IcyMonkey wrote:
Yevaud333 wrote:
...however much I may personally despise Occam's bloody Razor...
You can't despise Occam's Razor... It's like despising thought itself. Although we don't notice it, we actually use Occam's Razor daily, and our mind simply could not function without it.
Be that as it may, it doesn't mean I have to like it. ("Although we don't notice it, we actually contribute to the destruction of innumerable parts of our environment every day, and our society simply could not function without doing so."
) The human mind is ridiculously narrow and limited when you get right down to it; we just don't notice because, even moreso than with dimensions beyond the 3 spatial and 1 chronological, we're not built to transcend it (since to do so would involve not just physical improbability but actual logical paradox [though who's to say that our puny 'logic' is the final word on anything?]). True, we can do immeasurably more things than any other organism or system in our frame of reference, but the infinity between 0 and 1 is still less than the infinity between 0 and 100. (Sorry, to clear up that analogy: if our intelligence is like the infinity between 0 and 1, and thus significantly greater than the next greatest animal intelligence [which is, say, 0 to 0.37] there's still the possibility [and near 100% probability, given the vastness of reality] of other intelligences which dwarf our own by even greater magnitudes.)
Sorry, it's late (or early, now
) and I'm getting self-indulgent with the parenthetical statements.
::tries to discipline himself as he continues::I guess my main beef with Occam's Razor is that, while it enables us to function and has led to a great number of 'accurate' (read: useful) interpretations of our world, I'm sure it has killed just as many beautifully ornate systems which had positive side effects which are lacking in the simpler systems which replaced them. This is directly related to the absoluteness of Occam's Razor, the fact that in
all situations,
every possibility but the one with the fewest moving parts must be discarded. I have similar issues with Christianity. It's champions, like the Occam's Razor-armed warriors of Science, dismiss anything and everything but their philosophy and worldview as not just absolute balderdash but actual
evil. Since all who disagree with them are incorrect, they must be converted and their beliefs destroyed so that they do not mislead others and detract from the greater glory of the sublime Truth of Science/Christianity, the light of which must be allowed and encouraged to spread to the furthest corners of reality so that all may be freed and enlightened thereby.
The worst part (or at least one of the most annoying ones) is that this
is a noble goal. When you come down to the ideals at the heart of both Science and Christianity, they are indeed good ones, involving the liberation and empowerment of all human beings. So one cannot dismiss them all as evil or misguided (though there are certainly individuals within their ranks to whom those labels apply). At worst, they are like the forces of Good within
Eve Forward's Villains By Necessity (more reviews
here), who pursue their aim of eradicating Evil with such ardor that they fail to realize that their actions are imperiling, through an excess of homogeneity, the very world they are trying to save. No one law can or should hold throughout reality, or even a single world. In attempting to bring about such a state of affairs, they fail to heed the wisdom of that philosopher's paradox: "There is an exception to every rule." (And while this statement may apply even to itself, I am highly skeptical of anyone who claims to have found
the instance thereof.)
In the end, I just chafe against the idea that anyone or anything could or should be allowed to assert and maintain its dominance in all places and at all times. Unless your neighbor is interfering with your life and/or beliefs, you have no place interfering in his. (Although, again, I acknowledge that in the case of both Science and Christianity it is sometimes a sense of generosity and good intention that drives such unprovoked interference.) The end result of such a crusade, taken to the logical extreme, would be a sort of death - at the least of many beautiful ways of human thought, belief, and expression, and at the worst of all but the tiniest degree of human mental freedom.
Oh, and Wandering, my personal favorite in the realm of gender-neutral pronouns has long been to overload the plural "they," though I admit to bowing to popular pressure in recent years and beginning to abandon such usage. Perhaps if I start using these Greg Egan terms, though, people will beg me to resume my prior practice.... 8)
And finally, because I re-read the thread again, and found something else to respond to which actually helps clarify some of the vauge points I made above....
IcyMonkey wrote:
If we really think about it, existence doesn't mean anything unless the object that supposedly "exists" can be detected - as Berkeley said, "esse is percepi" ("to be is to be perceived").
I disagree, slightly. And so do you. :P
IcyMonkey wrote:
Keep in mind, as I proved in the philosophical brawl thread, reality does not exist outside usefulness. In everyday life, we follow this dictum, consciously or not. We usually only count things as existing if there is evidence for their existence. Why, then, should this not apply to God?
The two regions I bolded above are inconsistent. Specifically, if the usefulness of an idea or concept determines its existence or reality, then there are many useful things which we have little or no evidence for. And God is actually a prime example of this.
To paraphrase some of wolf346's comments: belief in a higher power has a profound effect upon many people's thoughts, and thus on their actions, and thus on their lives, and thus upon their reality. So while we may lack any evidence for the existence or lack thereof of God, the concept of God is undeniably a "useful" one, in some sense of the word.
Similarly, many systems of belief which have been torn down and supplanted by Science and/or Christianity may have actually been more "useful" in certain ways than their conquerors. The most tragic cases are those in which the prior system of beliefs included elements which contributed positively to human life and well-being in ways that were lost upon their replacement. Though they may not have described objective perceivable reality so well as Science does, the subjective reality that their believers experienced may have been a better one than that offered by Science, technological advances and all.
So these are the charges which I bring against Occam's Razor and those who wield it: The simplest system is not always the one best suited to serve humanity. The predictive power of a system does not directly correlate with its effect on human happiness. And to forget this and hail Occam's Razor as a physician's blade which can do no harm is irresponsible and innacurate.