Another contestant in the competition here. Really great stuff from Casey! I'd strongly recommend all those interested in more updates to join the discord server:
How much of that website is true and how much is fluffing his own project/research? It would be good to have at least some external or independent links on this topic. As it stands it reads more like marketing and less like research, which doesn't mean anything necessarily but does make me skeptical.
I am not in any way qualified to assess the quality of his research as this is completely outside my scope of practice, but I am failing to detect any marketing in what is an interesting open source (and possibly forfeiting or foregoing the rules of the prize) disclosure of something that he believes is a progression of the subject under discussion, and will ultimately lead to further progression; or alternatively lead to dismissal if the methods disclosed turn up nothing of further benefit.
Seems like someone who is pretty into the scientific method, and, more importantly, spirit, to me?
My dad, the eternal optimist, suggested I try doing a statistical approach to edge pattern matching of an eggshell as a project. His goal was to do the fragment reassembling for Hebrew scrolls. This was in the Vax 11/780 days. I think it would be more feasible now. (He did stylometry at Edinburgh uni as a hobby alongside more serious CS/VLSI work. I declined to try, the problem was too big for me)
I'm a Classicist (and non-Christian), hadn't heard of Richard Carrier before, it's an interesting list, though the guy's anti-Christian bias infuses it so much it's a little hard to take him seriously. He's got some odd conspiracy theories about Nero, for example. And for someone with his perspective you might imagine an intact copy of Josephus prior to the later Christian edits would seem like it would be #1 on the list, but since he's a Mythicist he doesn't mention Josephus at all, since in Josephus you have a few mentions of Jesus as a historic figure which is evidence against the Mythicist belief, esp. given the chronology.
Ancient Rome was such a hotbed of conspiracy theories that familiar tropes today, such as Nero's slaughter of Christians, stand on extremely shaky ground. The texts we have today were selectively preserved, and unreliably transcribed. We have exactly zero original manuscripts of any of what historians are obliged to rely on. Everyone writing the history preserved was biased, and much of it was doctored by medieval monks, often by accident. E.g., we now know, reliably, that a single-letter transcription error produced "peace on Earth and goodwill toward men" from the original (in Greek, of course) "peace on Earth for men whom God favors".
Every last scrap of documentary evidence of the beginnings of Christianity was deliberately, openly, proudly torched by the early Church, so every conventional fact stands on extremely shaky ground. Consensus among current scholars not pledged to uphold Church doctrine is that the entirety of the New Testament, absent about half of Paul's letters, is wholly fictional. Paul, of course, had his own biases. It is still possible that some anecdotes are based on factual events, but we have no reliable reason to believe any in particular. Opinions vary.
People invested in current consensus should want to have actually-reliable documentation for any factual basis for any of it. It is just possible that there really was a Jesus from Nazareth at the center of Christianity. It is even just barely possible that this Jesus was crucified, maybe even in something like the manner now believed. (Zombie dinner parties afterward, not so much.)
The guy's a crank-historian and if you stick with him you'll follow in his footsteps. The ancient world is certainly quite interesting, I can tell this guy snarks at Ehrman, it's worth reading Ehrman on his own since he's a professional historian rather than a crank, and it's with looking at what else is out there that professional historians are up to. There's the chance of doing good work outside the academy, but then there's this Richard Carrier crank kind of pop-history preaching to a specific kind of converts.
The one reliable thing you can say about Richard Carrier is that surprisingly many otherwise pretty-sensible, competent people, Ehrman among them, absolutely lose their f'in minds when anything about him comes up. He might be wrong about some things, but he is certainly right about others. Which each is will become clear as more books are restored from Herculaneum.
Carrier is unpopular among Christians and crypto-Christians for obvious reasons that should not affect the rest of us. He is a well-taught, peer-certified, and articulate historian who is unafraid to take up opinions unpopular with retired colleagues. There is no reason to lose your mind about him: if you disagree with him, identify specific reasons why, and express exactly those. Be prepared to deal with Bayesian statistics reasoning, something old historians often have difficulty with.
