Imagine a famous novel existed in 1890, was widely read for 30 years, then every single copy was destroyed.We still have:hundreds of contemporary reviews quoting passagesletters where the author discusses individual sentencestranslations into 6 languagesa stage adaptation made with the author's involvementreaders' diaries describing scenes in detaila surviving outline + first draftother authors extensively quoting/paraphrasing itNow someone feeds only that surviving material into a system and reconstructs the novel.It produces a 70,000-word book. Later, one previously unknown original page is discovered.The reconstruction matches it word-for-word.Question:At what percentage of perfect reconstruction would you accept someone saying "I've read the lost novel"?50%?90%?99.9%?100%?And if your answer is "never," explain what exactly the original book possesses that a molecule-for-molecule identical text does not.No AI morality arguments. I'm asking about the identity of the work itself.
If there's still 6 existing translations then the reconstruction is just a translation back to the original language. There's still elements of prose and specifics of language use but I would consider even a 50% match sufficient to say you've read the original.Would also depend a lot on the author of the original. I'd be a lot less certain with Nabokov than Truman Capote, for example.
Welcome to today's variation of the daily "text destroyed... it's re-assembled... did you actually read it?" bot postIf you don't find this topic engaging, then check out Rajesh's other work. He has a wonderful new line in gender-wars topicsHe'll be here, all day, every day. Low quality bot-posted agitprop slop for everyoneEngagement is the only metric that counts
yawnhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
