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>Occam's razor would say that the simplest explanation is the best _Best_ not as in "the true one", but as in "the most possible, if we don't know any better".
by dmorgan 14y ago
>Occam's razor would say that the simplest explanation is the best
_Best_ not as in "the true one", but as in "the most possible, if we don't know any better".
An event could have an elaborate explanation and a simple one, and the elaborate explanation could still be the true one.
E.g a guy is found knifed in a desolate street of New York. His wallet is missing. He had no known enemies. The simplest explanation is "it was a mugging gone wrong". In fact, he was killed by a guy that had an obsession on the girl he recently started dating. The killer didn't even take the wallet to make it look like a mugging: he took it because it had pictures of the girl and the dead guy he wanted to add to his "shrine". (Hmm, I should go write for CSI).
>thus since this "simulation" works exactly the same as the known universe and we don't know about anything that is outside the universe we can safely ignore this theory and not lose any information about how the universe works.
Except if a simulation _doesn_t work_ "exactly the same as the known universe" but has tiny details that could be telling, which is, like, the premise of the whole article.
- narrator 14y ago> In fact, he was killed by a guy that had an obsession on the girl he recently started dating. The killer didn't even take the wallet to make it look like a mugging: he took it because it had pictures of the girl and the dead guy he wanted to add to his "shrine". (Hmm, I should go write for CSI). But that's not more likely than any one of thousands of other possible explanations which there is no specific evidence for. Proving a negative, that it didn't happen this way, is also not possible. Thus, that the negative cannot be proved is not evidence for this theory either. See Bertrand Russel's Teapot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot.
- dmorgan 14y ago>But that's not more likely than any one of thousands of other possible explanations which there is no specific evidence for. True, but the point I wanted to make is that Occam's Razor doesn't give us the "true story", just the more possible given the evidence we have. I.e sometimes the complex, involved story can be the actual thing that happened, despite involving 20 more entities and complex interactions.