Manu Wrote:
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> 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.

I don't believe I do any "normative thinking" except to the degree I grade evidence and conclusions.

> 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.

Evidence and logic are great. They are the only tools any of us have. Where we aren't expert we can usually rely on state of the art which some people call "consensus opinion".

> 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.

My theory can stand entirely alone from the opinions of Sethe and Mercer. It is not dependent even on the literal meaning of what the builders said. The theory can stand on the physical and historical evidence with no cultural evidence at all. I set out not to find a language or science. I set out to reverse engineer the great pyramids and I believe this is essentially outlined already by means of the physical evidence which I'd never have seen without the words of the builders to direct my attention. The physical evidence is sufficient already to make my pyramid construction theory state of the art even if it wholly lacks consensus. That this theory has obviously predicted the infrared results is essentially "proof" that it is correct. That it successfully predicted them is likely related to the reason the results haven't been released and instead we get comments from Hawass that say "results that don't agree with current beliefs will not be released". Obviously the results don't match current beliefs. I knew years ago that the results would not match current beliefs but would support my theory. This is why I've been calling for infrared testing (et al) for many years now.

That the literal meaning of their words as translated by Mercer matches what I believe is author intent is merely an interesting sidebar I've been working on since ~2011. It has led to a vast host of paradigm busting hypotheses. No field is wholly immune.

> 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.

Essentially, yes.

But it's worse than you think because translations tend to change with context which leads to even more words and suggesting Zipf's Law which just says vocabulary incidence should lay out logarithmically. There aren't enough words in any of these translations to do this.

> 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.

Not exactly. I don't know how they imagined things but I'm sure they could construct visions of what they desired or might otherwise exist. They needed some sort on "imagination" to do metaphysics. But without words for this I have to imagine that that was just some form of grammar, some rule, that suggested the state being named didn't actually exist. Remember, I don't believe the language has been translated and I believe it can never be translated. It can only be interpreted.

> 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).

Tomato, tomatoe.

I believe ancient people were a force of nature who could accomplish the impossible with ease and with only primitive knowledge and science. They were highly concerned with the history and success of the human race.

I believe modern man is a threat to everything but more importantly he is a threat to himself. We stumble blindly through a dangerous world never noticing that we don't really know much of anything at all. Now we are creating processes and tools that can spell the end of a human existence we don't even understand.

If there's a pig wearing lipstick it would be us.

If you look at my signature line you'll see I do believe man and science will prevail in the end. I believe man can survive for billions of years if we can find a safe path through the next century.

> "You're not
> giving the ancient Egyptians enough credit when
> you say they used ancient methods to build their
> monuments based on ancient science".

I believe they did use ancient science and the reason we can't see it is that it used a different metaphysics. They knew nothing at all about experiment and would have sanctions for those who attempted it. A real primitive would find modern technology to be magical but when we see ancient metaphysics (language) all we can see is magical.

> 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.

Responding to this would be off-putting to you.

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

I know what each sceptre was used for and how it came to represent things in the language. I know what the icons are. Egyptology uses the absence of evidence to prove their beliefs. The ramps were removed, the grave goods were stolen, the lack of science proves they were superstitious, and the existence of neters which are not logically placed in any context other than the book of the dead proves they had no science and they were just like the authors of the book of the dead.

Heal thyself.

> 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?

Absolutely not. I predicted a thermal anomaly as the result of a pre-existing "Cool is the Crown" path in this area. I knew it was here because they described its location and logically they'd preserve a path that led directly into the second Sphinx which is subsumed under the NE corner of G1 "exactly" as they said.

> Did you observe something and then reverse
> engineer your interpretation of the Pyramid Texts
> to support it?

six of one half a dozen of the other. I reverse engineered all the great pyramids concurrently with solving the PT through context.

> 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.

I'm sure I was speaking to a different point.

I have no means of judging the quality of a translation other than how it conforms to my understanding. This doesn't mean I reject all other translations, merely that this is how I judge their quality. If someone translated something from Norwegian and it made no sense (or isn't even good English at all but looked similar to something that did make sense would you not assume one was likely higher quality that the other? You don't have to dismiss the first but you should be leery that it is accurate.

> 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.

Of course but I have shown that none of the data actually fit the ramp paradigm. All of the data shows beyond any real doubt that stones were pulled straight up the sides of five step pyramids and suggests they used water as ballast in counterweights.