The Historicist vs Mythicist debate is not about Christian vs rationalists or whatever you imagine. It's about evidence-based history vs conspiracy theorists. Using Bayes to rationalize the conspiracy of an invention of Jesus is fine with him since he's a crank and no professional historians are engaged with his work so he can make up whatever conspiracy theories he likes. In the end the Mythicist position always requires a conspiracy to explain why the documents we have exist as they do, while the Historicist position would apply Occam's Razor to inventing that conspiracy.
Anyway, the reality is that Josephus exists, a Jewish historian writing about the history of Judaea less than fifty years after Jesus's death who mentions Jesus's existence. The Mythicists have to deny what is actually slam-dunk evidence by ancient historical standards to hold their position which is why it's always been the territory of cranks.
It's really funny that in this day and age it's atheists who are driving along tedious religiously-motivated debates about the ontological nature of the person of Jesus. It's doubly funny that the self-proclaimed rationalists cling to a conspiracy theory and deny evidence. Anyway there's a lot more to the ancient world worth learning about, but I'd recommend learning from historians who are professionals to avoid openly biased cranks with a religious axe to grind.
We have no reliable documentary evidence. The Josephus we have is all based on a single manuscript held by Eusebius. The consensus position of historians is that the Testimonium Flavianum is, at minimum, heavily doctored, so is objectively useless as evidence one way or the other. Other independent sources are all similarly copies of copies performed by monks. Thus, any conclusion is no better than opinion. Nobody needs to invent conspiracy theories about the early Church: all the early sources we have absolutely revel in conspiracy theories, and boast of torching whole libraries of heresy.
Mainstream historians, as a rule, don't touch Christian origins with a ten-foot pole because the independent evidence remaining, a tiny handful of quotes that all fit on literally one page, stinks to high heaven, and is guarded by legions of hornets' nests. They have plenty of more productive ways to spend their time. Does it matter, ultimately, if a Yeshua existed at the center of the surviving cult and was executed, the only factual detail of any significance?
It is, as they say, moot. Only actual, reliable evidence could ever change that. We used to think none could ever surface. Herculaneum could very possibly change that, and much else of overwhelmingly greater interest.
Carrier has very interesting things to say about the non-biblically-adjacent finds likely to surface there. However distasteful you find his biblical opinions, he is among the best choices to read on topics of late Roman science.
You've picked up some misinformation there since your goal is to make some Christological point rather seek the truth. And thus, rather than accepting evidence you work to deny it. You may not be a Christian but you're engaging in the same kind of thinking - denying evidence that doesn't fit your beliefs.
Also are you capable of recognizing that this is a conspiracy theory? This is a Creationist-class argument. Responding to a critique that you position is based on conspiracy theories and denying evidence, you responded with a conspiracy theory to deny evidence.
My point is that in Christology there is literally nothing but conspiracy theories all the way down, by every active participant for fully two millennia. If you imagine anything, anywhere is even a hair better than a conspiracy theory, it is a trick of the light.
To any sane historian, the whole topic is plastered over with "Nothing to See Here" signs.
About Carrier, I find nothing but "crank crank crank crank" name-calling that is beneath any actually respectable historian speaking of another credentialed academic. The only response that does not itself identify the speaker as himself a crank is, "We differ on details, as follows." Of course every historian differs on details with literally every other historian.
As a little background, I did an MA in Classics (focusing on ancient philosophy), and started a PhD. I'm not a Christian, and mostly ignostic - religious debates are a waste of time. Since then I've kept reading, I have a lot of Ehrman's titles, and I've read a lot of the sources in Greek. While I started with more of a focus on philosophy and poetry I've gotten more interested in history and have kept reading for a few decades since.
>Carrier is unpopular among Christians and crypto-Christians
Carrier is in the minority because he holds a minority position. The reason it's a minority position is because it's steeped in conspiracy theories even if he tries to use Bayes to add a fig leaf. When I was working with them, no historians I knew of back in the '90s were crypto-Christians pushing a Historicist agenda, some of them were indeed priests, but no one was hiding anything. I am very sure you can't point to an actual working historian who is a crypto-Christian, while that term introduces even more conspiracy thinking.
The Historicist agenda isn't actually some secret formalization of traditional Christian doctrine, it's not a Christian or a crypto-Christian position, it's a position useful for historians speaking about secular history, that's why it was developed, and why it's the consensus position. It's an evidence-based position with sufficient evidence that professional historians hold a general consensus and the only outliers are folks who are motivated by a kind of evangelical atheism where they are the ones actually dragging religious biases into the debate and rejecting evidence-based thinking in favor of conspiracy theories (flavored with Bayes).
"Crypto-christian" just means saying they are not Christian, yet still assuming things just because Christians insist upon them. Bart Ehrman is a good example. You can shriek "crank" all you like, but either you engage with the evidence, or you are a crank yourself. Carrier exposes all his evidence and all his reasoning for public inspection. Ehrman just huffs and blusters disgracefully.
Your assessment of a "minority position" carries exactly zero weight. Either the gradient is positive, negative, or static. For the case of mythicism, the gradient over the past century is strongly positive: a hundred years ago nobody could even discuss mythicism. Twenty years ago, few found it plausible. Since then, the number has risen sharply. As Max Planck said, science advances one funeral at a time. The trend is clear.
Does it actually matter? Only as much as any history matters.
Disclaimer: Ehrman is a friend of mine but opinion is my own
I would agree that Carrier doesn't get taken as seriously as he should be, but I think it's partly because he has a very abrasive approach and he has a very unorthodox style due to being an outsider. He also has a tendency to repeat claims like "they won't respond" when in fact they have responded[1]. Historians are people too, and much like the asshole genius programmer who is difficult to work with because he bitches about everybody elses style, the person's technical contributions may not get as much love as they deserve on their merits because things are colored by emotion and discomfort with the person.
Personally, I think the "outsider" perspective is important and welcome, especially given what we've seen are systemic problems in academia in general.
But that said I think "Ehrman just huffs and blusters disgracefully" is pretty unfair. Ehrman has addressed many of Carrier's claims seriously (on his blog for example)[1]. There are lots of other responses in various other places that I wish were much better organized. These sorts of debates can get insanely detailed and long, and especially when so much from the ancient world is (IMHO) ultimately unknown and unknowable, in the end I personally just have to enjoy the ride and accept (much to my dismay) that I may never really know.
Lastly, there is something about the debate behind "did Jesus exist" that I find makes a lot of agnostic/atheist people lose their minds. It feels a lot like the response from Christians when one of their traditions/dogma is challenged. I get it, it would feel really justifying to be able to say "Jesus didn't even exist" but I think the evidence that the stories of Jesus evolved over time to become more and more mythical is strong enough that it doesn't matter whether a real man ever existed. It's a very fun debate when it doesn't become heated and personal, which unfortunately is almost never nowadays.
That said I really hope Carrier continues his work. I've enjoyed his books and I think he is on to something. I'd love to see him work more toward building consensus and working together though.
Thank you for that. The huff and bluster I encountered was in Ehrman's video appearances. I would never have guessed that he had actual arguments he just preferred never to mention in his presentations. I will see now if he has any.
Carrier has been very abrasive in the past, but not as I have seen lately. He might be said to have mellowed with age.
There is only one concrete fact of history here that is of any consequence: did Romans knowingly execute the instigator of the one cult that survived? I agree that we might never know. We need not trouble ourselves over Mary, Gadarene swine, or zombie dinner parties.
The charred scrolls in Herculaneum are deeply exciting for far more substantive reasons. We might find there was, or wasn't, a Jesus, and forget to care because of the important revelations.
> The huff and bluster I encountered was in Ehrman's video appearances. I would never have guessed that he had actual arguments he just preferred never to mention in his presentations.
