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Occam's razor cannot be used to assert that when something exists, if must be or indeed is likely, to be in its simplest possible form. Human DNA has plenty of

Occam's razor cannot be used to assert that when something exists, if must be or indeed is likely, to be in its simplest possible form. Human DNA has plenty of redundant areas and yet we still exist. Indeed, probably all organism have a non-simplest form of DNA and yet still do just fine. We only have one example of a universe and even for that we have an imperfect understanding of its working. It is therefore impossible to know or assert that the universe is it its simplest possible form.

blacksqr 8y ago
By form I don't mean physical form of objects in the universe, but the form of physical law which describes all observable events which compose the universe. That that form is the simplest it can be is exactly what Occam's Razor suggests. It is that form that must be grasped in order to assess the difficulty of replicating the universe in digital form, which is the topic of the linked article. Neither I nor Occam assert that the universe is in its simplest possible form, Occam suggests that is the likeliest assumption, and so far he's been on the money. Reasoning from other assumptions would require extraordinary evidence. People do use Occam's Razor to reason about the nature of the universe. Here is a reference to an argument that the Bohm-DeBroglie interpretation of quantum physics is incorrect because Occam's Razor: [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory#Occam's-razor_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory...