Occam's Razor...

[Ó Cathasaigh]

I recently made a post about Occam's Razor in another thread, but as usual, my post was buried beneath more bickering about irrelevant discussions.
The subject of that thread was Creation, and how using Occam's Razor, we can rule out a creator. My response was this:



Occam's Razor is a wonderful tool. Especially when trying to figure out how something happened, like a Crime or an Accident. The simplest answer is usually the answer. However, it is not always the answer.
Take for instance the movie "Hot Fuzz"


I'll spoiler it if you havn't seen it...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

In this movie, Sgt. Angel is investigating a series of murders in a small village. After putting the clues together he finds that the victims were killed as part of a plot to keep a man's business free of competition in the village. One victim was killed to keep her from selling her land to a developer who planned to build a competing store there, the developer was killed as was his partner to keep them from buying and building on the land, a woman was killed because she had knowledge about the deal that was being brokered and a writer for the newspaper was also killed because he knew about the deal as well. Seems simple enough, or the most simple answer for the string of murders considering they were all related in that sense. However, the reasons they were murdered were actually radically different. One had an annoying laugh, one was a bad actor, one couldn't spell things properly in the news paper, one had an ugly house, and one was a talented Gardner. who was moving away and the murderers didn't want her to share her talent with another village. In the end, the string of murders was the result of a large conspiracy involving all the town fathers in order to retain the village of the year award. Instead of a 'simple' case with a logical string of cause and effect, you get an absurd reality. This is a fictional story, of course, but it's a good example of how Occam's Razor is not always the best tool to use. Simple does not equate to reality. Things get very complicated, and I imagine the creation of existence was far more complicated than a murder conspiracy or even a random explosion.

[Denny Crane!]

not always the answer but unless you have evidence to point otherwise your just clutching at straws, you can say its not always the answer if it makes you feel better but until you have some form of evidence that points to a creator your just randomly inserting a hypothesis for no other reason than you want to.

[Tankbuster]

not always the answer but unless you have evidence to point otherwise your just clutching at straws, you can say its not always the answer if it makes you feel better but until you have some form of evidence that points to a creator your just randomly inserting a hypothesis for no other reason than you want to.

Exactly.
Occam's Razor only applies to unnecessary hypotheses (the ones that don't advance your reasoning in any way).

[S.L.I.G]

not always the answer but unless you have evidence to point otherwise your just clutching at straws, you can say its not always the answer if it makes you feel better but until you have some form of evidence that points to a creator your just randomly inserting a hypothesis for no other reason than you want to.

We are all clutching at straws when we make a statement about the creation of reality. We are all clutching at straws when we discuss God, because there is no evidence that actually states anything one way or the other, nor could there ever be. Furthermore, how is a reality without God more simplistic than a reality with one? Or the reverse? It's all assumptions. What works for you is fine, whats works for me is fine. The debate is ultimately pointless.

[Ó Cathasaigh]

Why are we to assume the simplest is the correct one?

Just answer that question.

[Denny Crane!]

Why are we to assume the simplest is the correct one?

Just answer that question.

Because until you find evidence to suggest otherwise your just imposing your own desires on a question. Unless your insane and just picking things out of a hat.

Its not logical or rational, but I'm not trying to tell you that you have to be. Just don't expect me to debate philosophy with you without a degree of sarcasm if that is the path you choose. Other than that it is your choice and you are free to make it.

[finsternis]

Why are we to assume the simplest is the correct one?

Just answer that question.

Because it tends to be the answer. Why do we assume that if we jump of a cliff we will die? It tends to happen, doesn't it?

In science, the simplest answer tends to be true, hence why we say that creationism is false (it is not the simplest answer).

It also violates one of the fundamental beliefs that every scientist must assume: events in nature are related to nature ALONE (this might be true or not, but a scientist MUST believe this in order to do science).

[Helm]

Thing is just saying God made everything and God always existed is the simple answer. Though it's most likely a slightly more elaborate process than that which doesn't necessarily entail any supreme beings.

[Ó Cathasaigh]

Because until you find evidence to suggest otherwise your just imposing your own desires on a question. Unless your insane and just picking things out of a hat.

Its not logical or rational, but I'm not trying to tell you that you have to be. Just don't expect me to debate philosophy with you without a degree of sarcasm if that is the path you choose. Other than that it is your choice and you are free to make it.

Wait wait. I'm kind of lost here.

My beef is with someone saying "well, existence without a God is more simple than with a God...Occam's Razor, discussion over."
It seems to me to be nothing but a lazy copout. Like using Godwin's law in a talk about Mussolini's blackshirts.

[Denny Crane!]

Wait wait. I'm kind of lost here.

My beef is with someone saying "well, existence without a God is more simple than with a God...Occam's Razor, discussion over."
It seems to me to be nothing but a lazy copout. Like using Godwin's law in a talk about Mussolini's blackshirts.

Err nope. Not lazy correct. Thats where your going wrong you see. Your confusing logical and rational with lazy.

[Ó Cathasaigh]

Oh. Well then. Let's just stop discussion and claim victory because you think simplicity = reality is logical and rational.

It's just as stupid as Pascal's wager. If you want to be logical and rational, you should be praising God, because it's logically the best bet! However, I don't expect you to do so, because it's a horrible argument, much like Occam's Razor.

[wearycelt]

Oh. Well then. Let's just stop discussion and claim victory because you think simplicity = reality is logical and rational.

It's just as stupid as Pascal's wager. If you want to be logical and rational, you should be praising God, because it's logically the best bet! However, I don't expect you to do so, because it's a horrible argument, much like Occam's Razor.

Pascal's wager is only a logical conclusion if we assume that the only God that can exist is the Christian God. EDIT Hence, Occam's Razor suggests that due to the complicated issue of attempting to please various Gods, the simplest answer is to base your decisions on something else.

[Denny Crane!]

Oh. Well then. Let's just stop discussion and claim victory because you think simplicity = reality is logical and rational.

I think until evidence points you to believe in something its a futile exercise to just randomly make things up and then assume they could be true yes....

It's just as stupid as Pascal's wager. If you want to be logical and rational, you should be praising God, because it's logically the best bet! However, I don't expect you to do so, because it's a horrible argument, much like Occam's Razor.

Oh god. OK this is the part where I get a bit sarcastic, don't say I didn't warn you. If you think Pascals wager is logical then which God? Norse or Greek, do we include shamanistic tree gods in the hope it will effect our Karma? Do we worship boddhisattvas in the hope they help us towards enlightenment or the Krishna? It isn't exactly well thought out. And how can you choose a belief? Can we assume that God hates Atheists since we can't even define God, can we assume he would punish disbelief?

So do you just pick a random theist arguement and assume its random and chuck it into the arguement hoping I'd oh golly you are right how could I have forgotten about that daft arguement I'd better back down now since you called it logical and rational.

Except like most theist arguements it isn't logical or rational. As I said in the OP if you want to believe in God then believe, its your choice. But you are wasting your time assuming you can believe in God and define it as a logical belief or rational belief.

edit: OCathasaigh, happy trails. I'll leave it here. I don't think I can be the one to explain logic to you.

[MaximiIian]

The Razor has much to do with probability and hypothetical discussion, as the OP's example demonstrates. In any case, Occam's Razor is a scientific principle and tends to be right in areas of scientific study.
However, theology and philosophy don't usually deal with the same subject matter as science.

[Ó Cathasaigh]

not always the answer but unless you have evidence to point otherwise your just clutching at straws

Let me get back to this.

Let's say Person A. Commited a murder and Person B. has been blamed for it. There's plenty of Evidence that Person B was the murderer (B's prints on the victim and murder weapon, no alibi, and a busload of eyewitnesses). Person A has an aliby and seems to be squeaky clean. This means that under Occam's Razor we can simply say "Person B is the murderer all the evidence available has pointed to that and the only other explanation is that person A has framed person B and paid off the witnesses, but that's much more complex."

Evidence and Logic aside, in reality Person A is the murderer. It doesn't matter who knows it, or if he left any evidence, it's the truth and Occam's Razor can't change that. It can divert attention away from the truth, yes, but it cannot change reality.

[Tankbuster]

Logic and Reason are nice. However, Logic and Reason are not always in line with the truth and reality. The world is not always Logical, and it's high time you grew up and accepted it.

All you said is true, but it's not exactly a revelation, you see.
Logic and reason are only human tools that we use to attempt to get a grip on reality; they are not infallible, and they shouldn't be confused as such. When we get into the realm of quantum mechanics, for instance, trying to logically understand things like non-locality is a futile effort. Our brain is able to logically understand simple physics (the kind we could use on the Savannah), but we are horribly inept at determining the physics of the microscopic world.
Now, it just happens to be that if we apply our logic and reason to a system that's based on empirical observations, and we work according to a rational system that depends on empirical falsifiability and hypothesis testing, then we have gotten very good results so far. This is science, and it has a pretty good record of being able to figure out how the world functions.

