Ockham's Razor and Ding an sich

We have phenomena. From these phenomena we deduce or posit Things, out there, that are independent of observers, whatever that means.

Seems like Ochham's Razor should cut off that fat.

Sure it can be useful and it certain is tradition to posit these extra entities, these things that are somehow separate from experience.

But they are extra.

 

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I'll be brief, then let the thread run.

1) Ockham's razor states that we must not needlessly multiply entities.

2) If we do as you suggest [and some do...], we end up in solipsism.

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Let me mull on number 2. I do not think I have to deny the existence of others, as long I claim to experience their whole presence. But I can see I'll have to do some work.

As far as number one, you can drive a double trailer through a word like 'needlessly.'

 

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oddly, this is what i was getting at with the allusion to nen(nien)-actions. in certain forms of zazen meditation one aims to dissallow for the second stage of nen-actions--or pure perception without abstraction/naming, and subsequent reflection upon.

isn't occam's razor (though occam be a theist) frequently used to argue against the existence of god?

so, alternately i suggest, rather than solipsism, perhaps satori--seeing one's original face. or, alternately, monism?

 

Second take. It may be a form of solipsism, but this tends to mean that the self essentially swallows up everything we think of as other or world. There would also be a more Buddhist approach, where the Self is not expanded, but rather the phenomenon is Everything. Movements towards asking about Ding an sich are hit with a stick or with 'Mu'. It is not so much a claim there is nothing beyond experience, but rather a not claiming there is. Mystical writers from a number of traditions, certainly various Hindu sects but also Christian and Sufi writers also, have seen things in a similar way. Or a potentially similar way given the language issues. Everything is Brahma, etc.

I would prefer to call it phenomenalism - but this probably has a different meaning in philosophy.

 

Definitely related to what I am getting at.

Ah, you saw through my irony. Not that that was all of my intent.

Or not coming down as claiming any of these, but clearly NOT positing things in themselves.

 

correct. i think with buddhism especially, it is a fallacy to attribute the "resolution" as monism; essentially, a western attempt to describe/translate what cannot adequately be translated (see heidegger's "conversation with a japanese guy" (or something like that) in on the way to language).

this is what has always perplexed me about western atheists fascination with buddhism: certainly, there are buddhist theists (usually syncretists); but as to whether there are buddhist atheists (or even agnostics) remains unclear to me--i think they would be more inclined to, well, a sort of positivistic position: the matter is irrelevant--or perhaps wittgenstein (the positivistic one): there are indeed matters which cannot be put into words. they make themselves manifest. they are what is mystical.

not that i claim to know, rather i'm just not so sure that one can confidently discuss dualism/monism with respect to buddhism.

 

OK.

Or that one need not get attached to deities that arise, whether or not they exist. I can see a consistent atheist Buddhist position, but you have to let go of a lot of other nouns also. A few do do this. Self qualia comes up as a phrase often I've experienced. But God and Persistent Self, it seems to me, are married. You want to evict one, the other will follow.

I couldn't. Though there is a sense of 'the world of things' and experience of the Buddha, with a prioritization implicit for the latter though one should let this go also in the end.

I also think the Hindus are fairly complicated about monism dualism. You can have Shiva Parvati making the universe through intercourse....
and then it is all Vishnu or Brahma, 'really'. All we avatars can do is try not to get in the way.

 

Occham was a theist. He had it easy to use conepts such as "needlessly".

 

Annnnyways... getting back to the topic of ontological parsimony....

 

It's true. We're a bunch of losers. All the big philosophers some of whose ideas we are now chewing on were all theists.

They could toy around with solipsism, ding an sich, subjectivity, objectivity, I think therefore I am etc. etc. because at the end of the day, they would say their prayers to their beloved God and go to sleep rest assured they are safe and protected.

We cannot say that about ourselves. We go to bed with solipsism and we wake up with solipsism. We go to bed wondering about das ding an sich and we wake up wondering about das ding an sich. We can think I think therefore I am until we are blue in the face, but it does not make us any more.

Trying to discuss ontological parsimony without reference to the Be-all-and-end-all is like pouring sand on a wooden raft in the middle of a raving ocean in an attempt to build an island to make one's home on it.

