Did Homer write?

Did Homer write?

Bernard Knox, author of the Fagles translation Iliad foreword, says he did but I've read elsewhere (Greek history books etc.) that such was impossible since, during Homer's life, there was no alphabet and Greeks were utterly illiterate.

I have a mixed opinion. Evidence for Homer having written the Iliad include the facts that the Iliad is incredibly long, rigidly structured, and poetically sensitive (e.g. repetition for affect rather than mere description). He also wrote in the Homeric Greek syllabary which would have made it nigh impossible to impart by purely oratory means.

Aristarchus posited that Homer lived about 140 years after the Trojan war which, if I understand correctly, would have made it impossible for him to be literate. There are also the numerous historically inaccurate references within the poem to account for.

At best, Bernard Knox shows that writing likely played a part in the development of the Iliad we know today. This is not to say that Homer himself wrote. I am inclined to believe the theory of George Grote that the Iliad began as a much shorter poem -- one that could be condensed to one or two papyrus scrolls -- which were later elaborated upon by bards who had the ability to read and write. Thus, the Iliad is a result of bother Homer, the individual and Homer, the Greek collective -- a vindication of Giambattista Vico's assertion. Either this is the case or Milman Parry's theory of Homer being an oral bard of immense talent using his syllabary married with metre-minded epithets is.

So tell me Veeky Forums, did Homer write?

Other urls found in this thread:

textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=67884
towardsdatascience.com/stylometric-analysis-satoshi-nakamoto-294926cdf995
books.google.com/books?id=xGNN75vXX0MC&pg=PA377
twitter.com/AnonBabble

holy shit this is actually something directly Veeky Forums related, there's so much philosophy and history spam...well it's not impossible for humans to memorize works that large, but that's also why epic poems were poems not epic prose, it's easier to remember poems, want to give us a quick rundown on the multiple authors theory? where can we see the seams between authors? are vico's comments in the new science?

"Homer" is a bardic tradition that is paralleled in many other traditions, some of them still living. Check out Walter Ong's _Orality and Literacy_, which makes extensive reference to not only Albert Lord's collation of contemporary epics still sung in Balkan bardic traditions, but to the analogous skalds in Scandinavia, the Sundiata story singers in Africa, and even the Mahabharata which is memorised in a different fashion and by rote.

The origin of the Homeric epics is probably Mycenaean for obvious reasons of content and access to historical information that didn't exist thereafter, but persisted (or first thrived, or was founded in its regularised, fully bardic form) in the Greek Dark Age down to the reintroduction of an altogether new form of literacy in Greece via the Phoenician alphabet. Then it was recorded, but Greek bards ("rhapsodes") still existed down through Roman times, appearing for example appear as subjects of discussion or even primary interlocutors in Plato's dialogues. This is the case in the dialogue Ion, where the Socrates interrogates a rhapsode about whether he thinks he sings so well through divine inspiration or through his own cleverness. He thinks it's the former. The whole reason they are talking about inspiration or cleverness, rather than memorisation or vocal skill, is that the recitation of the Homeric poems was improvisational, taking stock themes and stock poetic formulae with reliable metre-fitting qualities and changing them on the fly. Every recitation would be tailored to its audience and context. The Viking skalds and modern Balkan bards, and the Sundiata singers, the first two from a parallel Indo-European tradition but the latter from an altogether different one (suggesting this is a pretty common human ability and cultural device), were very similar.

Ong mentions that the Sundiata singers, when asked to recite their "memorised" stories from rote, end-to-end, couldn't really do it, and when they did it became tedious. The reason for this is that they literally didn't "think in" those terms when singing their songs. They memorised innumerable phrases, formulae, and plot points, and wove them together on the fly. When they tried to "force" those into a linear narrative foreign to their culture, their brains hurt.

It's almost certain that there is no original Homer in any meaningful sense. Probably there was a Mycenaean bardic tradition (singers do appear in the poems, but they are sung for Dark and Archaic Age audiences as we receive them so it's impossible to tell really), but it likely worked the same as it did in later eras, just a cultural facet without a single founder or even a single original story.

Vico's theory I read from a secondary source so I cannot say where he posited such an idea. As for the question of where the seams lie, they are in the historical inaccuracies I speak of.

