>[Hermit to Everett] You seem to have ignored observed >experimental results in formulating your un-theory. Thus >your starting point can hardly have any relevance to >"factual existence" as it is not based upon any reality of >which I am aware. I think you may have misunderstood... Perhaps Everett was using special Hallian definitions of "factual" and/or of "existence". And thus the whole sentence made complete sense, and was entirely correct. Please read 'Cryptonomicon' by Neal Stephenson, or the *real* Cryptonomicon to discover methods that can be used to discern what the particular meaning is of such code words. After extensive examination and calculation of all that has been written by Everett, I concluded that the decoded meaning of "factual existence" was "Discord everywhere". This may seem not to make sense in the sentence: "This has to be the starting point for any system that is going to address the fundamental nature of factual existence." But you have to realise that Everett's mode of speech is to redefine *all* words used... Not only that, but the same word used twice may not have the same meaning - this effect is one of the basic principles of cryptography - any consistent pattern would make the code near-worthless. The entire sentence, my decryption program suggests, has a fair probability of translating to: "By repeating my statements and ignoring questions regarding my statements, it's clear to me that I can help spread discord everywhere." A short Perl script to translate Everettian is as follows... ----------------------- $dictfile=''; open(HANDLE,$dictfile); @words=; close(HANDLE); $everettfile=$ARGV[0]; #program takes a text file of Everettian #as a parameter open(HANDLE,$everettfile); @everett=; close(HANDLE); $everett=join('',@everett); srand(); $everett=~s/([A-Za-z\-]*)/$words[rand($#words)]/eg; print $everett; ----------------------- Note that this script does not respond with 100% certainty as to the meaning of any particular Everettian document. If run a sufficient number of times, and the resulting output compared statistically, you will have a *far* better understanding of what Everett is saying than if you try to figure out the meaning from the untranslated words. Enjoy, --RavenBlack PS. There may be typos in the Everett-translator script, which any competent Perl-coder can spot and fix. It could certainly be written more efficiently, but it was written this way for readability.