 

a PERFECT example of this being broken is within the sciences

In the standard model all is hunky-dory in measuring the phenomenon of the solar system with newton

but then with the benchmarks in place, and the use of virial theorem, they predicted how galaxies rotate but found within the evidence from the hubble, that the predictions are wrong

so they created dark matter/energy in which to fix the errors, they had to add (to the universe) that over 78% of the total, is dark junk.

and why a paradigm shift is so hard to comprehend

as most everything changes simply based on the understanding of what is, versus what is believed (heat is not a property of energy but a measurement of the effect and some just can't see that)

and often most everything we thought was true, changes in a paradigm shift

 

don't you mean tending tangentiality?

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still though, many here (and elsewhere) are wont to invoke occam's razor as though it were a principle, when it's "merely" a heuristic device. so why not entertain the idea of taking it a step further?

i'm just not so certain that such would necessarily result in solipsism, and with respect to other traditions, i'm not so certain that they are satisfactorily translatable.

and since i already had to allude to the ever-inconsistent heidegger: i recall having first read his essay on trakl in english, and then a couple of years later reading it in german. i noticed all these passages which i could not recall from joan stambaugh's translation, and i discovered that perhaps a cumulative 5 pages were omitted from the translation. (i later found an attempt at translating such in a philosophy journal) if we can not adequately translate text/ideas from the german, what chance do we have with the japanese?

 

Or parsimonious ontology, really, I think.

Just for a moment I would like to approach this phenomenologically, because I think this is where many people go astray - and in another thread I encountered this where a video camera is essentially seen as verifying ding an sich.

We leave a room in our house - and notice that language has Ding an sich built into it - and we imagine what the room is like without us in it. Over there, it is 'the same'. The image we have of this 'room in itself' is a somewhat hazy image as if an observer were there looking at it. Thus, in fact, we are imagining a 'full phenomenon' - iow observer + stuff or simply, and without the bias, experience. So we bias this thought experiment and yet it seems to confirm the existence of things in themselves, but further that they are like our maps of them - or to put this more accurately, that the DanS is like the experience that we label the object taking the portion of the experience that is 'us' away from the whole.

I also think there is a further brain obstacle to really being open to the philosophical issue we are talking about. This is closely related to the above. It is such a given that we are subjects moving - over time - through a three dimensional universe 'outside us' and encountering things 'out there', that when we imagine issues surrounding Ding an sich, they seem mere thought exercises and silly ones at that. Most people cannot get behind their cultural biases and see how they are built up. As I asked elsewhere, without the observer, what is time?

So the OR gets used only for whatever parsimony the individual in question can tolerate emotionally, including possibly for Ockham himself.

I agree with Parmalee that OR is not some rule of reality - iow an authority we can refer to to settle disputes. It seems ethical to me, however, that if it is presented as a good heuristic or communal device to use, we should each use it on all of our beliefs about entities, especially if it is being used in arguments where our superiority is implicit to those who do not seem to use it as well as we do.

And empiricism does not offer us an out.

 

it seems to confirm it for ourselves--but then there is the observer who is, say a foot taller or shorter than you whose map would in many ways differ from your own. i frequently experience a sort of jamais vu (there's a more specific name for this type, but i can't recall it--though it is sometimes referred to, in academic literature funnily enough, as "alice in wonderland syndrome") in which my experience does not correlate with my "map": the table is much larger, i seem much, heh, closer to the ground (IOW i "seem" shorter), etc.

this has not been satisfactorily answered by anyone--at least to my satisfaction--and the idea that "time" can be parsed into a "smallest possible unit" seems counterintuitive. (is this accepted? i could look it up; anyhow, i seem to remember planck time referring to something else, so i guess i shall.) a number of anthropologists (at least, insofar as "we" are concerned

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) have encountered this problem in their dealings with certain cultures, but anthropologists--even those steeped in post-structuralism--aren't very good at explaining these things.

with regards to occam's razor and theism--how would it address pantheism? or, since so many are idealists at heart, panentheism?

 

Let alone the rattle snake with infra red sensing. And certainly let alone the non-time bound, non-local knowledge of the room - God? - that people really must invoke. I never thought of it before, but one really does need a God to know anything about things in themselves.

