Occam’s Razor advises us never to multiply entities beyond what’s needed to explain what needs explaining. Is this because the simpler explanation is more likely to be the correct one? If so, what would explain that? So no. Rather it’s because explaining affords us prediction and control, and doing so consumes cognitive resources we’d rather husband if we can. So the fewer entities to be invoked the better.
Then what explains our penchant for explaining things that are inert in this regard, i.e. that don’t promise any prediction and control, like “How does God know He’s always been?”? They’re spandrels. They’re spandrels of our penchant for explanations that do afford us prediction and control.
So seeking after the truth is not an end in and of itself. It’s instrumental. And at that only contingently so. If the false gives us prediction and control, but the truth does not, then consign the latter to the flames. So, for example, that the sun rises and sets, though false, provides greater quotidian utility than that the earth rotates on its axis. Plus, at least for quotidian purposes, it gets the more approving nod from Occam’s Razor.
I believe the world came into being five minutes ago, with all those pseudo histories on those bookshelves where we find them, and all those pseudo memories in our heads where we find them. I believe this because any of the myriad alternative explanations – the Big Bang, the theory of evolution through natural selection, and so on – invoke all kinds of historical hypostases beyond our need to explain how those books and mental states got onto those shelves and into our heads. The only revision this (let’s call it) ‘infant earth hypothesis’ requires, to whatever alternative explanation we’ve been taught, is to scope any proposition that purports to make reference to the past with an “It’s as if …” operator. It’s as if the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. It’s as if I already told you that!
But if so – if, that is, the as-if operator re-legitimises the past – what work is this infant earth hypothesis doing? Well, for one thing it relieves me of feeling guilty for having skipped Pompeii and spent the time at that charming trattoria down the street instead. And for another it forces us to identity what’s really at issue in our thinking about pedophilia. For sure it can’t be the difference in ages, since ex hypothesi there isn’t one.
Slight change of topic, though as we’ll see in a minute, not really.
Sometimes we want to know how something came to be. If we didn’t we wouldn’t have the concept of theft. Sometimes we don’t care. How I allowed your knight to fork my rook and queen is irrelevant to what I should do now. Sometimes we unthinkingly think that something continues to be what brought it about. Money used to be a portable means of exchange, so that’s what it must still be. And sometimes we’ve added so many layers of obfuscation to something we knew that we’ve forgotten what we once knew. A woman has a right to control her own body, dammit, notwithstanding that what it is to be a right is nothing more than a report on a relatively stable equilibrium of social expectations.
And what makes this analysis of the concept – in this case the concept of a right – the right one? It’s the one that best affords us prediction and control, and does so with the least expenditure of cognitive resources.
Plato thought we knew everything from the moment we were conceived, but coming through the birth canal causes us to forget. He thought this explains why when we see a chair we recognise it as a chair. This Theory of the Forms has long since been abandoned. But Wittgenstein offered us an isomorphic account, in his case of what so often makes us spin our mental wheels. Whether by God or natural selection, the human mind wasn’t designed to think about things it wasn’t designed to think about. So when we do think about things we weren’t designed to think about, we get ourselves all twaddled. Thus the function of philosophy, he opined, is to help us untwaddle ourselves. So yes, Virginia, it’s Occam’s Razor all the way down.
There’s nothing special about the example I’m going to pursue in this entry. But that’s precisely why we can employ the induction theorem to show that the same analysis can be applied, and applied without remainder, to pretty much any of the core concepts by which we manoeuvre our way through the world. If this ‘reductionism’ works here – and I guess we’ll just have to see – it should be worth a try over there, or there, or there. “O do not ask what is it. Let us go and make our visit.”
If and when the Earth ceases to be amenable to human existence, a.k.a. anthropic, we won’t be around to express our disappointment. But insofar as we can say anything at all, about anything at all, it follows that the Earth is, at least for now, anthropic. And so – and this is where the infant earth hypothesis comes in – the question is not, How came we and the world to exhibit this fortuitous fit?, but rather, How can we continue to enjoy this fortuitous fit? And the answer to that is, that it continues to offer us food, water, and shelter.
The food and the water I get. Without either I perish. But why shelter? Well, given the hair we no longer have covering our bodies, we can only survive in this world within a certain range of temperatures. Either side of that range – either too hot or too cold – and we’re dead. So yes, the first thing I need to do, were I parachuted onto this planet bereft of the endowments my more hirsute ancestors enjoyed, is survive in situ, and then, if I can, get to a source of food and water. But unless I’m extremely lucky, that means I have to move. And to do that I have to traverse territory that is as likely as not outside this range of survivability. Hence I need to shelter myself against the cold and the heat. And this sheltering we call clothing.
Of course there’s a bootstrapping problem here. I need to eat and drink long enough to harvest and fashion clothes for myself. But because we’re adopting the infant earth hypothesis we needn’t care. We can suppose I parachuted onto this planet fully clothed. But our analysis explains why we’d be well-advised to remain that way, at least when we go out shopping for groceries.
Of the things that threaten us, the lion’s share of them, including lions, come not from over our heads, i.e. vertically, but from over there, i.e. horizontally. So, as the saying goes, “Walls before roofs!” That said, rain can’t kill us, but it can make us damn uncomfortable. So the construction of roofs, as distinct from walls, are (what Thomas Hobbes has called) “for our delectation only”.
