[OT] Text analysis and author, anyone done it?

[Richmond Mathewson]

Analysis of texts by machines is fairly suspect because it rests on a bogus
premise:

Humans are like machines.

They are not, and machines will never be like humans. The mechanistic view
of the human brain that has developed over the last 100 or so years has
served to block our understanding of important aspects of what "being human"
means.

There are 2 main views of how humans came about:

1. Some sort of evolution from less complicated life forms.

2. Some sort of creation from life-less matter.

Whichever way you cut it, the Human=Computer just doesn't work:

1. Computers have not evolved in the way that the term 'evolution' is
understood in Darwinian theory and its developments. Computers have
not randomly developed features that has meant that some of them have 
been picked off by predators, and some have survivded for the next round.

2. Computers of the sort we have now, were not created "crash-bang-wallop"
a week ago.

Computers are examples of intelligent design (pace Paley), conscious 
modification
and improvement.

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What computer analysis of texts CAN do is present us with patterns:

"Fambles goes into the bar, where he sees Sonny with his black eye and those
torn jeans; so they sit drinking together and having a crack about old times
on the state farm."

might, at a pinch, show some pattern similar to Damon Runyon's writings 
[i.e. persistent use of the historical present]. What it won't show is 
who wrote it.

Nor will analysis of texts written about 2000 years ago in Koine tell us 
very much,
as we have NO text we know 100% was written by the chap [Paul] whose 
writings
we are interested in.

I am presently having a look at some Sanskrit texts supposedly written 
about 1500 years ago, claimed to have been written 4000 years ago, and 
there is also a big
argument about where they were written. The tradition in which they were 
written in would have us believe that they have been handed down from 
God, so are written 'transparently' (i.e. unaffected by any personal 
foibles of the scribe). The only sensible conclusion I can come to is 
"this is a can of worms"; and worms that will always be worms, or, at 
best, matters of belief and prejudice.

It is a very Western obsession to worry about who wrote religious documents,
and as soon as one starts to apply rational thought processes to 
religious texts
one ends up badly mired indeed. The biggest "weapon" of the rationalist 
is computer analysis; on matters of faith it matters not one wit, and 
the big
mistake is thinking it does.

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So; the writings in the New Testament are "what they are", and 
non-machine driven
textual and toponymic analysis have got a long way to unravelling 
various things
in a way computers will not manage.

Religious people will worry much more, about the spirit in which the 
writings of "St. Paul" were written, and the message(s) they contain; 
and that is probably a better
bet than feeding them into machines for number-crunching.

Well, that's a quite sufficent rant; I'm off to have an hour with the 
Gospel of Thomas:
always calms me down.