You have no reasonable basis from which to make this sort of statement. These are your prejudices at work, not anything anyone else can recapitulate. I am trying my best to separate normative from objective thinking here. Aesthetically, I am offended by that statement, but I have to put that aside. I keep remembering what the Doc said some time ago: Confront ignorance with evidence, not rhetoric. Mind you, you do not need either my level of education nor acquired knowledge to confront your theory. Your theory does not have a logical foundation left of Mercer and it has none right of Sethe. Many others have also said this to you and they are absolutely correct. However, some elements in your theory are useful, if nothing else a challenge to check your own unwarranted assumption and review their justification. So I am not saying you should not pound your drum. The value of free speech and heretic ideas is that they challenge you to check your own prejudices and preconceptions. I wholeheartedly support you in spreading your ideas even if I disagree.

But let's focus on one of your misconceptions: Your application of Zipf's Law. Without knowing anything about how to apply it and how to interpret it, let's look at how you applied it:

You took Mercer's translation of Sethe's translation of the Pyramid Texts and, so I presume, did a statistical analysis of the occurrence of words in this text. You observed that a certain class of words, those related to imaginary thinking, are significantly underrepresented absent. From this observation you conclude that the ancient Egyptian brain lacked the capacity to operate in an imaginary way. Since this conclusion carries controversial overtones, you put lipstick on a pig and construct the idea that modern man's thinking is superstitious (i.e. you give it negative connotation) so that you can say ancient man's thinking was not (and thus give it a positive connotation). Yet you call them dogs. This latter part has nothing to do with your rationale. It is merely made up by you to make your conclusion more acceptable. This isn't uncommon in Alt History theories: I see this all the time: "You're not giving the ancient Egyptians enough credit when you say they used ancient methods to build their monuments based on ancient science". You see the problem with this? This isn't wanting to find the truth. This is moralizing to push an alternative theory which cannot muster enough of its own evidence. I just read Jacob voicing his similar frustration in a post to DavidK, who makes normative statements all the time. You have to try hard, in any investigation, not to use what you think should be as an argument for what is.. This gets especially dicey when the conclusions are controversial.


Back to Zipf: Whatever statistics you want to impose on the Pyramid Texts, you are basing it on a translation of a translation, whose methodology you don't accept. Yet, you accept the outcome of the statistical analysis....of course the explanation is clear: It confirms your theory.

We have:
1) Prejudice
2) Circuitous rationale
3) Confirmation bias
4) Theorizing about something you don't understand and have not studied

Alright, let's address the last one item and then I'll call it quits: Your predictions.

You feel vindicated that you reading of the texts is correct because it confirms archeological predictions you made about the Great Pyramid. But are these predictions self-fulfilling prophecies? Did you observe something and then reverse engineer your interpretation of the Pyramid Texts to support it?

This something I wondered about, when you stated..."as long as it supports the idea that Shu means upward, I am ok with it"...I am paraphrasing you. This, to me, shows that your entire language theory is bent to fit your construction theory, your prime motive in all this. And this takes me to the fifth shaky pillar of pseudoscience: Focusing on one small detail and adjusting all else to fit a model based on it.

This is a difficult subject because when not all data fit a model, a model indeed needs to be revised. We could devote an entire thread to this topic, but suffice it to say, there is a line to be drawn somewhere there, but you're not drawing it in the right place.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 28-Nov-18 18:04 by Manu.