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> Who's to say there isn't something out there we haven't discovered yet Occam's razor? We should work with as few assumptions as possible to get a model with

• RHSeeger 11mo ago
  Yeah, but "we've been discovering new things for all of history, so there's likely more to discover" seems to a pretty fair assumption.
  • PaulRobinson 11mo ago
    The point I made a few comments up is that often we start to identify the need for a new science based on observations we can't explain with our current understanding. Hydro-dynamics and electricity are examples given in the comment I replied to - but we could see those and go "wait, we can't explain this well, yet". Quantum physics, X-rays, wave-particle duality of light, and so on - we observed something and could not explain it. My point was I don't think that's happening with neuroscience yet. We might not have a complete map yet, but we know where thoughts come from in the organ, we can watch them. Or can we? It's an open question, if people think there is more science to be done to sort out fundamentals, and we're not just in the stage of iterating on our base assumptions more, I'm OK with that, but it's not my understanding today.
• akomtu 11mo ago
  Occam's razor is just a search heuristic when we try to find something in the woods at night blindfolded. It's a rule of thumb that says "when there is so many possibilities to explore, start with the simplest ones first, otherwise we'll surely get lost." But it's a mistake to use the Occam's razor as a law of nature and think that if we can't see anything in the dark over there, then there must be nothing there.
  • cindyllm 11mo ago
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