Occam's razor

In keeping with the last entry, I'd like to continue with the theme of simplicity. Last time we saw that the world is by nature complex, whereas most everything we humans get our hands (feet, minds, ...) on gets complicated. What is more, complicated things are difficult, but complex ones are not really.

Sure, I can hear all you scientists out there yelling that we've only begun scratching the surface of understanding of many of the world's phenomena, from the human genome to the intellectuality of one-celled organisms to parallel universes to slicing bread. But, we should not mistake the map for the territory. I fully agree that we've only begun scratching the surface because from the onset we are complicating things. Complex things - with a bit of patience and perseverance - can be grasped, but we have to get our egos out of the way and let our consciousness work its magic.

Of course, since we're such technological creatures, we need tools. We love tools. Most of us don't work well with tools, but we love them anyway. And one tool that can help us out here is Occam's Razor. Well, this isn't really a razor like the one's we use to shave with, rather the term refers to a way of thinking, a sharp way of thinking, a heuristic, and by thinking sharply and cleanly, we can avoid a lot of complication.

As a side note, the tool is named after William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349), an English logician and Franciscan friar, to whom it is credited although he didn't come up with it. The same thought as the razor are to be found in Maimonides (1138?-1204), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), and John Duns Scotus (1266?-1308). It was Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) who first used the term itself.

The form most often used by Occam himself is numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, or, for those of you who opted out of Latin in school, "plurality ought never be posited without necessity". This should be thought along with the principle of economy which was well known to him and his predecessors, namely frustra fit per plura quod potest fiere per pauciora, or "it is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer". One of the most common formulations today is

Explanations should never multiply causes without necessity; when two explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.

So, I think you can see where I'm going with this. The next time you listen to all those explanations on the news why gas prices must be tied to oil prices, or why it "makes economic sense" to ship tomatoes from Florida to Mexico to be packaged so that they can be shipped to New York for sale, or why there is allegedly some inalienable right for private citizens (as opposed to citizens who are part of an official militia, like the Swiss) to own guns, or that a society can afford to pay CEOs hundreds of millions but can't see to it that single mothers can make the rent, or why any one religion got it all right while all others got it all wrong (... the list goes on ...), think of William and his razor.

It's been a long time since William and longer since we took him seriously, so let's take his razor then as the goal to strive for. In the meantime, any simple, sensible explanation will do. Do we still have it in us, or have we lost it completely?