Yes, I have this. Sometimes I can call it up. When I was a kid I would sometime suddenly zoom away from objects, which I found very disturbing - I do not mean I ran away, but my eyes/brain functioned like a film camera zooming out. But there are more subtle jamais vu, where things are not right, the same. I suppose in Buddhism this might be taken as a good sign.

I don't think it is resolved quite what now is or how long it is. But a non-experienced thing it itself, would it be sliced like this and why?

It would be considered adding consciousness, most likely, where we have no evidence - on their terms.

 

I agree fully on the approach. However, once we commit to that, we have to drop the Ding an sich (which is why I was confused as to its inclusion here...). We have no experience of anything noumenal. Indeed, by definition, we cannot know anything about the Ding an sich. We do live in the world of appearances. If we choose [as many do...] to propose that there are things that exist somehow beyond that veil, the problem then lies with the chooser, not the situation...

I fully agree. OR is a device to be used to clarify our thoughts.

eeek. Ethical?
[Scurrying away fearfully....]

Certainly not if we want to be logically consistent, no. [and thus.. back to solipsism]
However, no competing system offers us anything better. The problem is, ultimately, one has to decide which ontological commitments one is prepared to take, to get through the day, so to speak...

Interestingly, you've now brought us to "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism"....

WVO Quine


Lovely.

 

hmmm. reminds me of beyond good and evil. isn't this matter--the discussion of noumenon with respect to (redundancy again for emphasis) experienced phenomenon--at the heart of bgae? and i suppose, nietzsche's inversion essentially laid the groundwork for subsequent modernist and post-modernist critiques of emphasizing the distinction.

anyways, i can't help myself, but whenever i encounter "noumenon" i invariably (for obvious reasons) think of "numinous." heh.

when you say "no competing system offers us anything better," are you thinking specifically with respect to "western" systems? i suppose the problem is partly the degree to which our language informs our "world," and to imagine another language is to...

OT, but i think this serves as a reminder for the fruits to be gained from learning foreign tongues which are markedly removed from one's native tongue(s).

perhaps not so OT though, for doesn't quine opine re: these matters of "translation"?

 

Indeed.
And someone once said Nietzsche wasn't rationalist... tsk, tsk..

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I think though [and it goes without saying that this is my interpretation...] that for Nietzsche, what is noumenal is irrelevant. Or, what is noumenal is what we decide it to be. Since we can't determine what 'really' real is, all that matters is what we make real... and thus... existentialism.

I take your point on language [hopefully, without sidebarring off onto Chomsky....].

IMO however, 'western' systems are invariably more robust than any eastern one. Purely on a pragmatic POV...

True enough.
Though, somewhat conversely [though I don't think of it as such...], this highlights the need for specialized language, jargon, etc. [my special 'shout out' to those here who are annoyed and/or confused by philosophical technical terminology...

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].

Well noted. The "radical translation' problem.
See? Everything goes back to Wittgenstein.

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well, i think that was said in relation to socrates, and i would have to agree that socrates would not find nietzsche rational (especially if he read ecce homo). though nietzsche's tendency towards devil's advocacy, hyperbole, etc. often makes it unclear as to what he's really getting at, or "how he thinks"--just as he intended. (perhaps nietzsche's excesses can be perceived as a sort of catalyst or impetus for the linguistic turn?)

i lean towards the latter reading--what we decide it to be--though with regards to this:

i agree with the need for specialized jargon (excepting those instances where such is used to preserve "status," or distinguish oneself--and one's ilk--from the masses), but i think efforts towards, um, unambiguity will ultimately be futile--and thus non-essentialism (for me). and:

for me, it tends to be the post-tractatus w., where he is more inclined to acknowledge the futility of the preceding endeavor, and further distances himself from russell, et al.

the animosity towards his later work held by some "ordinary language" philosophers and analytic philosophers confounds me: in his later work, he is certainly inclined towards extremes when playing around with the many senses of everyday terms (like confusing that, that, and that (and perhaps a few more)--a problem i have been having the past few days) in a fashion not dissimilar to contemporary continentals, but i don't think the (intended) obfuscation simply that--rather, it illuminates the potential (and inevitable) difficulties and the import of context.


re: pragmatism and asian philosophy: i recall a particular text devoted specifically to likening zen buddhism (specifically, the soto traditions in japan) to american pragmatism. of course, it's all in the translation--and those working from texts often draw markedly different conclusions than the anthropologists.