For example, in some parts of the poem, bronze is a valuable commodity, one given as a gift or one whose only utility is at the tip of a spear. Later, bronze is used quite liberally as arrowheads and mentioned without any second thought. There are more but I would have to scan the book once more.

Knox brings these points up and to me, it seems to refute any idea that Homer wrote but nonetheless he says he did. Why is this?

Also, the multiple authors theory comes from the fact that, as states, the Homeric tradition was an oral one which involved extemporization. If he couldn't write at the time of the poem's composition, it would had to have had at least one other author.

i agree that homer is probably a collection or genre of performer, but if this is true shouldn't we have found a few different versions when different people finally wrote them down? why are they all the same?

but i mean say in the old testament u can see the different authors between yahwest vs elohist or whatever, homer seems pretty consistent

Made me think of how I see teenagers communicate in meme phrases from tumblr etc. Seemingly without thinking about coming up with words, just rehashing wordings they've seen in popular posts

Contribute or get the fuck out you boring cunt

This is the very reason why I'm conflicted.

Not sure actually. I did find this: textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=67884

The OG structuralists used to analyze all kinds of weird shit, and when I first started reading about it I didn't understand it. They would go into a text or series of texts and analyze EVERYTHING that could possibly be analyzed, including seemingly arbitrary shit like the length or stress length of words and phrases.

I later realized that they were deliberately trying to suspend their preconceptions about what the "important" parts of language are, the parts that mimetically carry over, and instead to try to measure structurally and quantitatively every possibility. It's interesting to think that not just words or phrases but certain "ways of saying" things, certain intonations or cadence structures, are just as mimetic as words and phrases themselves. Even the implicit pause after starting a sentence with "Furthermore," is structurally analyzable and mimetically available to consciousness to pick up and carry on.

I've always been fascinated by how phrases get completely deracinated from their original contexts but still convey either their original meaning or at least some other meaning perfectly well. Throughout my life I've noticed plenty of stock phrases the origin of which I don't understand and never even thought to question, but which I use perfectly fluidly anyway.

All of this points to interesting mimetic and semantic faculties in the human mind that despite being incredibly flexible aren't fundamentally reducible to mimesis alone.

he's talking about the retribalized fragmented dark age consciousness of modern man you fucking PHILISTINE NIGGER fuck off with your gay fucking intrigue thread you bug

He is, unlike you, you stubborn shitstain. Now, you must work hard to ignore further impulses to intervene and the thread will be fine.

shouldn't some stylometry neural net be able to find all the possibilities for different authors? has this been revisited since ai became a thing?

homer wrote the iliad and odyssey, and we have received the text unaltered. there is no debating this matter.

>every contemporary printing has it split into books
>unaltered text

those weren't there originally breh

They try to apply that shit to music sometimes I think. Most AI people don't understand that AI is just a big beep boop machine that YOU tell to do a bunch of stuff, and then YOU judge whether it "did it" "correctly." No matter what mechanisms a computer uses to analyze Bach, the parameters of that analysis are determined by humans, and whether the output of the analysis is "correct" is determined by humans.

If you're being self-conscious about all that, you can use the technology meaningfully because you will be visualising the apparatus as just an apparatus, in the same way that if I ask my computer to pick three random ten-beat segments out of a Bach overture, it will return outputs that are already determined by what I tell it a "beat" is, what I tell it "ten" is, what I tell it a "segment" is, etc. etc. That's all that kind of AI can ever be. AI researchers just add ten trillion billion pseudorandom-through-complexity extra steps to obfuscate the operation, and think that the computer is "deliberating." Neural nets and algorithms are still just punchcard GOFAI at base.

The cyberneticists did shit like this in the 60s and 70s too I think. They tried to talk about all information being enworlded and dualism being an illusion, or some shit like that. So they thought that any organisation of processes and events "out there in the world" was ontologically indistinguishable from human organisation of it. Lots of interest in "self-organising" systems, "open" semiosis with natural systems, etc etc. Really dumb fucking garbage. Jean-Pierre Dupuy has a good book on this shit and because he deeply understands its fundamental epistemic flaws he is unsurprisingly a millenarian Girardian anti-AI mystic or some shit like that.

and they do absolutely nothing to detract from the text, it just makes citation easier.

