RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 17, 2019 at 8:12 am
(This post was last modified: January 17, 2019 at 8:15 am by bennyboy.)
(January 17, 2019 at 7:07 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: That's a great example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. What about the application of Occam's Razor? Isn't that a useful means of assessing probabilities in general?
I think I'd like you to specify how you mean to apply that principle to the subject at hand before I attempt to give an opinion on that.
I'd say that in general, applying Occam's Razor to existing world views is likely to lead to the following result: that collections of assumptions (for example about physical realism) are interpreted by a thinker as a single assumption. No physicalist says, "Given that solipsism is false, and that my senses are informing me about real objects, and that those objects exist independently of my mind in a 3D space, then X is true." Instead, you get something more like:
"Given that my existing world view is correct, and I feel sure it is, what I already think is most probably true." But most of us will add a lot of extra words to confound the obvious simplicity of that kind of thinking.
