Little sips can be very tasty

I'm surprised by the number of my friends and acquaintances who have not encountered the term "Occam's Razor," which to me is like the base from which we should conduct our explorations. It's often used in science, but often also warned against in science discourse, partly because the whole principle includes an escape clause which is sometimes forgotten.

Duns Scotus formulated it thus: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." It's the "beyond necessity" that disappears from detractors' versions of the formulation, a bit of a "straw man" dodge. 

I think it's a strong principle.

Aristotle sought to find the lowest common denominator in his search for first principles from which to build arguments: "We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses." Galileo found it so, as did Newton. 

"Necessity" does arise in physics from time to time, as when Einstein outperforms Newton on gravity calculations, something useful to know about when doing orbital mechanics. But the differences between their results are so small that as a rule of thumb we may continue to use Newton in daily life, even the daily life of construction engineers and airline pilots.

In popular culture, our Occam par excellence is Sherlock Holmes. In pursuit of his quarry, Holmes gleefully abandons complex explanations in favor of simple ones, not because the simple is always true, but because the complex is apt to be loaded up with irrelevancies, thereby likely wasting effort: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Stripping away specious explanatory principles improves his chances of arriving at an explanation that correctly describes what actually happened.

Society is struggling right now with a cornucopia of misinformation and disinformation. In fact, we're losing, and are most likely entering a period of unprecedented suffering brought on by a will to power, the primary weapon of which might be called a will to ignorance. 

Buddhism says we are subject to three poisons in our social setting (for our purpose they pretty much require the presence of others to be venemous): greed, anger and ignorance. Anger and ignorance are regularly fomented in service of greed.

Complex, or rather falsified, explanations are mustered to overcome knowledge in service of greed. Where someone has been duped by the greedy with such explanations, we have misinformation. The misinformed more easily harbor racism, sexism, anti-semitism, trans- "phobia," science denial, and the like, and can be recruited, wholeheartedly and with the belief that they are doing good, into campaigns against the commons, in the form of democratic elections, public health, public education, libraries and more, all of which may tend to equip us to resist the greedy.

Disinformation is the misinformation which is knowingly propagated by the greedy to foment ignorance and anger, so as to create and direct mobs -- armies that can serve as the shock troops -- in informal warfare to serve a will to power, the will of the greedy whose aim is rule in service of their greed.

Even those who recognize the caveat of "beyond necessity" may attack the razor for its imprecision. Such may have thoughts along these lines: "Occam has an out and therefore cannot be entirely trusted as it stands, hence it is misinformation and therefore its choice of theory is ultimately no better than the alternatives." This can be a reason why disinformers remain entirely within their comfort zones while laying waste to whole realms of the commons.

But it's not the micro-scale accuracy of our tools of inquiry that concerns humanity here. It's the motivation behind the uses to which they are put. We don't simply seek to know; we seek to know for benefit, and the majority (rightly, I submit) seek to benefit the many rather than the few.

When Buddha intuited that there is no permanent soul of the individual, he was applying something like Occam's razor. Dependent origination is for him the simple ontological explanation of existence, as opposed to a more complex and less demonstrable dualism, and gives rise to his four truths.

Buddhism does have an ethical position, but it's maybe hard to describe because we are used to prescriptives. The default Buddhist ethic is non-prescriptive. 

Buddha said "come, monk" to anyone who showed up. And then there was a knowledge commons. But whenever anyone took an action that was outside that bubble of right action arising from right view, he found it necessary to proscribe such actions in future, and from this arose the precepts.

Well and good; the precepts are a magnificent set of "skillful means." But Buddha and Occam both appreciate simple adherence to first principles, and at the center of first principles, I think, there is something like a still point.

When I sit zazen I don't shop. 

If I'm not shopping, I'm not under the influence of advertising. Therefore the ontological parsimony of sitting zazen resists the illusions promoted by the greedy, and by extension may be said to be resistance to fascism.

 

Here is my current zazen, in progress.

This is zero-gravity-chair-zazen, practically-reclining-in-bed zazen, very-intermittent zazen. 😁

Some might object that this cannot be zazen on the grounds that I'm not sitting up straight. Some might also object to it on the grounds that I'm probably only really doing it for a few moments at a time, rather than the full half hour of most of the Zoom zazen periods I attend. I'm just not up to much, as I've been deteriorating for some time. 

The doctors tell me they've finally located the problem, which is leukemia. I'm not in much pain, but I'm definitely sort of weak and woozy as a regular thing, so I've adapted my zazen accordingly. In like case, such as Long Covid, others may do the same. The important thing, as any Zen teacher will tell you, is not to be doing much.

The goalless goal, I think, for anyone interested in ontology at least, is to not be fooled. I admire those who aren't fooled for a whole half-hour at a time. I like to think I've been there and done that. If such practice is in the rear view mirror, though, I can at least, for the time being, be not fooled in little sips. 

Do you know the story of the tigers and the strawberry? Little sips can be very tasty.