It seems like the most likely explanation is that there was Homer, plural or singular, of the Mycenaean tradition, and the scribe -- two authors (or more if you like).

I'm pretty much where I started but this talk about computational prosody is peaking my interesting. Thank you all and sorry to

I thought you were referring to the poster's words rather than the bardic tradition. I am, admittedly, a little drunk.

dude, you can easily id people by the stuff they write with ai, the phrases you use, word choice, sentence structure, etc. are unique, didn't you see all those articles about how the nsa identified satoshi using stylometry?

>towardsdatascience.com/stylometric-analysis-satoshi-nakamoto-294926cdf995

see how they identified one guy as writing the bitcoin papers, and another guy sending emails as satoshi, so it might be a team of dudes...much like we were just speculating homer might have been...

>Jean-Pierre Dupuy has a good book on this shit
On the Origins of Cognitive Science ?

Yeah but only because when you're designing the Thing-Finder program you're constantly giving "it" feedback about what the "correct" outputs are. It's a bundle of bundles of bundles of bundles of bundles of mechanisms whose "function" is constantly regularised and stabilised by being employed by humans. Even when the program is in the wild and being put to use, humans still do this. If it does something "wrong" you call it a "bug," and "fix" it so that it does it "right." That is how it was created as well, and all the subordinate technologies that it contains.

The only guarantor of correct meaning-use, correct signification, is interpretation. This goes for humans and machines. Truth-correspondence theories are totally dead because they always fundamentally assume that objects in the world can be objectively meaning-bearing, and that the mind can somehow signify those meanings correctly. Now we only talk about intersubjective truth really.

But at least with humans we can surmise that there is still intentionality in another person's mind even when they fail to communicate, fail to signify correctly, fail to deploy meanings correctly, all ways of saying the same thing. When a pile of rocks fails to signify anything, we assume natural, unminded, unintentional, non-processes. We don't assume a final cause.

Machines like rocks don't have intentionality, subjective will, but they still have outputs, in the sense that a bunch of rocks fortuitously arranged can appear to have an informational output. As human beings, we go around the world looking for "meaningful outputs," intentionality, information. Most of the time we're good at inferring where the intention originates, because virtually no phenomena in the modern world seriously masquerade as having their "own" intentionality, so when we see or otherwise interact with matter or natural processes that seem to bear information, we just begin tracing it back to its source in a human, or something human-like in some deliberative respect like an alien or animal or God.

In pre-modern times people found intentionality in nature all the time, because they simply assumed as part of their objective knowledge of the world that all kinds of spirits and shit must inhabit it and its objects and locales. Machines are the one place where modern humans are resurrecting this mistaken "ensouling" of dead matter. As the mechanisms of computers get more and more complex, and we used constrained randomness (like designing the initial parameters, and then letting the machine algorithmically build on them), the machine begins to pass Turing tests (a meaningless phrase in most uses) in some of its outputs. Qualitatively and in principle, nothing has changed - it's still a big bundle of human-determined mechanisms, even if they exponentially complexify themselves (already using "self" language for the mechanisms).

now matter what you "believe" about neural nets, they can identify you based on your writing, deal with it

OP here, I'm a dilettante of literature but mathematics and computer science is my background and this is 100 percent correct. Luckily, some cognitive scientists understand this and know that this can't possibly change on a software level. It must change on the strata of hardware.

As long as you remain mindful of the fact that there is QUALITATIVELY no difference between writing outputs for a text game, writing NPC behaviour for GTA4, and writing a Turing test-passing algorithmic chatbot of intergalactic complexity that would fool every single human one earth, because they're still always just bundles of mechanisms, then you can use these tools wisely.

