Occam's Razor

 
When choosing between explanations of phenomena the one with least assumptions is best.

Occam's razor is a common meme in the self-proclaimed as well as certified scientific community, but while it is almost entirely taken as obvious doctrine without question it remains only an aesthetic heuristic. Simpler explanations are just more pleasing and also far easier to wrap one's head around—at least that's what we believe. There are obvious counters to the assumption that simplicity of abstract explanation is best, but it is clear that the razor is not so simple. Occam's razor is not against complexity as such, it is merely against unnecessary complexity. The question of what is necessary, however, is really what Occam's razor really comes down to. The formula of parsimony itself does not tell us what we are to count as necessary complexity or not. It is often the case that we simply assume that necessary complexity is found by not making logical leaps from what is known to the unknown, i.e., not to make explanations which reach into assumptions we have no sufficient evidence for. This seems easy enough... until one comes to grasp the relativity of empirical science and its assumptions. What we deem necessary complexity has everything to do with what complexities we already assume the world has. With something like schizophrenia, for example, we in the modern world believe overwhelmingly that there is only one model of schizophrenia: that it is a mental illness to be treated by psychiatrists and chemical intervention. Why? Because with a physicalist model of the mind it is assumed that the nature of the condition is fundamentally neuro-chemical. Now, disregarding the complications that come with the fact that modern medical science only knows schizophrenia as a family of phenomena which only appear similar but have no known common genesis, we must also acknowledge that what is called a mental illness by us is regarded in other models as something else. In the first world there is a very small, but significant, group of professionals and individuals who claim that schizophrenia is a mental disorder, but it is fundamentally psychological (a kind of mental breakdown), not chemical, and therefore it should be treated quite differently. The very nature of schizophrenia is brought to question in some cases in that it is claimed it may not be a disorder or disease at all, it might be a natural psychological response of the mind to certain kinds of extreme stress, and further, that it might actually be a self-healing mechanism of the psyche if only we paid attention to the meaning of hallucinations with regard to the self. These are just differences in the 'modern' view of this phenomenon, one only gets increasingly radically different when one steps beyond into the so-called 'primitive' societies where this illness or disorder is not considered an illness or disorder at all, but a spiritual gift that makes one capable of becoming a shaman. In each model, the necessary complexity is different. For the physicalist it is unnecessary to posit conscious or unconscious thoughts or attitudes as the cause of schizophrenia because the assumed nature of the disease is physiological; as such, one finds that all other possible explanations are a priori denied or reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of the physical because the very concept of objectivity as such is conceived as the physical as such. In such a worldview no other kind of model is allowed any validity, no evidence could ever be evidence of anything except for physical models. In the psychological models of schizophrenia no evidence could be evidence for a physical reduction, any sign of success can always be rationalized away as a false explanation of merely dealing with symptoms while not touching the true essence of the issue. For the shamanistic worldview there is a total antipathy to the physicalist reduction, and some significant friction with the psychological reduction in that the shamanistic model posits not that the subject is somehow trapped or projecting from within, but rather that an objective appearance of beings is being perceived by the individual whose latent spiritual capacities have awakened. The voices are not my voices, but the voice of other beings existing in a different aspect of our reality. Their whispers are not broken meaningless words and phrases, but deeply important and meaningful messages. The 'schizophrenic experience' of hallucinations is not a disease or disorder, but a privileged gift of sight into another part of the world. The physicalist reduction is a priori denied: spirit is the ultimate reality, not matter, and schizophrenia is a positive spiritual condition. The psychological reduction is a priori denied in that an objective spiritual world is posited. In every trance communication which provides even the faintest trace of an interpreted truth the shaman's model of the world is given evidence as its theoretical object is empirically evident. For each of these worldviews, the others provide unnecessary complexity in positing what to each appears as extraneous assumptions which have little if anything to do with the nature of the so-called problem. [ ] [ ] [ ] —Parsimony As Such— Parsimony as such is telling of nothing much like the concept of efficiency is itself empty without the consideration of what its concrete purpose is. What is metaphysical realism parsimonious to? The immediate intuition of the senses and their corresponding concepts: there is a world out there that is not me. Given this experienced reality, the simplest explanation for this experience is that there simply is a world out there that isn't me nor dependent on me, and in its most logical extreme is so independent that I cannot fathom what it even is because it is the ultimate alien being. The explanation for this, however, ends up being in principle impossible because naive realism simply isn't satisfactory to explanatory requirements, and a rigorous realism which is critical and nondogmatic has to bring into question the link of mind/cognition and truth/objects in such a way that this link is also impossible when rigorously challenged to explain itself completely. What is metaphysical Idealism parsimonious to? With regard to Bernard Kastrup's Idealism specifically, it seems it is regarding the immediacy of the phenomenon of consciousness's object. Like Hume and Berkeley, Kastrup thinks that the obvious immediacy to hone in on is not the opposition of consciousness to an object that is not it, but to the experiencing itself. We experience perceptions, not 'things out there'. The concept of things out there is secondary to the immediate fact: we only experience perceptions. Where are these perceptions? Not out there as something which is not consciousness. Kastrup immediately begins with a basis quite different to the realist, and one can hardly argue against this beginning as invalid. Kastrup is almost a Spinozist in his dual-phenomena theory: internal (first person subject perspective) and external (second person object perspective) except he ultimately privileges consciousness/mind as the source of the external. There are other Idealisms which do not function with appeals to consciousness or minds at all (so called objective Idealisms like Plato's). Both of these views simplify towards one thing they are interested in privileging, and in doing so massively complicate another related set of matters. In the end the question of which is most parsimonious is bogus. Parsimonious in regard to what? [ ] [ ] [ ] —Occam's Razor As Specific— Occam's razor is not about general parsimony. It is about relative parsimony comparing two theories of the same with regard to both what is minimally to be empirically explained and what is minimally needed to rationally explain it. You can't use such a principle of general parsimony when the object you want to explain is itself an open question (what reality even is). Between the explanation of mind arising from brain and brain receiving consciousness, what in the world could this heuristic do when the very appearing of the object to be explained is radically different? Kastrup argues that one should not throw away theories that may invoke paranormal (e.g. ESP, mind without body, life after death, etc) explanations since we have not yet concluded their negative without doubt. He uses this scientific gap as a way to open up theories to his Idealism. He is right, but parsimony as such is not really the basis of why one would choose one or the other. Consider psychedelic or mystical experience. To the physicalist the 'simple' explanation is to simply explain it away as an drug induced illusion because that is what the assumptions of this theory require for parsimony despite your being unable to give any detailed reasoning as to how and why this drug does this and why the brain responds this way. Is this unquestionably true? Not at all, perhaps psychedelics do reveal another reality of the world. A theory that accepts the latter would think it more parsimonious to interpret this experience as a lifting of limitations of the every day mind by shifting the receiving channel of the brain. Why not accept one or the other? Because your assumptions simply a priori lead you to deny one or the other as making sense to you, let alone seeming simple. Neither of these explanations are actually simple, and being more or less simple as such is not a virtue when it comes to mere beliefs. What we care about is necessary simplicity, but such is different from case to case and theory to theory. The necessary simplicity of biology, for example, is something we are finding out to be increasingly complex. True simplicity is complex. Our commitments make us believe things are simple when they never are. For example, organisms are not just abstract independent entities in themselves, they live in and form ecologies they depend on, their mere biology does not explain their being and living, etc. The explanation necessarily gets more complex the more we know, so parsimony concerns the minimal set of assumptions of what we know. What we know, however, concerns what we think things even are. If we disagree on what things even are, then parsimony is useless to compare.