{"id":2159,"date":"2011-01-27T13:13:12","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T18:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=2159"},"modified":"2011-01-27T13:13:12","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T18:13:12","slug":"occams-razor-and-entropy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/2011\/01\/27\/occams-razor-and-entropy\/","title":{"rendered":"Occam’s Razor and Entropy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was trying to understand Occam’s Razor, specifically I wanted to know its justification.\u00a0 There are posts over at Wikipedia<\/a> and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/a> worth looking at, but neither left me satisfied.<\/p>\n

Instead, I came up with “Death Implies Economy”<\/strong>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 DIE<\/strong> is a metaphysical justification of ontological parsimony:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 [One may revise the principle to ‘Demise Implies Economy’ without problem or changing acronym.]<\/p>\n

Now, the reason I wanted to figure out Occam’s Razor was because I thought it might help me understand entropy better.\u00a0 Entropy seems to be this force or cause that basically is always at work and does whatever we don’t want it to.\u00a0 Jerk.\u00a0 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:\u00a0 why should our physical science be subject to a form of energy loss?\u00a0 This makes me think it is our fault.\u00a0 No, not ‘fault’, but intrinsic part of how we go about our science.\u00a0 My apologies to the universe for calling it a jerk.<\/p>\n

So, back to Occam’s Razor and DIE.\u00a0 If DIE underpins Occam’s Razor, then we are metaphysically bound to proceed in a piecemeal manner.\u00a0 Even our most radical theories are not developed by immortals with no care for time.\u00a0 So, in some sense, our theories are also fundamentally limited and hence will always admit some unknown factors as a metaphysical consequence.<\/p>\n

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”?\u00a0 How can I make the claim that we will never succeed in this scientific endeavor?<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 And to question whether our adherence to ontological parsimony has the theoretical consequence of an unresolvable force.\u00a0\u00a0 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<\/strong>.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was trying to understand Occam’s Razor, specifically I wanted to know its justification.\u00a0 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”.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 DIE is a metaphysical justification of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,26,27,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-ontology","category-philosophy","category-physics","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}