may believe the Adam and Eve story is allegory, I'm pretty sure they believe most of the other crazy things, such as God appearing as a burning bush.

      Again, which is more plausible? God appears as a burning, talking bush, or someone was hallucinating, or flat-out lying to get people to do his bidding? Well, most of the USA believes the former.

    6. Re:Riiiiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The author uses previous research into Platonic line length to arrive at 35 characters per line on average, and then he uses this line length as a metric into which to divide up the dialogues. So far he's very safe.

      He finds that numbers of lines in dialogues suddenly become very, very round and that the works can be broken apart easily, usually into twelfths. That's his first conclusion. The only major problem here is that he doesn't show his data but keeps pointing to "works in progress," which undermines his credibility somewhat, but not fatally.

      I have just now attempted to check the accuracy of the article's counts. They're not staggeringly good.

      I have taken the TLG text of the Symposium, stripped everything but letters of the Greek alphabet, divided it into 35-character chunks (not finished yet, since I'm having to do it manually; Unicode Greek causes serious hiccups in automated search-and-replaces done with regular expressions).

      Kennedy claims that in the Symposium "Pausanias’ speech is aligned with the point two-twelfths of the way through the dialogue," which according to Kennedy is 2400 lines long. Based on that, Pausanias' speech should start very close to line 400. In fact it starts at line 377, an error of -23 lines. Not miles off, but hardly exact enough to be very striking. Eryximachos' speech is supposed to start at the three-twelfths point, i.e. line 600; in fact it starts at line 619, i.e. an error of +19 lines.

      If we're allowed to have errors ranging from -23 to +19 in 200-line chunks, there's really no argument to be based on precision. Colour me unimpressed.

    7. Re:Riiiiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Addendum: I've now divided the Symposium into 35-character lines. This dialogue, which Kennedy talks about on pages 7-8, 10-11, 14-15, and 17-18, works out as follows. I offer no interpretation of the differences between Kennedy's claims and the actual figures, except to acknowledge a very approximate correlation.

      Total length of dialogue

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 10): 2400 lines.
      • Actual: 2375 lines plus 2 characters (error: -25 lines).

      Pausanias' speech

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 7): begins at line 400, lasts 200 lines.
      • Actual: begins at 377 (-23), ends at 599, i.e. lasts 222 lines (+22).

      Eryximachos' speech

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 7): begins at line 600, lasts 200 lines ("including the repartee over Aristophanes' hiccups": cherry-picking?).
      • Actual: speech extends 619-758 (139 lines); repartee extends 599-778, i.e. 179 lines (-21).

      Aristophanes' speech

      • Kennedy's claim (pp. 7-8): begins at line 800.
      • Actual: begins at 778 (-22).

      Agathon's speech

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 8): ends at line 1200.
      • Actual: ends at 1180 (-20).

      Socrates' speech

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 8): lasts 600 lines "including his conversations with Agathon and Diotima".
      • Actual: extends lines 1180-1833, i.e. 653 lines (+53).

      Alcibiades' speech

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 8): lasts 400 lines.
      • Actual: extends lines 1955-2302, i.e. 347 lines (-53).
    8. Re:Riiiiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Addendum to the addendum: those interested in verifying my results may find it useful to have the Symposium chunked into 35-character lines. plain text; ODT version; PDF version.

    9. Re:Riiiiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      AC claimed regarding the Symposium in the post above:

      Total length of dialogue

      • Kennedy's claim (p. 10): 2400 lines.
      • Actual: 2375 lines plus 2 characters (error: -25 lines).

      But in the linked plain text file there are only 1532 full 35-character lines. The ODF and PDF have 2375 lines. Each file has the same beginning lines and ending lines; the text missing from the plain text file begins at line 824 of the ODF/PDF and runs for 843 lines.

      Anyone wishing to verify AC's results ought to use the ODF or PDF, or even better his or her own version of the text.

  3. Aristotle? Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Kdawson, your are an idiot. You're dumber than a pack of matches. I've had cats smarter than you. My cats have had hairballs that are smarter than you.

    Even Bill and Ted knew the difference between Aristotle and Socrates. You're dumber than Bill and Ted.

    Seriously. Re-evaluate your life, dude. You're doing the wrong thing.

  4. Philosophy graduates/phds in the house? by ThorGod · · Score: 3, Informative

    How reputable a journal is Apeiron?

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    PS: I don't reply to ACs.
    1. Re:Philosophy graduates/phds in the house? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Simply: it's not. It's a crank journal, which specializes in publishing papers other journals won't touch with a ten foot pole. That doesn't mean that once in a while a proper paper can't filter through the dross, but you should be careful what you accept coming from such a source.

