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From: kube@cogsci.berkeley.edu (Paul Kube)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Layman's argument for Occam's razor
Message-ID: <20264@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 20:34:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.20264
Posted: Sun Aug 23 20:34:57 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Aug-87 03:51:52 EDT
References: <433@morgoth.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: kube@cogsci.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Paul Kube)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 34
Keywords: simplicity truth aesthetics

In article <433@morgoth.UUCP> dmb@morgoth.UUCP (David M. Brown) writes:
>One argument given recently was that simplicity has an aesthetic
>component, which touches our innate ability to directly sense Truth.
>I agree with this, but others were not convinced that this sense is
>accurate.

Are you counting me among the `others'?  I don't doubt that our
intuitions about what's true are sometimes right, and even reliable
over some domains.  I do doubt, though, that these intuitions are
reliable when applied to anything as complicated as a serious
scientific theory; do you really mean to suggest that you can tell if
a serious empirical theory is true just by thinking about it?

>I submit that if we had generalized,
>etc., in the wrong directions, we would have died (probably many did).
>Our process of generalization (ie, simplification) gave us survival
>value only because it was in the right direction.  

That we have survived as a species shows at most that we have not got
it so wrong as to have been put to serious disadvantage with respect to
our ecological competitors; it does not show that we have got it right. 
So far as physics goes, our innate endowment seems to have left us
stranded somewhere pre-Aristotle:  good enough given our niche
and maybe more useful than the correct theory given the computational
limitations of our wetware, but wrong nevertheless.

I would think that the kinds of cognitive capacities that tend to
enhance reproductive success are primarily things like being able to
tell if a mating candidate is fertile or whether the thing you're
looking at is edible.  Our intuitions are bad enough here; what reason
is there now to think that we have evolutionarily honed intuitions
for detecting correct mathematics, or quantum mechanics, or astrophysics?

--Paul kube@berkeley.edu, ...!ucbvax!kube