Hypothesis #4, Monk Occam and White paper worldviews

This is a continuation from the previous post where I wrote about my 3 fundamental hypotheses. To summarize:

1. I can trust my senses and therefore my observations.
2. This is not a huge Truman show-style play by all of you.
3. Nature will keep responding as it has until now.

Thinking about these three, I realized there was a 4th one I was forgetting. which is:

4. The past is not a lie

What if all the world started 3 minutes ago? Imagine all memories, evidence, fossils etc were planted to create the illusion of a past. A variation of this is some times claimed by 'young earth creationists' to explain various proofs that is brought forward that the universe is several billion years old. They claim that all evidence was 'planted' by God. Is this falsifiable? Not really. But it wouldn't be nice of Him now, would it? So as with the other hypotheses, we assume #4 holds.

But why do we make such huge leaps and accept these hypotheses, you ask? For one thing, if they don't hold, the truth may be literally anything. We have no leg to stand on. But there is a simpler justification for all this, offered by a 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar called William of Ockham. Odd trivia, Ockham, the location, is apparently a 9 mile drive from where I currently live. Exciting! Back to the principle, to quote the wiki-gods:

"The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", roughly translated as "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity".

This is often paraphrased as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood."

So we accept that these hypotheses hold, because it is the simplest explanation. Yes we could theorize that all this is a huge conspiracy by a mad elephant genius who has imprisoned all our minds in a virtual world. We could make any number of hypotheses that lead to the same observations we are making now. Yet we accept the simplest one, that is the principle we go by, and it seems to have worked out pretty well until now. Is it perfect? Of course not, but it's what we have. To paraphrase a greek saying, "It's the least obscene scenario".

So we covered #4 and Monk Occam. What about the white paper? A closely related set of thoughts I have had recently relates to a reccuring fear that I have. What if all civilization disappears in a mad max/lost kind of scenario? What if I no longer have access to computers and technology in general? In fact, what if all expertise is lost for some reason say, a mass amnesia disease. I postulate that the truth should be recoverable, given time. This means that I do not accept any kind of text that claims to be divine revelation of knowledge. If it cannot be independently recreated from white paper by an independent observer of reality that lives in an isolated environment, it is worth very little to me and I suspect it contravenes Occam's razor. It is not a simple theory if I am required to accept an entire book as being infallible without proof, no matter what that book is. That's why philosophies like Zen are attractive to me. They are recoverable and not bound to a specific text. One of their main messages is that you can see everything in anything. If you become expert enough in fishing for example, you can draw basic principles that can be applied in other areas. I guess that's why sayings and parables are so effective.

To summarize, I try to build my worldview based on the simplest explanation I can come up with, given my observations and having in mind that this should be re-creatable from the ground up if I was to open my eyes and find my self with no memory, in an unknown world. I think these thoughts conclude what I wrote in my previous blog post, although I am sure I will find more to write soon enough.

Until then, take care.
Alexandros