Haha, yeah that's fair. IMHO he's a great public speaker and I enjoy watching him, but he has been really bad at laying out his arguments against Carrier in videos. I think partly because he is a super classy (and incredibly nice) guy who hates personal insults and such, and a lot of interviewers try to juice the beef (because let's face it, it's entertaining :-) ). I think he's also just deeply uncomfortable with the whole topic because of past friction and tends to try to avoid diving into it.
> Carrier has been very abrasive in the past, but not as I have seen lately. He might be said to have mellowed with age.
That would be great! IMHO Carrier is one of the most interesting atheists nowadays, and he's very much inline stylistically with the new atheist movement from the 00s (which I kind of like actually), but I don't know if it's cultural change or what but that approach really turns a lot of lay people off now, leaving just people like us. I'd love to see his appeal broaden, and I'm excited to see the next generation of thought leaders (and partially afraid that there may not be any).
Regardless, thanks for the discussion! I've found your comments very interesting
Much more interesting, ultimately, than any of the actual arguments is the modern method of evaluating them. It's not foolproof (fools are clever!) but it offers a chance of results that amount to more than just one more opinion. Makes me think of the Enlightenment dream that one day all disputes could be resolved by "come, let us calculate": http://scihi.org/universal-academic-gottfried-wilhelm-leibni...
Atheism is growing by leaps and bounds, even in the US, I'm guessing in large part because evangelicals here have so enthusiastically embraced out-and-out grifters and con-men. I doubt promotion can claim much credit.
Roll up a newspaper or some sheets of paper, bake it until blackened, then pull out the charred remains and have this fancy tech tell us what it sees. You could easily verify whether what it says is true and whether any of the interpretions" correlate in any way with the newspaper that went in.
In fact, this would be the right way to iteratively develop your process, hone your software, etc - you would have some criteria with which gauge that this is viable. As opposed to a process that is bound to find something even in white noise.
Alternatively, you could just get ai trained on ancient greek, give it some noise, get it to generate some text, and call it an amazing ancient greek discovery!
> The entirety of the ancient corpus today can fit on a small bookshelf.
This person hasn't been to the local bookshop - there are many bookshelves worth of ancient texts. There are bibles, other religious writings, ancient plays, ancient history, science, philosophical works, etc. Or, Casey is right... in which case, what is the provenance of all those purportedly ancient texts?
Its amazing to me that I think I'm stating the obvious - that you can't read burnt paper - and yet I'm downvoted, with no comment to explain why the downvote. I guess people like to live in a fantasy reality, where technology is capable of magic, and anyone who questions what sounds like a lovely story is just mean. Downvote!
At least you are expressing something about your discontent - so thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond.
Perhaps its random speculation to you, but I cannot read what was written on burnt paper. I don't think the idea that some software/hardware fix can or ever could read what was written on burnt paper is viable.
However, I'm not just criticising the purported facts. I'm also offering a suggestion whereby I can be shown to be wrong, as I suggest a verifiable way to prove this idea works. I'm saying that you should surely test this system out on something that you can prove works, before rolling the idea out onto actual historical artefacts and adding to the ancient works on the bookshelf.
I just don't see what's objectionable to what I'm saying - it seems entirely based in common sense. However, I think it upsets people, as it snaps them out of a 'merry daydream' they have about how wonderful technology is.
What is objectionable is that you are just making shit up. Calling it "common sense" does not help.
It is a fact that actually-ancient manuscripts are vanishingly scarce; almost everything you cite on bookshelves today is from copies of copies of copies. And, extended text has already been extracted from charred scrolls from that very site, albeit destructively. So, what you insist is impossible has already been done. The goal is to do it better. You could have found out all this yourself with a tiny amount of reading, and not wasted everybody's time.
Think any way you like. I doesn't make the rules for what you can post without getting dinged.
