01.27.11

Occam’s Razor and Entropy

Posted in economics, ontology, philosophy, physics, science at 1:13 pm by nogre

I was trying to understand Occam’s Razor, specifically I wanted to know its justification. There are posts over at Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy worth looking at, but neither left me satisfied.

Instead, I came up with “Death Implies Economy”. What this means is that we are fundamentally limited in time and resources, and hence we cannot afford to waste what little we have on unnecessary complication. DIE is a metaphysical justification of ontological parsimony: regardless of how we come to the knowledge of death, the principle only requires that we are fundamentally limited and is agnostic as to how we come to understand this of ourselves. [One may revise the principle to 'Demise Implies Economy' without problem or changing acronym.]

Now, the reason I wanted to figure out Occam’s Razor was because I thought it might help me understand entropy better. Entropy seems to be this force or cause that basically is always at work and does whatever we don’t want it to. Jerk. Of course the universe has no reason to conform to our way of doing things, or worse, my way of viewing the world, but entropy just seems to be excessive: why should our physical science be subject to a form of energy loss? This makes me think it is our fault. No, not ‘fault’, but intrinsic part of how we go about our science. My apologies to the universe for calling it a jerk.

So, back to Occam’s Razor and DIE. If DIE underpins Occam’s Razor, then we are metaphysically bound to proceed in a piecemeal manner. Even our most radical theories are not developed by immortals with no care for time. So, in some sense, our theories are also fundamentally limited and hence will always admit some unknown factors as a metaphysical consequence.

It is fair to ask if this is all just a fancy way of stating pessimistic induction, “Since we haven’t gotten theories perfect in the past, we shouldn’t expect to in the future”? How can I make the claim that we will never succeed in this scientific endeavor?

My answer is that these questions raise legitimate issues, but the specific question at hand is not to speculate on what will happen with future theory but how we are to understand entropy and simplicity now. And to question whether our adherence to ontological parsimony has the theoretical consequence of an unresolvable force. Since we must believe the theories we have, at least to some extent, whatever these theories do not describe must be left in an accordingly deep mystery– as the result of an unexplained force at least as powerful as the forces we do explain. Therefore I have to conclude that, given a metaphysical understanding of Occam’s Razor such as DIE, there is a legitimate concern of inevitable unresolvable causal consequences which could manifest as various forms of entropy.

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01.01.09

Economics

Posted in economics, philosophy, Relativity, science at 10:59 pm by nogre

Readers of this blog may have noticed a lack of updates recently. I can’t apologize: I’ve been eating, breathing and drinking philosophy for so long, that now that I have written everything I wanted to write, I feel free. I wish it on all of you. [Happy New Year Everyone!]

But this doesn’t stop me from thinking. I was at a Christmas party and got talking with an Indonesian economics grad student. He was researching economic methods Indonesia could use to become treated as a major world power, such as investing in ports with international business significance. Interesting stuff.

Unfortunately my knowledge of economics is woeful. However, when I pressed him to explain exactly how his economics works, he used ethical terms. This gave me the idea that economics is fundamentally based in ethics. When economists speak of value, this use of value is not different than the value we use in ethics, only a bit more abstracted.

Money used to represent a commitment of the issuing institution to having a certain amount of a precious metal on hand. The cash was a proxy for that metal. Metal, of course, has no inherent value: it is just a lump of metal. What gives a lump of metal value is its properties that people use for specific purposes, and these purposes are fulfilling the commitments we have in daily life. Hence money is an eventual proxy for commitments.

Now, commitments are a relativistic metaphysical substance, something I have much more experience with (man that’s a funny thing to say). Relativistic metaphysical substances can be analyzed along the general guidelines of physical relativity: there is a general theory, there is a special theory, and then there is quantum.

The forces of macroeconomics can be conceptually aligned with a general relativistic theory, and microeconomics with special relativity. Unfortunately everyone already understands these things so there is little hope of finding some inefficiency to exploit.

What people don’t get is quantum mechanics: it is just accepted that things are weird in the quantum world. My view is that quantum phenomena are a highly sophisticated relativistic measurement issue (yes, I have seen all the data against this view and I am still convinced). This allows me to look in the world of economics for similar relations and, lo and behold, impulse buying fits the schema.

Impulse buying appears to unbelievably unstudied: it has 4 whole paragraphs dedicated to it in Wikipedia. I know this isn’t the best judge of research, but other economic topics in Wikipedia seem to have textbooks written about them and impulse buying has 1 academic journal reference (about how distraction affects brand selection during an impulse buy, not exactly the underlying theory) and a reference to a ‘Natural Parenting’ magazine article. I feel like I can declare myself an expert right now: I am the foremost leader in the economic theory of impulse buying.

I guess now that I am done with philosophy I can start a business to see if my theories are correct…. never thought I’d end up in experimental philosophy, but it just goes to show that you can never say never.

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