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.

Comments

Socrates, not Aristotle

[jjohnson]

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.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Anonymous Coward]

Morons.

Not "morons", it's "cretins", you cynic.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[maxwell demon]

"Think of the children" obviously already worked back then.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[maxwell demon]

Aristotle was a student of Plato

Wait a minute, those people were real?

Even more, they were rational!

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Big_Monkey_Bird]

Well, Socrates was executed for being a radical.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Capsaicin]

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.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[SlappyBastard]

No, Aristotle was exiled to Mexico and was assassinated by Spanish Communist with an ice axe. Shit, doesn't anyone check facts any more? What is this shit? Uncyclopedia?

Dan Brown just came.

[MessedRocker]

Dan Brown just came.

Re:Dan Brown just came.

[maxume]

Yeah, right, because the first thing he is worried about is having some basis in reality.

Re:Dan Brown just came.

[gijoel]

Well in an eerie parrellel to Dan Brown's novel, the scientist only made this discovery after being chased around Athens by an Albino.

Turns out the poor guy was trying to give his wallet back.

Riiiiight

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Riiiiight

[Grishnakh]

What, you don't think George W. Bush is a reptilian?

As for Erich von Daniken, his theories are far more sound than the things that the majority of humanity believes. After all, he believes that alien astronauts came in ancient times and influenced human development, and that this explains religious writings, such as the Wheel of Ezekiel.

Compare this to a majority of Earth's population, who believe that various religious writings are actually real, and the work of an omnipotent, omniscient "god" (or gods), and that these gods have actually visited humans and still talk to them.

Which one is the "kook"? It seems pretty obvious to me that Erich's ideas, while fairly silly-sounding, are less fantastical than the things that most living humans believe.

If you don't buy Erich's ideas, what's your explanation for the Wheel of Ezekiel? The way I see it, there's three or four possibilities:
1) (which just about all Christians believe, comprising at least 1 billion people) that Ezekiel really was visited by God.
2) that Ezekiel was visited by an alien spacecraft.
3) that Ezekiel was piss-drunk, or on some drug and hallucinating
4) that Ezekiel was a shyster of some kind and was lying

Obviously, #3 and #4 are the most plausible, and would fit Occam's Razor the best. However, if you have to choose between #1 and #2, which one is more plausible? #2, easily. Spacecraft are unlikely, but not impossible, and much more likely and allowable by the laws of physics than #1. However, at least a billion people (including most of the USA) believe #1. So if you think von Daniken is a nutcase, what does that say about most Americans, just about all Latin Americans, many Europeans, most Jews, etc.?

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Aristotle? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Aristotle? Really?

[maxwell demon]

You misunderstand. The errors are not really errors. They are part of the secret kdawson code.

Completely misses the "News for Nerds" bit

[IICV]

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.

Well, let's not forget the Moby Dick code!

[MoellerPlesset2]

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.

Re:Philosophy graduates/phds in the house?

[John Whitley]

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.

Depends on which Apeiron

[brokeninside]

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.

Plato in "The Mask of Apollo"

[handy_vandal]

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.

Re:Cretin != Cretan

[beanyk]

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

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

He was executed for time travel

[SlappyBastard]

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.

Re:Aristotle? Really?

[Sasayaki]

"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.