Brent,
> scientific theory. Occams razor is a vague desiderata. You can justify
> almost anything by choosing your definition of "complex", e.g. theists
> say, "God did it." is the simplest possible theory.
no you can't:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/occams-razor.html
most relevant quote from the above post:
This lets us see clearly the problem with using "The lady down the
street is a witch; she did it" to explain the pattern in the sequence
"0101010101". If you're sending a message to a friend, trying to
describe the sequence you observed, you would have to say: "The lady
down the street is a witch; she made the sequence come out 0101010101."
Your accusation of witchcraft wouldn't let you shorten the rest of the
message; you would still have to describe, in full detail, the data
which her witchery caused.
Witchcraft may fit our observations in the sense of qualitatively
permitting them; but this is because witchcraft permits everything, like
saying "Phlogiston!" So, even after you say "witch", you still have to
describe all the observed data in full detail. You have not compressed
the total length of the message describing your observations by
transmitting the message about witchcraft; you have simply added a
useless prologue, increasing the total length.
The real sneakiness was concealed in the word "it" of "A witch did it".
A witch did what?
QUOTE END
same goes for "god did it"
Cheers,
Günther
--
Günther Greindl
Department of Philosophy of Science
University of Vienna
guenther.greindl.domain.name.hidden
http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/
Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/
Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org
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Received on Wed Jun 18 2008 - 15:39:25 PDT