Now, there's absolutely no guarantee that the things we investigate in science are actually real. For all we know, we might be living in the Matrix, and the laws of nature only exist in our mind. Now, this might be an interesting thought experiment (an opinion which I wouldn't share), yet it's just not useful for our day-to-day lives.
It's like this argument that creationists used to bring up: "The fossils are only there to fool us!". There's no way of disproving such an argument with any form of logical reasoning or science. It might be true for all we know. It's just not a useful way of thinking about the world.

Let me get back to this.

Let's say Person A. Commited a murder and Person B. has been blamed for it. There's plenty of Evidence that Person B was the murderer (B's prints on the victim and murder weapon, no alibi, and a busload of eyewitnesses). Person A has an aliby and seems to be squeaky clean. This means that under Occam's Razor we can simply say "Person B is the murderer all the evidence available has pointed to that and the only other explanation is that person A has framed person B and paid off the witnesses, but that's much more complex."

Evidence and Logic aside, in reality Person A is the murderer. It doesn't matter who knows it, or if he left any evidence, it's the truth and Occam's Razor can't change that. It can divert attention away from the truth, yes, but it cannot change reality.

Well of course, these are the limits of human reasoning. The police department can only search for evidence and leads, and use it to try to solve the case. If you are a police officer and you believe in the theory you just described, then you will have to find evidence to support your claim; otherwise, you're just being paranoid.
Rationality and logic will only point to the correct conclusion provided that the correct conclusion can actually be found with rationality and logic. That seems to be an axiom.

Thought experiments like this are cute and all, but they are not useful.
If person A really has committed the perfect murder (which by definition means that there is no way the police department can find out he committed the murder), then it's only logical that we won't be able to find the real murderer. That's a tautology.
If Satan really did place the fossil record in a certain place just to fool us, and some supernatural power arranged everything on this planet to make it look just like evolution really took place, then of course, we won't be able to know.
The question is: what do you gain with this kind of knowledge?
Nothing.

[Ó Cathasaigh]

Way to avoid the entire point of my post and turn this into something it's not, nor was it ever entended to be. You've single handedly turned the discussion from one of questioning if Occam's Razor is a legitimate excuse or tool for a debate, to one of Pascal's wager and it's flaws. Perhaps, and here's where I get a bit sarcastic, you missed the part where I called it a "Horrible Argument". Yes, I'm thinking you may have not read that part because, oh Golly me, you were so busy being a genius and all you either didn't have time to read that part or were too quick to put quill to ink in order to rebuff pascal's wager that it slipped your mind that I rejected it as a stupid argument. I mean, I understand completely. When I get on a roll I often stop reading others posts mid sentence and reply to them (once again, often treating them like children whilst making a complete ass of myself by agreeing with what they just said in the process. The Irony being, I am treating them like an idiot while saying in essence the exact same thing. It's a bit of a paradox. Am I an idiot as well?)

Concluding the sarcasm, you pretty much gave me a good example of something one, like myself might say to a summoning of Occam's Razor, by one such as yourself.

These are your words, your sarcastic wit ironically being used against you.

how could I have forgotten about that daft arguement I'd better back down now since you called it logical and rational.

In this case "that daft argument" is referencing Occam's Razor.


Logic and Reason are nice. However, Logic and Reason are not always in line with the truth and reality. The world is not always Logical, and it's high time you grew up and accepted it. I'm afraid I can't really say it's been a pleasure talking to you, but if you must leave, so be it.

[Avendiel]

The way I've always understood it the justification behind the use of the razor is a pragmatic one. Given that two theories are equal in other respects, it's just easier to learn, explain, and work with a simple one. If you've got a simple theory that works, then why introduce complications that don't help you out at all?

I mean, take a (silly) example. We've got a theory. There are all sorts of ways you can add all sorts of self-canceling or epiphenomenal junk to the theory that won't necessarily produce any way to judge between the theories empirically. Now, IMO such theories could be true, but if they were, how could we know and how could it matter? Maybe there really are intangible gravity bunnies or whatever that magically make gravity go in just the way it does, and they're completely unverifiable in principle because that's Just The Way They Are™ (or any similar theory that gets bandied about these days). My answer would be, and this is the spirit of Ockham's Razor imo as a pragmatic tool of theory construction, why the should we have to talk about them every time we want to use a theory of gravity? It's just a waste of calories and we can just as well do without them.

That is an example of two theories that will always make the same predictions regardless of any possible situation, but the same could go for theories which do make different predictions, but the differences occur in a way or at a level at which we have no way of testing at the moment (or maybe ever).

