V. OCCAM’S RAZOR AND ATOMISM
The core axiom driving any cognitive system is to treat like alike. So naturally, whenever there’s such an option, the mind would prefer to think that things are, at some fundamental level, alike, so they can be treated at that fundamental level as alike. This propensity to minimise the kinds of things there might be has come to be known as Occam’s Razor.
And so given this propensity to minimise kinds, it’s not surprising that it occurred to us very early in our speculation about the world – as early as the pre-Socratics, in fact – that maybe there’s only one kind of thing – one kind of building block, as it were – and that all the variety in the world can be chalked up to variations in the arrangement of these blocks. What accounts for these variations in arrangement? Well, some thought, temperature. Or perhaps density. Or … Or whatever, provided that whatever is not just another thing. So there are, thought the ancients, the atomic constituents of the world, and there’s preferably one, or in any case a small number of determinants of those constituents’ configurations.
To repeat, there are, thought the ancients – and we continue to think so today – one kind of thing, and at least, but preferably at most, one kind of determinant of how tokens of that kind get configured. By one kind of thing is meant that, save for its positional and temporal properties, each token of that kind is identical to every other token of that kind. In other words, the atomic constituents of the world are fungible. And why do we think every token of that kind of thing is atomic? Because if it weren’t, it could be redefined as a collection of tokens that are atomic.
Fair enough. But why do we have such a strong preference for the fungibility of these atomic constituents? Because if we allowed that every atom could be unique – or even that there are several different kinds of atoms – we’d have to identify its kind before we could predict its behaviour, and that would be an epistemic burden nigh-impossible to bear. Put another way, imagine a world the atomic constituents of which were not, for all epistemic intents and purposes, fungible. We couldn’t navigate the world. But we can. Quad erat demonstrandum.
Well, not quite. For it could be – could it not? – that all our epistemic efforts are utterly inert, that our world is anthropic only because there is a God, and She’s an indulgent mother hen, such that She keeps comporting the world to our however stupid understanding of it.
As charming, not to mention unfalsifiable, as the God’s-a-Mother-Hen (GMH) hypothesis may be, we seem to have rejected it, and for good reason. If we thought God’s indulgence was inexhaustible, then if we thought we could fly we’d immediately sprout wings. But apparently our thinking doesn’t make everything immediately so. So if there are limits to Her benevolence – and clearly there are – then we have no choice but to induce those limits. And inducing those limits is just what we call, well, science.
So all the GMH hypothesis amounts to is the conjecture that the anthropicity of the world is the product of Someone’s druthers, which is just the Teleological Argument for the existence of God. Is this the best explanation for the anthropicity of the world? It certainly was, until Darwin came up with a better one. Better in what sense? In the sense that it minimised kinds. So yes, not unlike those proverbial turtles, it’s Occam’s Razor all the way down!
Categories: pure philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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