🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <433@morgoth.UUCP> dmb@morgoth.UUCP (David M. Brown) writes:
>The purpose of a theory is to simplify.  Seemingly disparate phenomena
>are unified, or integrated, into one.  The purpose of this is similar
>to the need for modularity in programming - to hide details.

Yes. But why do you hide the details? So it's easier to think about,
I would say.

>But what, someone asks, if the simpler theory is not the "right" one?
>Perhaps you philosophers avoid this question.  If so, then you need
>not consider Occam's Razor as anything more than advice.  If not, then
>we are entering the realm of "Truth" (absolute, relative, whatever).

I really don't think that science deals with "Truth" or "right"ness.
It does deal with accuracy and explanatory power. Explanatory power
has two halves: simplicity, so we can understand it, and generality,
so it covers more than a narrow range of phenomena.

>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.

I'm not sure what Truth you're talking about here. Do you mean
scientific truth, as in the likelyhood of some scientific theory being
accurate to such and such a degree, or are we back to some sort of
innate philosophical truth? I don't think we can sense directly
the accuracy of a scientific theory.

>Because we are talking about matters of the mind, it might be
>appropriate to discuss the origin of the mind.  Basically, minds have
>evolved because they have survival value.  The ability to generalize,
>to hide detail, and therefore to deduce, to look ahead, to imagine, has
>given us the ability to survive.  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.  For example, it was
>absolutely correct to consider the leaves, branches, trunk and root as
>one entity, the tree.  That was the *correct* simplification.

Nonsense. That was the *useful* simplification. *Useful* in that it
increased survivability. There is nothing to make any simplification
any more "correct" than any other, other than degree of accuracy.
And the usefulness of such simplifications varies *greatly*, depending
on your purposes.

>When a theory becomes too complex (at any one particular level), when
>it has loose ends, when it has jagged edges, when it is not simple,
>our aesthetical sense, derived from millions of years of being right,
>tells us it's wrong.

Hmm. For whatever it's worth, I don't think this is right. I think
there is a failure to comprehend a theory that gets too complex --
comprehend on an intuitive level -- which is of course yet another
simplification. I feel that the isomorphism between my mind and
physical reality is not very good. I don't think we're told it's
wrong, but that we don't understand it well.

A theory is only "wrong" insofar as it is inaccurate. But it is only
useful insofar as it is accurate AND understood.

>Did you have a picture in your mind of 'loose ends', etc.?  What is
>that a loose end of?  What are those lines?  I can't answer that
>exactly, but I think they are really *there*.  Where?  Somewhere you
>can only see/be with your mind.  Somewhere where conception differs
>but little from perception.

I think this is more of a psychological problem. Some people (including
me) think in pictures. Images come to mind when I think about things.
I think it's just another way of representing within your mind what
goes on around you. Another way of making the isomorphism between
reality and your mind. Many people have a good understanding of what
they can picture.

It's just a simple step beyond that to represent concepts within your
mind as pictures, too. If the brain is hard-wired for anything, it`s
hard-wired for dealing with perception. Hundreds of millions of years
in the making. Why not make use of that hardware?

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Bob Myers                                         myers@tybalt.caltech.edu
			 {rutgers,amdahl}!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!myers