OCCAM'S RAZOR

"Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate"

"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"

                               - William of Ockham, Circa 1342

Our life today is like a high speed train running on an endless track. If we are lucky we get occasional rest stops called weekends or even a complete yearly pit-stop called the annual vacation. In this busy life, we are confronted by decisions and choices at every turn of the road. Small mundane decisions like 'should I have that extra slice of cake' to life changing decisions like 'should I leave this job'. And often it is the paths we did not take that give us sleepless nights as opposed to the ones we took. As time goes by, the burden of all these decisions bog us down and we keep moving closer to a break-down. It is usually not a question of if we are going to have a mental collapse, but of how soon it's onset is going to be.

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is an intellectual tool which may help us live a little better by reducing the burden.

                           

William of Ockham was a prominent medieval english philosopher. The essence of one of his more famous works was that we should not make things more complicated than they need to be. We should cut out all the non essential parts of any problem in order to arrive at the best possible solution. With the passage of time, many varying formulations of Occam's Razor was given by different philosophers and scientists.

Scientists like Leibniz and Newton had turned to Occam's razor to trim and improve on their theories. Newton summed it up thus - "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than 

such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances". Occam's razor was one of the tools used to discredit the existence of ether, the all prevalent medium used by early scientist to explain the transmission of light through vacuum. From the perspective of science, one of the most popular formulations of Occam's Razor is "When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one which has lesser inherent assumptions is the better one".

It is clear to any observer that this scientific usage of Occam's Razor is flawed. We cannot assume that everything in nature will always follow the simplest path it can take. Occam's Razor in the context of science is, at best, a scale with which we can compare two solutions which have equal likelihoods of being true. It cannot be used to carve out a perfect theory set in stone. It doesn't disprove the more complicated solution, it only assigns more merit to the simpler solution in a theoretical sense. For example, we cannot really say that ether is nonexistent because that seems true as per Occam's Razor. All we can say is that our current scientific understanding doesn't require something complex like Ether to explain the observable phenomena.

But in our daily life, I think the policy of cutting out the non-essential is an approach we all need to adhere to. Just think about it. The time we spent on decisions which really doesn't matter. Does it matter what brand of soda you get your colleague from the cafeteria? Should u really spend all the time on deciding what color shawl you should gift your least favorite cousin on his/her birthday? You would never know if he/she is going to like it or not anyway. Of course when I explicitly mention them, they seem too trivial to think about. But the sheer volume of such decisions we spend time over in a week is what got me thinking. 

While it may sound like an insipid argument at first, what we have to realize is that when we free ourselves from the burden of a thousand non-critical choices, we are opening up our minds to address the ten critical decisions we really have to think over properly. In effect, Occam's razor as seen in day-to-day life helps us prioritize and distinguish between things we should worry about and things over which we shouldn't blink an eye.

However I have to end this with a warning. When I say we shouldn't spent time on things that don't matter, I am making an assumption that we are aware of what is important and not. It changes from person to person and we should be careful to not overlook things. First lap in our race for success is in being able to rightly separate the critical decisions from the trivial ones. Einstein sums it up best - "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".