contact@onbelief.orgThe Principles of Economy and Emergence
"When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically",
Ernst Mach.
Life is short. Why persist with beliefs concerning what we are and the nature of world around us just because they make us feel good, especially when they are not logically required? That is a very simple question which believers of many kinds simply choose not to ask because their belief gives them comfort. Instead they opt to believe ideas of unnecessary complexity or those that are outmoded or simply foolish.
"The Principle of Economy", "The Law of Parsimony" , or "The Rule of Simplicity" is inherent in the following quotation by Albert Einstein. "The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience" (source > ) In other words it is better to have a simple theory if it explains all of the evidence. There is a long philosophical tradition for this idea. William of Occam said "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily". This proposition eventually became known in the 19th century in its many derivative forms as "Occam's Razor".
Murray Gell-Mann has expressed the idea of parsimony as "beauty" in his lecture "Beauty and truth in physics". He asks "What do we mean by beauty and elegance?". The answer he gives is " A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have." He also points out that he has published theoretical ideas that have run contrary to current experimental observations. His action suggests an important fundamental principle that observational evidence (from experiment or by other mean's) also needs to be treated as provisional and that observation and belief should interact in a cyclic or iterative process.
In the same lecture, Gell-Mann also briefly introduces the idea of emergent properties which help to explain the complexity of our universe. In wikipedia you will find the following definition. "An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective". (See wiki article on Emergent properties and processes ) In other words complexity arises from the interaction of more simple systems. The emergent properties of the system then appear to us less deterministic or as Gell-Mann says "accidents happen". By this he presumably means that for any given starting point, a complex system could produce many possible outcomes. The outcomes are so numerous and the probability of an individual outcome so low (and so transient) that an individual outcome at a given stage in the operation of a complex system can not be predicted.
In the book 'Self-Organization in Biological Systems', Scott Camazine, when referring to biological patterns says "Self-organization is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower level component of the system. Moreover the rules specifying the interactions among the systems' components are executed only using local information, without reference to the global pattern. In short the pattern is an emergent property of the system rather than a property imposed on the system by an external ordering influence".
In a similar way Stephen Wolfram, who makes disputed claims about his own originality in his large online book "A New kind of Science", writes "Whenever a phenomenon is encountered that seems complex it is taken almost for granted that the phenomenon must be the result of some underlying mechanism that is itself complex. But my discovery that simple programs can produce great complexity makes it clear that this is not in fact correct." He has devised rules of interaction for simple entities, know as "cellular automata" which as Ray Kurzweil writes can result in patterns that are neither regular nor completely random. It appears to have some order, but is never predictable. We learn from this that in the 'real world' even apparently deterministic rules lead to the unexpected as well as an unpredictable degree of complexity.
Clearly there is a balance to be achieved between parsimony and emergence and the adequacy of description as "entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy". Strict reductionism and the law of parsimony will have a tendency to reduce analysis to inadequacy and so lead to under-specified or "black box" theories. If we proceed in a reductionist fashion we should agree with Whitehead when he said "Seek simplicity and distrust it". Nevertheless the fashionable tendency to use the term 'reductionist' or 'naive reductionist' as a pejorative term in popular culture is regrettable as it fails to acknowledge the simultaneous need for reductionism and a systems approach. There is a delicate balance to be achieved between reductionism and economical statement of theory on the one hand and the need for descriptive elaboration, theoretical sufficiency and coherence on the other. Kurzweil skillfully points out that we humans cannot be considered merely as 'Turing machines' or 'cellular automata class four' we at the very least need to add the capacity for evolution. ( for further reading see his Article on Wolfram's book). How far simple computational rules can explain the complexity of the universe in general and our own existence and consciousness in particular is perhaps the the most 'hard' problem in modern philosophy.
It could be argued that the 'god creator' idea is a simple or parsimonious theory or one that has emergent properties and so passes these tests. Closer inspection reveals however that far from being parsimonious creationism has many fundamental assumptions which render it less than economical. Paradoxically the God-creator 'idea' also fails in philosophical power by inadequacy of description and observation. (In so being, it has created careers for many theologians whose obvious intelligence might have been better deployed more productively on non-metaphysical branches of philosophy or in social, political or artistic activities.) If the idea was intrinsically descriptive and capable of elaboration rather than reinterpretation it could not be described as inadequate. The believer simply holds the God-creator idea to be the case by faith. For the religious this is a satisfactory state of affairs. For the believer the God-creator idea is sufficient.
Theoretical explanations and predictive tests are of course best applied, as Einstein said, when we do have at least "a single datum of experience" preferably of the repeatable variety. Modern cosmology by comparison with creationism for example has supporting observations, a mathematical formulation, a predictive capacity and gives as a far richer view of the creation of the earth and its ultimate insignificance. It is certainly not ancient day dreaming.
On the Nature of Belief
www.onbelief.org
Scotland, 12th October 2007 and thereafter
Copyright 2007 onwards
