Slashdot Mirror
Science Historian Deciphers Plato's Code
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.
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.
Plato was always talking about mathematics being the language of God, mathematics explaining the heavens, mathematics being central to philosophy, etc. What he got wrong was assuming that something seductively appealing and simple from a mathematical PoV should be assumed to explain the world, rather than actually incorporating empirical evidence to test his models. Whence the Platonic model of the planets, etc.
Dan Brown just came.
It's all Greek to me.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
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.
You misunderstand. The errors are not really errors. They are part of the secret kdawson code.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The summary and press release it links to both completely miss the part where this is "News for Nerds". This paper is apparently the first time Plato's writings have been stichometrically analyzed by computer. Somehow, people have managed to miss him while analyzing other works. Apparently, it was commonplace back then to arrange parts of your work according various mathematical structures, though honestly I'm not sure how you get from that to this press release; I'll have to finish the paper to see if it is reasonable.
Seriously though, RTFP. It's not written very densely at all.
Fortelling assassinations! (This originally being a refutal of Drosnin's "Bible Code" nonsense)
Seriously, in any given cirumstance I'd be extremely skeptical of this stuff. But in this case we don't really know whether all of "Plato's" writings were actually written by Plato, and certainly not if they're verbatim. Given that ancient Greek had five grammatical cases, it didn't have very strict word order (much like Latin). So it's even less of a coincidence if someone manages to string the words together into comprehensible sentences.
I doubt this will be the revolution Dr Kennedy thinks it will be. It'd be interesting to hear what others have to say. But of course, this is a press release, not a real article.
How reputable a journal is Apeiron?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
OK, first of all, never trust a press-release, especially from the researcher's own college or university. No one in research is more self-aggrandizing than those offices are. (The researchers have to face their colleagues later, so tend to be more careful.) If they could get away with it, I'm sure that every press-release would claim a Nobel prize was pending for every discovery.
Second, is the discovery here just that Plato likes math? Because if so... duh? He didn't bury that in his writing, he was pretty clear about that. He loved abstract material. What he was contemptuous of, as I recall, was more "applied" disciplines, like what we'd now call Physics. (He liked Astronomy because it was like math and music. The fact that he made that distinction over Physics tells you how well he grasped how important math was in understanding Nature on Earth as well as in the sky.)
Also, in no way does say, "Hey, math is useful for understanding Nature!" predate Newton. That wasn't Newton's discovery. That wasn't any of his discoveries, in fact. Quite a few Greeks had the notion that mathematics was important to understanding Nature. Pythagoras comes to mind (in his own eccentric was). Heck, the quote about nature being written in mathematics isn't even from Newton, it's a paraphrasing of a well-known quote of Galileo's. (The significance of that distinction is this: Galileo recognized the importance, but he didn't invent Newtonian mechanics. Why? That math is helpful wasn't the important discovery.)
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."
>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
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.
I think the Renaissance was when a sea change in the attitude towards learning began to take hold. Before that, was pretty routine for leaders, especially those whose power rested on religious beliefs, to regard much of education, exploration, and discovery as a waste of time, if not outright subversion. Guilds and other clubs of that sort treated knowledge as proprietary secrets and weren't above murder to preserve those secrets.
So, yes, Plato would have had to hide certain things, or leave them unsaid. The execution of Socrates was certainly a powerful example and motivation.
Why the steganography, though? Why not write it down plainly, and hide the manuscript?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Our brains are the same size and of the same stuff as humans 5000 years ago, so it goes to follow that our philosophical and social habits haven't changed at all. But now, there are 6 billion of us.
Which goes to show, we're really no different from any other living organism. Despite all of the posturing by society to make it sound as if we're somehow more "civilized" now than ever before, the only thing we've actually succeeded in doing is scale up our old behaviors.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Mary Renault's excellent historical novel The Mask of Apollo is a masterful portrait of -- among other things -- Plato and his world. Engaging, informative, and moving: highly recommended.
We commonly think of Plato as a philosopher, and philosophers as unworldly; but Renault reminds us that Plato was also a soldier, a statesman, a man who repeatedly put his life on the line, for his friends and for his ideals, in the face of deadly opposition.
-kgj
Cretin has nothing to do with Crete.
$META_SIG_JOKE
Didn't you ever watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? Everyone knows the Greeks were jacked when they saw Socrates go into a phone booth, disappear and then reappear. Worse, when he came back, he kept trying to tell the Greeks to "be excellent to each other". Unconventional beliefs, indeed.
The final straw came when the Greeks repeatedly insisted there is only one time traveling phone booth, and it belongs to The Doctor. Socrates said, "Nu-huh!" Heresy, indeed.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
"Kdawson, your are an idiot." - I hereby proclaim this to be Sasayaki's law. When insulting someone on the internet, it is likely you will make some horrible spelling or grammar error which results in everyone laughing at you. If you are picking on someone for their own spelling or grammar, the probability of this approaches 1.
This sentance is designated to proof this rule.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
It improves social cohesion and makes warriors less afraid to die. Pretty useful when society is at the tribal stage.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.)