I have read text on undisturbed burnt paper, in the past. (Of course, what they have is not paper.) If you believe you cannot, then you certainly cannot, but you are not asked to. They have been doing it, and will continue. Among modern marvels you accept daily without demur, it does not stand out.
Your personal inability to read text off charred, rolled paper tells us literally nothing about whether the people actually doing it can. If a paper implied that nobody could, but you were doing it, that would be of interest provided you could explain how.
The point I'm making and that you're missing, relates to one's hierarchy of knowledge.
If you have personal experience of something, and then someone comes along and says something that is the antithesis of your experience, which source should you accept? Your experience or the other person? What if the other person is not a person, but a famous science journal - which source should you accept then?
The answer, if you are authority of yourself - is your own experience, every time. This trumps all other sources. It is the only golden source you have. Of course it can be fallible, but you do not intend to deceive yourself.
Other external sources can claim whatever they like! There are lots of incentives and mistakes that can be made. But it should not count for you more highly than your personal experience. For your own sanity, you must be aligned with your own experience - the other is that you are susceptible to any provided story.
Without getting into the question of how we know what we know, here is a wikipedia link on the Herculaneum scrolls, which people have been unrolling, usually destructively, and reading, since the mid 1700s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri
The use of x-ray tomography is just the latest iteration on viewing techniques which have ranged from holding fragments up to the light to look for reflections from the carbonized ink, to multispectral scanning.
Whether x-ray tomography is sensitive enough to detect carbon-based ink in carbonized scrolls is an open question. But unless you have personal experience
to the contrary, based on carbonizing papyrus scrolls in a low-oxygen environment (not at all the same thing as lighting newspapers on fire), you might be inclined to believe, based on 250 years of observations, that there is information that can be extracted from the scrolls.
Right - so you are saying a newspaper is not equivalent to papyrus. Fine. But there must be a material that we can prepare and burn that is. You have to reliably prove the methodology.
I remember when tvs weren't on for 24 hours - and there would be literal white noise being broadcast - it looked like lots of black and white dots moving. If you wanted and paid attention you could spot whatever you wanted on the screen - eg a red squirrel moving from left to right.
Why should viewing a red squirrel be discounted but finding 'ancient texts' be valid? Well, if you have a methodology that can read burnt newspapers (or a modern equivalent) and the text is correct - then you have a strong case.
If its just a case of 'trust the machine and its interpretation' well, I will trust my interpretation - that the machine is spotting red squirrels.
Again, just making shit up is no substitute for doing the work. Here, it is exclusively other people doing the work. Anybody can make up any shit they like, giving made-up shit negative value.
The uttermost essence of science is, exactly, distrusting what you think you know, and what anybody thinks they know. Literally all progress has come from discounting what somebody just felt dead certain about.
So, I know better than to base the self-assessment of my sanity on having been right.
Pompeii probably had a public library, but any scrolls that were in Pompeii, unlike in Herculaneum, burned to fine powder. And, any that were rescued from the eruption finally decayed and are lost; almost all of those, we don't even know the titles of.
You should be agreeing with my suggestion that if this mechanism works, it should be possible to do in a reproducible way! As per my suggestion of running it over a burnt newspaper. Then we can all see that this process isn't simply conjuring something out of white noise. Right?
50 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadhttps://discord.gg/6FgWYNjb4N
Competition website: https://scrollprize.org/
Seems like someone who is pretty into the scientific method, and, more importantly, spirit, to me?
Disclosure: I went to high school with Casey
A lot of the images aren't loading for me in the post, though.
i am so glad to see it receiving funding and capable participants
These scrolls use carbon-based ink with composition much like the paper. But there might still be usable differences.
That should give plenty of information to separate different element concentrations in papyrus and ink
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/23380
Every last scrap of documentary evidence of the beginnings of Christianity was deliberately, openly, proudly torched by the early Church, so every conventional fact stands on extremely shaky ground. Consensus among current scholars not pledged to uphold Church doctrine is that the entirety of the New Testament, absent about half of Paul's letters, is wholly fictional. Paul, of course, had his own biases. It is still possible that some anecdotes are based on factual events, but we have no reliable reason to believe any in particular. Opinions vary.