In drawing this distinction between needs and druthers, he’s hardly alone. We all do it. But what exactly do we mean? That without companionship, for example, we’d die? No we wouldn’t. A life that’s “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish” need not necessarily be “and short”. But if it were we wouldn’t be losing much.
This is an old saw. We hear people say, “Why should we give the welfare recipient the wherewithal to buy cigarettes?” To which I answer, Because we’ve rejected, as did Tennyson’s Ulysses, “as if to breathe were life”. Because for us life is not a biological concept.
So what kind of concept is it? Christians believe “Believe in Him and He shall offer them everlasting life.” But what exactly is He putting on offer? Whatever it is it had better not be mere survival.
I’m not sure Hobbes’ distinction between survival and delectation can be sustained in any event. Welfare minimalism would die the death of a thousand qualifications, because as often as not survival and delectation are mutually interdependent. But I digress.
The walls/roof distinction is a case in point of losing track of what things were for. Walls are erected in the service of our survival. But once they’re there they can be used to support a roof “for our delectation only”. Four walls must have a way to get in and out, and other openings by which to let light in and to surveil whatever’s ‘out there’. Add a couple millennia of modifications and add-ons and what we have is the walls and roofs being targeted for demolition today by the Russians in Ukraine and by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank. Why are the Russians and Israelis so intent on demolishing walls? Because walls are our last line of defence, because they were our first line of defence.
Demolishing the enemy’s walls is not rocket science, even though it might involve some rocket science. And so it is at last that we arrive, predictably enough, at The Three Little Pigs.
I’ve written in the past that members of our own species are our most dangerous predators. Strictly speaking this is false. What we normally mean by a predator is that it eats its prey. But few species eat their own. Rather it’s that we’re competing for what is our prey, and we’re trying to eliminate our competitors. Or, what’s often more profitable, or at least less costly, to eliminate them as competitors. For much of human history we did that by enslaving the enemy, i.e. by forcibly redirecting their labour to the pursuit of our projects. Hence labour camps. But more recently the strategy has been to simply wall them off from the resources we want to keep for ourselves. Hence the fence around Gaza and the walls around the settlements in the West Bank.
Whether we’re walling ourselves in for protection, or walling our competitors out from accessing the resources we’re unwilling to share, walls made of straw are notoriously unreliable. As, in the Old West, were walls made of wood. Less so walls made of brick. This is because certain materials are more combustible than others. Walls made of brick or stone or cement require energy rather than fire to demolish. And energy, we’ve all discovered, is something not to be needlessly squandered. Shrapnel (or a cannonball) needs to be propelled. Propulsion releases energy which has to be detonated. Detonation releases energy which has to be ignited. And so on. Call the whole sequence ‘munitions’. And munitions are, well, expensive.
How expensive? Well, it cost the Americans $200,000 to level a hut the Taliban could rebuild for $200, which it earned by selling heroin to American servicemen on leave. And it was the same, ceteris paribus, in Vietnam. So neither outcome should have surprised us. Once the concept of expenditure is properly understood, in a protracted war, in a war of attrition, the victor is the side that can ‘outspend’ the other. Vietnam and Afghanistan bankrupted the Americans. They cost the Vietcong and the Taliban almost nothing.
So knocking down walls is expensive. Rebuilding them? Not so much. But knocking them down at a distance adds the cost of delivery. And that delivery can increase that expense exponentially. Nuclear weaponry aside, the destructive power of most explosive material is a function of its weight. The heavier the weapon the greater the propulsion required to deliver it. The ratio of delivery to payload is more than manageable for the Israelis. That ratio is through the roof for the Russians. And all other things being equal – though of course they’re not – that means the Ukrainians can hold out much longer than the Palestinians. What makes the two unequal cases a tad less unequal is that the Palestinians have less to lose. But once again I digress.
So what’s the bottom line here? Just that sometimes – and this might be one of those times – removing all the heart-felt rhetoric, and reducing events to their unnuanced basics, can offer insights unavailable at the level of heart-felt rhetoric. Antarctica aside, there isn’t a square inch on this planet that hasn’t seen its people conquered, colonised, enslaved, or nigh-exterminated several times over. Borders shift as they have always shifted. With the alacrity of the weather. What do you think it looked like, what do you think it felt like, when these things were happening? Like this. If the present is unjust, so is all of history. If calling history unjust is a category mistake, then so it calling the present unjust.
What I’m suggesting – and it’s only a suggestion – is that we do our understanding of events a greater service, because we give ourselves greater prediction and therefore control, by seeing these events in the raw. Walls are physical constructions, constructed for a purpose, namely to thwart a competing purpose. There are, to be sure, metaphorical walls. It doesn’t do to conflate the two kinds. There are, to be sure, metaphorical purposes. It doesn’t do to conflate those two kinds either.
Sometimes I’m accused – in fact sometimes I accuse myself – of much to do about nothing. I’m trusting this isn’t one of those times.
extremes that would have otherwise killed them. Provided you’re wearing something rain and snow won’t kill you. Neither with the sun, provided you’re wearing a hat. And we need rain and shine for food and water. But too much rain, or too much shine, can make us highly uncomfortable. So the invention of the roof, or the finding of one in nature, is not so much about survival as it it delectation. That is, because very little that threatens us comes from over our head, a roof over them enhances the quality of our lives. Not so a wall, because a saber tooth tiger approaches us horizontally. And so the invention of the house, or the finding of one in nature, is about both survival and delectation.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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