Sunday, 26 February 2012

Ockham's Razor

the law of parsimony or the practice of extreme frugality or economy. The word extreme hits me. This suggests perhaps over simplifying.
How fabulous to be learning something so completely random and utterly new. How I love to learn. It may be common knowledge to many but I had never heard of Ockham's Razor before.
Who was Ockham? Apparently he was a 14th century friar, William. He was a theolgian and logician, or in other words came from a position of logic. Allegedly his words were  "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and in my words it would be to keep things simple. Funny enough reading about Ockham's law, the explanations can be quite complicated. Ironic really.
As cited on Wikipedia, To quote Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes."
My tutor suggested that Ockham's Razor can be useful when experimenting on complex cognitive processes and in trying to isolate one element of these complex processes, such as attention. This has arisen when I was saying that the experiments I have read about seem to ignore the fact that attention cannot be singled-out or seperated from perception and memory and so on. And yet they are attempting to explain attention singularly and evidencing applying Ockham's Razor.
Bliss
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