    2. Re:Philosophy graduates/phds in the house? by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Informative

      Watch your step there, friend! There are apparently two journals with that name, quite different from one another.

      The traditional academic journal, apparently out of UT Austin's philosophy department: Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science

      Then the online journal: Apeiron, Studies in Infinite Nature.

      This paper was published in the UT academic journal, not the (somewhat questionable looking) online journal.

      Beyond that, I have no experience with the UT publication or its track record.

  5. Actually, heresy is a better description by brokeninside · · Score: 3, Informative

    What he was actually accused of most frequently gets translated into English as 'impiety.' There were multiple counts of impiety according to Plato's retelling. Some of these were inclusive of corruption of the youth but others involved introducing "strange new doctrines."

  6. Re:Good article by Randle_Revar · · Score: 3, Informative

    >It seems little has changed in the day to day affairs of man.

    Not only has it not changed much in 2,400 years, if you read about ancient Mesopotamia, you will find that not much has changed in 5,000 years

    --
    Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
  7. Depends on which Apeiron by brokeninside · · Score: 4, Informative
    If it's the one put out by the school of philosophy at UT Austin, it's very reputable. If it's the forum for 'dissident' researchers and opinions not accepted by the conventional system, not so much.

    That said, his thesis doesn't sound all that far fetched to me. A large number of interpreters of Plato through the ages have argued for a "hidden" doctrine. And Plato's emphasis on mathematics is unquestioned. He would not accept anyone into his school that did not already have a good grasp of mathematics. The real question is whether Kennedy is just picking up noise or has found a legitimate code.

    I'm a bit doubtful mostly because we know next to nothing about what ancient Greek music. There are various reconstructions, but it's all highly speculative.

  8. Cretin != Cretan by LandruBek · · Score: 2, Informative

    Cretin has nothing to do with Crete.

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    $META_SIG_JOKE
    1. Re:Cretin != Cretan by beanyk · · Score: 4, Informative

      Your link is to a subscription service. More accessible (though not as impressive) is the dictionary.com definition:

      http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cretin

  9. Bullshit by FLuke27 · · Score: 2, Informative

    His website: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy

    Here's the argument, as far as I can tell.
    1. Plato's dialogues contain certain patterns.
    2. These patterns could only have been put there intentionally.
    3. These patterns show Plato was a Pythagorean.
    4. Therefore Plato was many centuries ahead of his time.

    Regarding the premise (1), sure, everything sufficiently complex will contain lots of patterns. The late Martin Gardner has written some articles about common statistical fallacies that may be relevant here (some are in Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus IIRC). The more data there is to sift through, the more likely one can find a certain complex pattern. He's mostly looking at the lengths and locations of certain sections, within sizeable bodies of text, so it's no surprise he came across certain patterns, especially lengths in fractions of 12, and appearances of "positive" or "negative" issues (e.g., beauty or disease). The existence of the patterns does not support (2), even though some examples have been found that fit the author's specifications fairly precisely. It would take deliberate work to avoid producing any such patterns in long written works (like the Symposium, one of Plato's longest dialogues, which is one of the author's targets), so the patterns hardly show intention. (I'm simply granting the author's premises about the correct way to represent the dialogues, whose exact contents are not entirely known, due to transcription errors, small gaps, etc.)

    Nor does (2) support (3). Pythagoreanism was a cult combining mysticism, mathematics, and music, and Pythagoreans worked out the "circle of fifths" from which we get the common 12-note musical scale, and some other very basic Western music theory. We know independently that Plato was influenced by Pythagoreans. But Plato's writing something that happens to contain a few 12-based patterns hardly constitutes an allusion to, let alone an endorsement of, Pythagoreanism or any principle of it. And the author's calling the collections of issues that come up at these intervals "harmonic" or "disharmonic" (rather than, e.g. "relevant", "contrary", or any other way we might connect the given pairs or triples of issues the author mentions in the paper) hardly shows any musical allusion on Plato's part.

    Finally, (3) does not support (4), the sexiest claim mentioned in the summary and press release (and on the author's website). If it did, we could just as well say the Pythagoreans anticipated the scientific revolution, etc. Well, in a nearly empty sense they did, just like Democritus anticipated early 20th-century atomic physics (although the former "anticipation" is more vague and tenuous). Some people thousands of years ago said a few things that turned out to be more or less right. This does not show they knew things not widely known until much later, because they lacked sufficient justification for their beliefs. If you speculate enough, as early scientist/philosophers tended to do, you will occasionally get something right. Big whoop.

    So as far as I can tell, this paper (and the other writings available on his website) contains a terrible argument for an obviously false conclusion. (Disclaimer: although I'm a philosopher, I'm not an expert on Plato or any other ancients.)