People invested in current consensus should want to have actually-reliable documentation for any factual basis for any of it. It is just possible that there really was a Jesus from Nazareth at the center of Christianity. It is even just barely possible that this Jesus was crucified, maybe even in something like the manner now believed. (Zombie dinner parties afterward, not so much.)
Carrier is unpopular among Christians and crypto-Christians for obvious reasons that should not affect the rest of us. He is a well-taught, peer-certified, and articulate historian who is unafraid to take up opinions unpopular with retired colleagues. There is no reason to lose your mind about him: if you disagree with him, identify specific reasons why, and express exactly those. Be prepared to deal with Bayesian statistics reasoning, something old historians often have difficulty with.
Anyway, the reality is that Josephus exists, a Jewish historian writing about the history of Judaea less than fifty years after Jesus's death who mentions Jesus's existence. The Mythicists have to deny what is actually slam-dunk evidence by ancient historical standards to hold their position which is why it's always been the territory of cranks.
It's really funny that in this day and age it's atheists who are driving along tedious religiously-motivated debates about the ontological nature of the person of Jesus. It's doubly funny that the self-proclaimed rationalists cling to a conspiracy theory and deny evidence. Anyway there's a lot more to the ancient world worth learning about, but I'd recommend learning from historians who are professionals to avoid openly biased cranks with a religious axe to grind.
Mainstream historians, as a rule, don't touch Christian origins with a ten-foot pole because the independent evidence remaining, a tiny handful of quotes that all fit on literally one page, stinks to high heaven, and is guarded by legions of hornets' nests. They have plenty of more productive ways to spend their time. Does it matter, ultimately, if a Yeshua existed at the center of the surviving cult and was executed, the only factual detail of any significance?
It is, as they say, moot. Only actual, reliable evidence could ever change that. We used to think none could ever surface. Herculaneum could very possibly change that, and much else of overwhelmingly greater interest.
Carrier has very interesting things to say about the non-biblically-adjacent finds likely to surface there. However distasteful you find his biblical opinions, he is among the best choices to read on topics of late Roman science.
To any sane historian, the whole topic is plastered over with "Nothing to See Here" signs.
About Carrier, I find nothing but "crank crank crank crank" name-calling that is beneath any actually respectable historian speaking of another credentialed academic. The only response that does not itself identify the speaker as himself a crank is, "We differ on details, as follows." Of course every historian differs on details with literally every other historian.
>Carrier is unpopular among Christians and crypto-Christians
Carrier is in the minority because he holds a minority position. The reason it's a minority position is because it's steeped in conspiracy theories even if he tries to use Bayes to add a fig leaf. When I was working with them, no historians I knew of back in the '90s were crypto-Christians pushing a Historicist agenda, some of them were indeed priests, but no one was hiding anything. I am very sure you can't point to an actual working historian who is a crypto-Christian, while that term introduces even more conspiracy thinking.
The Historicist agenda isn't actually some secret formalization of traditional Christian doctrine, it's not a Christian or a crypto-Christian position, it's a position useful for historians speaking about secular history, that's why it was developed, and why it's the consensus position. It's an evidence-based position with sufficient evidence that professional historians hold a general consensus and the only outliers are folks who are motivated by a kind of evangelical atheism where they are the ones actually dragging religious biases into the debate and rejecting evidence-based thinking in favor of conspiracy theories (flavored with Bayes).
Your assessment of a "minority position" carries exactly zero weight. Either the gradient is positive, negative, or static. For the case of mythicism, the gradient over the past century is strongly positive: a hundred years ago nobody could even discuss mythicism. Twenty years ago, few found it plausible. Since then, the number has risen sharply. As Max Planck said, science advances one funeral at a time. The trend is clear.
Does it actually matter? Only as much as any history matters.
