Shredding Occam's Razor

This principle of logic is a charming fantasy to which the ordinary binary intellects clings in a manner which precludes the possiblity of insight into reality. The quality of the clinging betrays the desperation which underlies this principle of ordinary logic. If Occam's Razor was recognised as training steps for real understanding it would be unobjectionable.

But the principle of Occam's Razor, dating from medieval times, specifies that the simplest explanation is the right one. What this boils down to, is, simply put, that the view of the ordinary binary intellect is the correct view. And this is not always the case: the ordinary intellect cannot even contemplate the vast (yes billions and billions) number of intersecting events which actually DO create an explanation for any one detail that occurs. And this does not even bring up how to consider the fact that what does not happen is just as important, the near misses, the totally close calls which you are never aware of---all this is actually effective and explanatory---but not manageable by the binary logic which defines the ordinary intellect. The ordinary intellect says something is either this, or that. In actually the correct view includes this, that, and that, and so on, on, on....

Just because the ordinary intellect cannot comprehend it, does not make reality any less real.
As Jehovah, mascarading as reality, once said, I am what I am.

Machinery

War is not the almost constant state of mankind that history presents to us, according to Jan Cox. It certainly can be be productive though to contemplate. Here you have men courageous enough to walk into bullets. What greater courage could there be? And yet there may be one, which however, is not the direct topic here now. Back to war, and soldiers following orders they may or may not realize are bad, ill thought out, serving someone's vanity, wasteful of life. (Yes, I got started on this watching Ken Burns's latest, on The War. ). Yet the soldiers follow orders for the most part, they do as their officers direct.

What occured to me was the reason Humanity grows under these circumstances. If you had soldiers on the battlefield running around without following directions, you would harm the larger organism. This failure to follow orders may be seen as a kind of illness in the body. Certainly the larger point that the society with such a malfunctioning army is less safe is obvious if you pause over it. One basic aspect of an army's usefulness is quick effective response to danger. This better protects the society of which it is a part. This is because the soldiers are cogs in a larger mechanism.

What is harder to see is that such a scenario also well describes the mental realm. We like to think we are free thinking beings who evaluate and act based on a well informed consideration of whatever issue is at hand. In fact though, the thoughts in our heads are soldiers some well commanded, some pathetically poorly commanded, but in neither case is the commanding officer anywhere nearby. Certainly not in your head. Did you invent your language? Your use of words, fundamental to the thinking process, is part of a larger process in which your darling self is but an illusion. The words have a purpose, they function as cogs in a larger unit, but the purpose and function are not what we assume. Certainly the transfer of information is the least of the functions of verbal speech, though not the least important if you consider just speech intending to describe the external world.

No conspiracy theory is being suggested here, simply the expansion to a mental view wherein we can acknowledge the possibility that things might not be what we assume.