Scientist cracks The Plato Code
An amazing read. 2,000 years later people are only just discovering the hidden musical tones in Plato's writings. Pretty mindblowing
(, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 6:05, Reply)
Err...ha?
Joke or wrong link?
(
Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 6:17,
Reply)
I cracked the plate code
in the dishwasher once.
Think it was a loose bottle top that did it.
www.physorg.com/news196943667.html
(
Professor Fnord Regius Professor of B3ta Chronology, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 7:02,
Reply)
www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=5894
'imma guessing this is the link you are looking for.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 7:53, Reply)
"Before becoming a teacher, he worked on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, in Tokyo as a translator, and in Baghdad at the National Computer Centre."
I'm not saying trouble follows him around, but I'd stay out of Manchester ;)
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Professor Fnord Regius Professor of B3ta Chronology, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 8:00,
Reply)
ummm
tbh isn't this a bit of a "non-story" if they don't even have a link to this fucking music they have found? I want to listen god damnit!
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Firkinfedup last shat on your wife's tits at, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 8:56,
Reply)
They didn't find any music
The Greek musical scale had 12 notes (I suppose ours does, if you count it in semitones) and some of these notes are harmonic with the fundamental, and some discordant. He's apparently found that Plato wrote about specific emotions at points multiples of 1/12 through the text. This sounds like bollox to me. A bit Bible code-ish.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 9:21, Reply)
So no Plato speedcore?
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Firkinfedup last shat on your wife's tits at, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 11:25,
Reply)
Thanks for the link (sort of)
spent the last 15 mins tracking the paper down and researching what Apeiron is (as a journal. It isn't main stream, I'm pretty sure there will be further debate about the validity of the work, but it's still interesting and exciting stuff :-)
Where is Enzyme? He does philosophy, I want to know what he thinks.
Anywho: personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apeiron_%28journal%29
(
Hellzapoppin, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 9:24,
Reply)
Oh, hai!
Yup: I'm a philosopher, and a philosopher at the University of Manchester to boot, so I share an institution with this guy. I'll check it out if I get the chance: I'm a touch busy at the moment.
My initial hunch is that any talk of a Plato Code is - as Smale says up ^there^ - distinctly iffy...
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 9:56,
Reply)
:-D
I'm going to look at the paper to see what his specific claims are and what the implications are.
My impression of Apeiron as a publisher is a bit dodgy, but it will be fun to see if there is anything it what he says. Reply here or wizz me a pm if you get 5! Cheers!
(
Hellzapoppin, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 10:16,
Reply)
I read one of the PDFs
(the one with picures, I thought it might be simpler). Without spending more time understanding his evidence I'd say his decision of what is 'harmonic' and 'discordant' in the writing is subjective. His location of speeches within twelfths of the text also looks suspicious, since he includes bits of non-speech to pad it out. It's not clear to me whether he's using strict line-counting or not. Even if he is, it looks very much as if he doesn't define the start and end clearly, meaning it could just be that Plato wrote 10 speeches with a prologue and an epilogue. Either way, it's hardly a code hiding something else. If he's right then Plato just found a handy form to structure his writing around. I think his quarter-note theory is baseless, and introducing the golden mean seems a bit arbitrary... So I'm not impressed.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 10:35, Reply)
You read a lot more than I did!
It's a shame though, it would have been fun to have an actual simple code hidden in his writing. A bit like finding a brilliant game that has the konami code secretly placed in for a secret message. Having said that I don't see why it would have taken all this time to discover an ancient konami code that Plato made.
(
Hellzapoppin, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 11:05,
Reply)
OK - based on a preliminary read, I don't buy it.
I know I said I was busy, but I couldn't resist.
First, the stuff about mathematics in there is trivial. Yes, mathematics is very important for Plato, and he has some odd ideas about the soul that reasonably frequently get lumped alongside his mathematical stuff. But, really, so what? (I'm not going to sweat this, though, because I'm by no means a Plato scholar.)
Second, one has to ask oneself why this paper hasn't appeared in a mainstream philosophy or history of philosophy journal. The fact that it hasn't isn't evidence of the paper's scholarly qualities... but, still, there's a whiff about it.
But here's the real reason why I don't buy it. Plato is, at times, a really good writer. As the Aperion paper makes clear, he's not averse to throwing in a good pun or joke now and again. As a dramatist, he's not bad - again, unsurprisingly, given the importance of the drama in Greek education and religion at the time.
BUT... If the hypothesis of the paper is true, it'd seem to imply that Plato sat down with a piece of paper before composing each dialogue, and planned to the line what would go where. And that doesn't seem plausible. After all, it'd mean that the arguments advanced would have to play second fiddle to their place in the dialogue, and be stretched or cut to fit. That is not the way to generate a philosophical system that was influential for two and a half milennia. You might be able to write an opera like that - but not philosophy.
To give an analogy: a philosopher (or scientist) might try to structure an essay by deciding to devote 10% to the introduction, 10% to the conclusion, and to share the remainder between the premises and different parts of the argument. But if that's the only criterion for what goes where, he probably won't generate an essay of a standard that's anything more than... well, barely undergrad. The chances that this essay would still be read 2500 years later are slim. And the chances that he could pull the same trick with tens of different essays of different lengths defies belief.
Yet this seems to be exactly the strategy that Kennedy ascribes to Plato. There's a serious credibility gap.
EDIT: Right, have to go now. There's a bloke here who wants to do things to my computer. I might add more comment later.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 10:29,
Reply)
It does seem a bit like he wants Plato to be Hari Seldon-ish
I could buy that he wrote using a particular form, but when it comes to placing punctuation in mathematically pre-ordained places, he's getting a bit thin on the plausibility.
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Hellzapoppin, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 11:00,
Reply)
Writing using a particular vague template is one thing.
But for it to be that precise, and for it to generate anything worth reading... naaah.
Props for the Seldon reference, though: I keep meaning to re-read those...
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 11:42,
Reply)
hehe
You should organise a secret Santa in your department this year, and buy him a copy of 'The Da-Vinci Code' :-D
(
Hellzapoppin, Tue 29 Jun 2010, 12:00,
Reply)
