Thought Provoker
Posts: 530
Joined: April 2007
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| Quote (midwifetoad @ Feb. 28 2010,09:25) | | Quote | The powers that be find this concept threatening to their philosophical outlook that consciousness is just an algorithmic property of matter and chemistry and nothing more.
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Perhaps they see no compelling reason to multiply entities beyond necessity. |
It's nice to discuss things with people who have reasoned and reasonable arguments.
"entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
Occam's razor isn't just a suggestion that "simpler is better" otherwise GodDidIt wins all (although Last Thursdayism could challenge it).
Consider the 19th Century scientists studying the age of the Sun. From this link...
"The energy source for solar radiation was believed by nineteenth-century physicists to be gravitation. In an influential lecture in 1854, Hermann von Helmholtz, a German professor of physiology who became a distinguished researcher and physics professor, proposed that the origin of the sun's enormous radiated energy is the gravitational contraction of a large mass. Somewhat earlier, in the 1840s, J.R. Mayer (another German physician) and J.J. Waterson had also suggested that the origin of solar radiation is the conversion of gravitational energy into heat.1
Biologists and geologists considered the effects of solar radiation, while physicists concentrated on the origin of the radiated energy. In 1859, Charles Darwin, in the first edition of On The Origin of the Species by Natural Selection, made a crude calculation of the age of the earth by estimating how long it would take erosion occurring at the current observed rate to wash away the Weald, a great valley that stretches between the North and South Downs across the south of England. He obtained a number for the "denudation of the Weald'' in the range of 300 million years, apparently long enough for natural selection to have produced the astounding range of species that exist on earth."
The powers that be (e.g. Lord Kelvin) saw "...no compelling reason to multiply entities beyond necessity." They presumed Darwin must have been wrong.
Are we in a similar situation today?
EDIT-added link and used Occam's razor on an unnecessary passage.
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