Occam's Razor

Weirdly, after writing this essay about it, I was searching for some unrelated information about Anton Levoisier, an 18th century French chemist. While googling, I came across a strange, crank article about Georg Cantor, who discovered transfinite number sets.

I'm not qualified to comment on his primary objection, that Cantor's math requires a leap of faith. I don't believe it does- the diagonal proof is pretty easy to understand, but there might be subtleties...

I am comfortable identifying him as a nutcase, though.

His main point is that the problem of artificial intelligence could solved easily of if only computers could be taught math (1). To my ears, this sounds like "If only horses could be taught to run, they'd be cars."

What interests me is that he assumes arithmatic computation is what makes us conscious. The solution must be simple, and therefore, anyone who suggests that it's really complicated must be perverse. A comment on the article notes that the Nazis held the same opinion of Cantor's work that they held of Einstein's- Jewish science.

It's interesting because simplicity is usually a sign of sound thinking. Occam's razor is a good rule of thumb, and the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. But if applied inflexibly, it'll make you bonkers.

The cornerstone of conspiracy theory is the notion that it's all connected. A conspiracy, after all, is solvable. The Jews, Freemasons, Cantorists, Rightist Elements, can all be uncovered and thwarted. Creationists get a lot of milage out of the watchmaker theory for the same reason- it seems simpler than the Rube Goldberg mechanism of evolution by natural selection.

Here in China, and back in the US, the simplicity argument is often invoked by different factions of the government to smooth over complicated problems. The terrorists hate our freedom. China's too big for representative democracy.

A friend of mine recently heard from a Chinese colleague that,

"Other people evolved in Africa, but Chinese people evolved in China."

Makes perfect sense to me, but it's beside the point. What I mean to say is that you've got always to stay loose. Acting rationally requires a lot of guesswork, and knowing when to apply the rules is an art. Otherwise, you go nuts.

1) Of course, there are ad-hominem attacks against the mathematical community itself, which speaks to an unhappy postgraduate experience.