I would agree that Carrier doesn't get taken as seriously as he should be, but I think it's partly because he has a very abrasive approach and he has a very unorthodox style due to being an outsider. He also has a tendency to repeat claims like "they won't respond" when in fact they have responded[1]. Historians are people too, and much like the asshole genius programmer who is difficult to work with because he bitches about everybody elses style, the person's technical contributions may not get as much love as they deserve on their merits because things are colored by emotion and discomfort with the person.
Personally, I think the "outsider" perspective is important and welcome, especially given what we've seen are systemic problems in academia in general.
But that said I think "Ehrman just huffs and blusters disgracefully" is pretty unfair. Ehrman has addressed many of Carrier's claims seriously (on his blog for example)[1]. There are lots of other responses in various other places that I wish were much better organized. These sorts of debates can get insanely detailed and long, and especially when so much from the ancient world is (IMHO) ultimately unknown and unknowable, in the end I personally just have to enjoy the ride and accept (much to my dismay) that I may never really know.
Lastly, there is something about the debate behind "did Jesus exist" that I find makes a lot of agnostic/atheist people lose their minds. It feels a lot like the response from Christians when one of their traditions/dogma is challenged. I get it, it would feel really justifying to be able to say "Jesus didn't even exist" but I think the evidence that the stories of Jesus evolved over time to become more and more mythical is strong enough that it doesn't matter whether a real man ever existed. It's a very fun debate when it doesn't become heated and personal, which unfortunately is almost never nowadays.
That said I really hope Carrier continues his work. I've enjoyed his books and I think he is on to something. I'd love to see him work more toward building consensus and working together though.
[1]: https://ehrmanblog.org/fuller-reply-to-richard-carrier/
Carrier has been very abrasive in the past, but not as I have seen lately. He might be said to have mellowed with age.
There is only one concrete fact of history here that is of any consequence: did Romans knowingly execute the instigator of the one cult that survived? I agree that we might never know. We need not trouble ourselves over Mary, Gadarene swine, or zombie dinner parties.
The charred scrolls in Herculaneum are deeply exciting for far more substantive reasons. We might find there was, or wasn't, a Jesus, and forget to care because of the important revelations.
Haha, yeah that's fair. IMHO he's a great public speaker and I enjoy watching him, but he has been really bad at laying out his arguments against Carrier in videos. I think partly because he is a super classy (and incredibly nice) guy who hates personal insults and such, and a lot of interviewers try to juice the beef (because let's face it, it's entertaining :-) ). I think he's also just deeply uncomfortable with the whole topic because of past friction and tends to try to avoid diving into it.
> Carrier has been very abrasive in the past, but not as I have seen lately. He might be said to have mellowed with age.
That would be great! IMHO Carrier is one of the most interesting atheists nowadays, and he's very much inline stylistically with the new atheist movement from the 00s (which I kind of like actually), but I don't know if it's cultural change or what but that approach really turns a lot of lay people off now, leaving just people like us. I'd love to see his appeal broaden, and I'm excited to see the next generation of thought leaders (and partially afraid that there may not be any).
Regardless, thanks for the discussion! I've found your comments very interesting
Much more interesting, ultimately, than any of the actual arguments is the modern method of evaluating them. It's not foolproof (fools are clever!) but it offers a chance of results that amount to more than just one more opinion. Makes me think of the Enlightenment dream that one day all disputes could be resolved by "come, let us calculate": http://scihi.org/universal-academic-gottfried-wilhelm-leibni...
Atheism is growing by leaps and bounds, even in the US, I'm guessing in large part because evangelicals here have so enthusiastically embraced out-and-out grifters and con-men. I doubt promotion can claim much credit.
But there's a simple way to test it!
Roll up a newspaper or some sheets of paper, bake it until blackened, then pull out the charred remains and have this fancy tech tell us what it sees. You could easily verify whether what it says is true and whether any of the interpretions" correlate in any way with the newspaper that went in.
In fact, this would be the right way to iteratively develop your process, hone your software, etc - you would have some criteria with which gauge that this is viable. As opposed to a process that is bound to find something even in white noise.
