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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 tha

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.

verisimi 3y ago
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.
- scroll12345 3y ago
  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 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.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    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.
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      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.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  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.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    So why are you giving me a hard time? 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?
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      I repeat that I have been able to read text on burnt newspaper before it crumbles. Try it yourself, instead of guessing.

verisimi 3y ago

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.

scroll12345 3y ago
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 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.
- verisimi 3y ago
  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.
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    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.
angiosperm 3y ago
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.
- verisimi 3y ago
  So why are you giving me a hard time? 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?
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    I repeat that I have been able to read text on burnt newspaper before it crumbles. Try it yourself, instead of guessing.