The point is that, to my knowledge, beyond practicability there is no theoretical justification of Occam’s razor. For an atheist though, Occam’s razor has the nice property of cutting off the probability of any algorithm that incorporates the concept of a god.
Er… isn’t this like saying “To my knowledge, there is no theoretical justification of biblical inerrancy. For a Christian though, biblical inerrancy has the nice property of cutting off the probability of any algorithm that incorporates atheism”?
Occam’s razor better have an independent reason to be sensible, other than reaffirming a previous (held on which basis?) belief in atheism.
Not exactly. There is no way to discount biblical evidence a priori. We can, however massively discount biblical evidence by deriving empirical predicitons and find that they do not match reality. For example, earth is massively older than the computed 6000 years.
The point of a prior distribution is to incorporate any principle or knowledge we have at hand. If we have no prior knowledge, that is, no evidence, no observation, a literal tabula rasa, the only guide we have in designing a prior are principles. That is the point which I tried to make: Before we look at the evidence we can think about which hypotheses we would prefer. Problem is, that we can now make another prior distribution for the principles in designing a prior. And another one ad infinitum. That is the fundamental problem of Bayesian reasoning that there is no canonical way to choose a prior, which is not as bad as it sounds since for infinitely much evidence the posterior will approach the true distribution.
Occam’s razor is an axiom. We can justify it by practicability considerations such as “simpler hypotheses are easier to compute” but ultimately there is no “fundamental” reason for it. My last remark about atheism was just a sidenote to illustrate that one motivation for Occam’s razor could be belief in atheism, but as you have already noted, atheism itself has to be founded on some basis: That is the position of agnosticism, that wich has no evidence speaking for or against it we can not decide. Occam’s razor merely disregards hypotheses that assert the existence of entities with no empirical effects.
Er… isn’t this like saying “To my knowledge, there is no theoretical justification of biblical inerrancy. For a Christian though, biblical inerrancy has the nice property of cutting off the probability of any algorithm that incorporates atheism”?
Occam’s razor better have an independent reason to be sensible, other than reaffirming a previous (held on which basis?) belief in atheism.
Not exactly. There is no way to discount biblical evidence a priori. We can, however massively discount biblical evidence by deriving empirical predicitons and find that they do not match reality. For example, earth is massively older than the computed 6000 years.
The point of a prior distribution is to incorporate any principle or knowledge we have at hand. If we have no prior knowledge, that is, no evidence, no observation, a literal tabula rasa, the only guide we have in designing a prior are principles. That is the point which I tried to make: Before we look at the evidence we can think about which hypotheses we would prefer. Problem is, that we can now make another prior distribution for the principles in designing a prior. And another one ad infinitum. That is the fundamental problem of Bayesian reasoning that there is no canonical way to choose a prior, which is not as bad as it sounds since for infinitely much evidence the posterior will approach the true distribution.
Occam’s razor is an axiom. We can justify it by practicability considerations such as “simpler hypotheses are easier to compute” but ultimately there is no “fundamental” reason for it. My last remark about atheism was just a sidenote to illustrate that one motivation for Occam’s razor could be belief in atheism, but as you have already noted, atheism itself has to be founded on some basis: That is the position of agnosticism, that wich has no evidence speaking for or against it we can not decide. Occam’s razor merely disregards hypotheses that assert the existence of entities with no empirical effects.