The problem is that AI people either A) don't clarify their fuzzy mistaken ontology of what "mind" is, and simply assume that a big complicated whirring gizmo that outputs the most complex GTA4 NPC of all time is human, on the same basis that ancient Romans thought a rock was talking to them and modern superstitious Wiccan girls think that the clouds are responding to their magickal attempts to communicate with them, because of their own cognitive bias, or B) they are cybernetic cultists who try to force an equally ontologically stupid "semiotic monism" where the problem of dualism is overcome by assuming that UHHHHH NATURE ITSELF IS SEMIOSIS, SOMETHING SOMETHING THIS SOMEHOW INSINUATES ITSELF INTO OUR CONSCIOUSNESS BECAUSE WE EVOLVED FROM MATTER, THEREFORE: PASSING A TURING TEST = IT'S A MIND

Yeah I think

Also this is a good thing
26. Phenomenology in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science
in A companion to phenomenology and existentialism, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall
books.google.com/books?id=xGNN75vXX0MC&pg=PA377

Sorry for shitting up your thread also drunk

"They" do work that is designated by humans. "They" don't identify my writing, any more than a mechanism you make out of hobby shop materials "correctly" "identifies" me entering your apartment and fires a steel bearing at me, because you've designed it to only be triggered by someone over 500 pounds stepping onto the pressure plate, and I'm super fat. That's, in principle, the same as what those algorithms are doing. They just have a billion more variables. You're believing in a ghost in the machine because the machine is made of shiny chrome.

do you think the people who write neural networks don't know what they are? "the chinese room" scenario is for douchebag philosophers not computer scientists or intelligence analysts, they don't care

Could you recommend some of them? I'm always interested to find the AI and computer researchers who truly understand the phenomenological critique of machine intelligence

no one in computer science believes there is some kind of magic in neural networks, everyone knows it's simple a kind of pattern matching, duh, but when the fbi uploads the drone video from the queers for stalin march into their database and the neural net matches it against your driver license pic, they have most definitely identified you, no one believes a magic being living inside your cpu found you, we all realize it took the video of your face, analyzed ten thousand ways and matched against your photo, no one except pseuds and gullible investors things "ai" is anything than pattern matching then again, humans are just pattern matching machines ... dun dun dun... tune in next century

watch a neural networks class, pretty ocw has one and maybe stanford, also there are a bunch of homemade tensorflow tuts on youtube

Wish that were true man but I attend weekly workshops with people who run the gamut from AI researchers to computer scientists to philosophers and a good half of them have a fucking Frege tier truth-reference philosophy of mind strapped to GOFAI ambitions, while the other half are indifferent, and both halves share in common that they think general intelligence will result from stacking enough evolutionary and neural nets onto each other. The mainstream leading researchers in these fields are dominated by cybernetic monist ontologies or by analytic-naturalist ontologies of mind from a century and a half ago. Those are the people who are trying to create a general AI through fake it 'til you make it. And to stop them, some faggot like Musk is going to make (or pay someone to make) an abomination that is founded on the same faulty principles, by assuming that glueing machines to neurons isn't recommitting the same error of reductive monism.

musk's end game is to get ai regulated so only established players like tesla can use it in self-driving cars, he's full of shit

Homer is a fictional character

And the motherfucker was blind to boot.

>that such was impossible since, during Homer's life, there was no alphabet and Greeks were utterly illiterate.
AFAIK the greek alphabet was introduced around 800 BC while the Illiad and Odyssey date to ~700 BC?

The Greek alphabet was invented in the 10th or 9th century. In Ionia, where Homer is from, nonetheless.

Does it matter if he existed or wrote?

If you are interested in history it does

I really, really like this thread.

The catalog of ships was quoted in the dispute between Athens and Megara over the island of salamis around 600BC. This tells me that there was a widely accepted written version prior to this. If it were written down for the first time, too close to this event I don't think it would hold up well as evidence.
Now if homer is dated as living in the middle of the 7th century (750BC +/- 50) that's only 150 years between him and the dispute.
Seeing as the Greek alphabet was invented no later than the 9th century I see no reason why he couldn't have wrote it down himself.
Also, hesiod only live about 50 years after homer and as far as I know there is no dispute that he wrote his work down.

The Greek alphabet was introduced around 9th to 8th century BC but if Aristarchus is telling the truth, that means Homer would not have been around for it. Also, it doesn't explain the anachronisms.

That's the oldest evidence we've found of the Greek alphabet, most people think it was invented in the 10th or 9th century though

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