The Limits of Simplicity

Seven hundred years ago in a commentary on a religious tract, William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar, wrote that “plurality must never be posited without necessity.” Such is Occam’s razor.

A bit gnomic, you might think. A bit hard to see at first how it earned its status as one of the most prized intellectual tools in scientific endeavour. But in his new book Life is Simple, Johnjoe McFadden proclaims it world-changing, “cutting through the thickets of medieval metaphysics to clear a path for modern science.” In short, this is a book of hero-worship, and just possibly McFadden has a point.

For most of us, Occam’s razor is like a country we can’t quite place on the map; we know it’s something to do with simplicity, but we’re not sure exactly what. Cited widely in science, but often misunderstood, for some it’s invaluable, hinting at profound truths about the nature of knowledge. For others it’s worse than useless. The old line attributed to HL Mencken has it that for every complicated question there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.

At its heart is the idea that simplicity can in some way help us decide between competing theories, all else being equal. “It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer,” as William put it elsewhere. Perhaps the most persistent of the confusions is that this means simpler wins every time, against any alternative. 

A more accurate paraphrasing might be “don’t add complications if you don’t have to.” That still leaves plenty of room for interpretation, not least about whether all else is ever really equal between two competing theories, giving us one of the most debated—and for my money intriguing—heuristics around. Mental shortcut or philosophical thicket? Questions about the razor’s true use and meaning abound.  READ MORE

K I S S Theory

KISS...

Keep

It

Simple

Stupid

What I have found over my lifetime is that:

• if something is simple describe it with complex words and concepts
• If something is complex describe it with simple words and concepts

and...  when you think about it, that is exactly what has been or is going on right now in both your professional and personal lives.  Anyone in a leadership role will use these principles all the time whether or not they are even conscious that they are using them at all...  especially people of faith.

This actually started out as a marketing concept by some clever Harvard graduate but it is nothing more than a spin of Occam's Razor...

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose an event has two possible explanations. The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation....

Or, another way to say it is KISS...

It seems that we are creatures of habit and our habit is to look at life simplistically because doing so any other way causes our brain to hurt after a bit of time.

Free Will and Choices

There is a common belief among mankind whether it be from man or from woman and whether you believe in a Creator or not that ALL OF US WERE born with a certain amount of FREE WILL and that this WILL is used on a daily basis to make our CHOICES and it is these CHOICES that determine the direction into which our lives will proceed and it is these CHOICES that determine or predetermine most if not all of our future outcomes.

There is no denial that we make choices and/or that for some of us, our choices are made for us whether these decisions come from our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our bosses, and/or our spouses.  And that these choices do influence in some degree our future outcome and life's directions.  HOWEVER, the concept of free will is a different matter altogether in that free will means the following:  the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.

Consequently, free will has nothing to do with any religious beliefs as it is simply an act of bring born into the world of mankind...  and, we all know that giving birth results from the sexual union of a man and a female...  and, we can make the assumption that this union has nothing to do with the will of a Creator or any such other religious nonsense...  especially since giving birth is as natural as breathing air...  and, we can assume that the properties of our physical body have nothing to do with a Creator either as they are simply the result of millions of years of mutated evolution.

As was evidenced by Jesus and his sayings as recorded in THE BIBLE, if he had FREE WILL then Jesus would not have needed to obey the will of GOD...  but, the will of GOD is necessary and the foundation of most all religion.

So...  therein lies our problem.

NOW...  let's look at the concept of time and the scientific fact that time has a past, present, and a future even though we can neither see our past or our future, yet we know as sure as we are breathing that it is there.

We also know from our space program that astronauts age less in space than they do on earth.  Using this knowledge as a foundation, we can now make the assumption that when we send astronauts further and further out into space and we keep a record of their time relative to earth that their present would be our future.  It is also possible that if these astronauts were the same age as those monitoring their progress that the monitors could die of old age before those astronauts return and still have almost half their lives to live.

Now, let's return to creation and see if it was a Creator that brought it about or some scientific anomaly.  Science believes that our universe was created by the bursting forth and expansion of a black hole.  By definition, a black hole is a compression of matter...  so, what comes out is that which was first inside since a black hole cannot exist with nothing inside.

Yet, science cannot explain where all the stuff that was expelled from that black hole came from...  and so, we must turn to a Creator for the only logical explanation which is a prime example of OCCUM'S RAZOR which states:  Occam's razor is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct. It is applied to a wide range of disciplines, including religion, physics, and medicine.

With this new concept in mind, we can easily explain the notion that if our Creator wanted to, He could see our past, present, and future and if it was His Will He could decide our choices for us by changing facets of our past which would cause us to make different choices in our present, thereby nullifying the fact that we had any free will at all.