Keep in mind that none of this has anything to do with truth *exactly*. I mean, part of the point with Ockham's Razor is that you use it when you can't really distinguish between theories on the basis of truth as they're equally well supported. If that weren't true...if the complicated one is better supported than the simple one, then you take the complicated one (and maybe try to simplify it if possible, to make it easier to work with, but perhaps it isn't possible). If the simpler one is better supported, then you take it for that reason and hardly need to appeal to the razor. But if there's no evidence to support one over the other, then as far as you know either could be true, so you choose the simplest one to save yourself some effort.

[Denny Crane!]

Way to avoid the entire point of my post and turn this into something it's not, nor was it ever entended to be. You've single handedly turned the discussion from one of questioning if Occam's Razor is a legitimate excuse or tool for a debate, to one of Pascal's wager and it's flaws. Perhaps, and here's where I get a bit sarcastic, you missed the part where I called it a "Horrible Argument". Yes, I'm thinking you may have not read that part because, oh Golly me, you were so busy being a genius and all you either didn't have time to read that part or were too quick to put quill to ink in order to rebuff pascal's wager that it slipped your mind that I rejected it as a stupid argument. I mean, I understand completely. When I get on a roll I often stop reading others posts mid sentence and reply to them (once again, often treating them like children whilst making a complete ass of myself by agreeing with what they just said in the process. The Irony being, I am treating them like an idiot while saying in essence the exact same thing. It's a bit of a paradox. Am I an idiot as well?)

You called pascals wager logical and rational which it isn't. If you didn't want to discuss it then you shouldn't have said I should believe in it because it is logical and rational

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

I recently made a post about Occam's Razor in another thread, but as usual, my post was buried beneath more bickering about irrelevant discussions.
The subject of that thread was Creation, and how using Occam's Razor, we can rule out a creator. My response was this:



Occam's Razor is a wonderful tool. Especially when trying to figure out how something happened, like a Crime or an Accident. The simplest answer is usually the answer. However, it is not always the answer.
Take for instance the movie "Hot Fuzz"


I'll spoiler it if you havn't seen it...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

In this movie, Sgt. Angel is investigating a series of murders in a small village. After putting the clues together he finds that the victims were killed as part of a plot to keep a man's business free of competition in the village. One victim was killed to keep her from selling her land to a developer who planned to build a competing store there, the developer was killed as was his partner to keep them from buying and building on the land, a woman was killed because she had knowledge about the deal that was being brokered and a writer for the newspaper was also killed because he knew about the deal as well. Seems simple enough, or the most simple answer for the string of murders considering they were all related in that sense. However, the reasons they were murdered were actually radically different. One had an annoying laugh, one was a bad actor, one couldn't spell things properly in the news paper, one had an ugly house, and one was a talented Gardner. who was moving away and the murderers didn't want her to share her talent with another village. In the end, the string of murders was the result of a large conspiracy involving all the town fathers in order to retain the village of the year award. Instead of a 'simple' case with a logical string of cause and effect, you get an absurd reality. This is a fictional story, of course, but it's a good example of how Occam's Razor is not always the best tool to use. Simple does not equate to reality. Things get very complicated, and I imagine the creation of existence was far more complicated than a murder conspiracy or even a random explosion.

Your problem is that you're using a rather loose and not terribly accurate version of what Occam's Razor says and then you aren't applying it properly. Finally, you're treating it as some immutable law rather than what it is: a rule of thumb.

William of Occam's principle wasn't that "the simplest answer is usually the answer". What he actually said is variously reported and expressed in several different ways, but it is usually summarised as "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" or "plurality should not be posited without necessity" or alternatively as "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" or "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity". In practice this means the explanation that requires the least number of suppositions is most likely to be true.

So if I hear the sound of hooves on the street outside my house it's much more likely that there's a horse out in the street than it is that there's a zerba out there. But even though a zebra is less likely than a horse, both are far more likely than a unicorn. For it to be a zebra only requires me to suppose that a zebra has somehow escaped from a zoo or circus. That requires more supposition than the idea that it's a horse, but much less supposition than the idea that it's a unicorn.

Your Hot Fuzz example doesn't invalidate this in any way. It's not that the hypothesis Simon Pegg's character came up with was the simplest and yet wrong, it's just that there was information that he didn't have that would have given him an explanation that didn't include a whole lot of suppositions which turned out to be baseless. He supposed that the murders were linked by a plot to stifle competition. He made that up. The murders were actually linked by something else, but he was too busy pursuing the idea based on his supposition that he didn't see the information that would have told him what was actually going on.

My beef is with someone saying "well, existence without a God is more simple than with a God...Occam's Razor, discussion over."

That's a clumsy misuse of the principle.