Alternatively, you could just get ai trained on ancient greek, give it some noise, get it to generate some text, and call it an amazing ancient greek discovery!
> The entirety of the ancient corpus today can fit on a small bookshelf.
This person hasn't been to the local bookshop - there are many bookshelves worth of ancient texts. There are bibles, other religious writings, ancient plays, ancient history, science, philosophical works, etc. Or, Casey is right... in which case, what is the provenance of all those purportedly ancient texts?
Perhaps its random speculation to you, but I cannot read what was written on burnt paper. I don't think the idea that some software/hardware fix can or ever could read what was written on burnt paper is viable.
However, I'm not just criticising the purported facts. I'm also offering a suggestion whereby I can be shown to be wrong, as I suggest a verifiable way to prove this idea works. I'm saying that you should surely test this system out on something that you can prove works, before rolling the idea out onto actual historical artefacts and adding to the ancient works on the bookshelf.
I just don't see what's objectionable to what I'm saying - it seems entirely based in common sense. However, I think it upsets people, as it snaps them out of a 'merry daydream' they have about how wonderful technology is.
It is a fact that actually-ancient manuscripts are vanishingly scarce; almost everything you cite on bookshelves today is from copies of copies of copies. And, extended text has already been extracted from charred scrolls from that very site, albeit destructively. So, what you insist is impossible has already been done. The goal is to do it better. You could have found out all this yourself with a tiny amount of reading, and not wasted everybody's time.
In your experience, can you really read text on paper, once it has been pyrolysed/burnt?
I have read text on undisturbed burnt paper, in the past. (Of course, what they have is not paper.) If you believe you cannot, then you certainly cannot, but you are not asked to. They have been doing it, and will continue. Among modern marvels you accept daily without demur, it does not stand out.
If you have personal experience of something, and then someone comes along and says something that is the antithesis of your experience, which source should you accept? Your experience or the other person? What if the other person is not a person, but a famous science journal - which source should you accept then?
The answer, if you are authority of yourself - is your own experience, every time. This trumps all other sources. It is the only golden source you have. Of course it can be fallible, but you do not intend to deceive yourself.
Other external sources can claim whatever they like! There are lots of incentives and mistakes that can be made. But it should not count for you more highly than your personal experience. For your own sanity, you must be aligned with your own experience - the other is that you are susceptible to any provided story.
The use of x-ray tomography is just the latest iteration on viewing techniques which have ranged from holding fragments up to the light to look for reflections from the carbonized ink, to multispectral scanning. Whether x-ray tomography is sensitive enough to detect carbon-based ink in carbonized scrolls is an open question. But unless you have personal experience to the contrary, based on carbonizing papyrus scrolls in a low-oxygen environment (not at all the same thing as lighting newspapers on fire), you might be inclined to believe, based on 250 years of observations, that there is information that can be extracted from the scrolls.
I remember when tvs weren't on for 24 hours - and there would be literal white noise being broadcast - it looked like lots of black and white dots moving. If you wanted and paid attention you could spot whatever you wanted on the screen - eg a red squirrel moving from left to right.
Why should viewing a red squirrel be discounted but finding 'ancient texts' be valid? Well, if you have a methodology that can read burnt newspapers (or a modern equivalent) and the text is correct - then you have a strong case.
If its just a case of 'trust the machine and its interpretation' well, I will trust my interpretation - that the machine is spotting red squirrels.
So, I know better than to base the self-assessment of my sanity on having been right.
Pompeii probably had a public library, but any scrolls that were in Pompeii, unlike in Herculaneum, burned to fine powder. And, any that were rescued from the eruption finally decayed and are lost; almost all of those, we don't even know the titles of.
You should be agreeing with my suggestion that if this mechanism works, it should be possible to do in a reproducible way! As per my suggestion of running it over a burnt newspaper. Then we can all see that this process isn't simply conjuring something out of white noise. Right?