Occams Razor:
What is Occam's Razor?
Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Ockham was the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born.
The principle states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Sometimes it is quoted in one of its original Latin forms to give it an air of authenticity:
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora"
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
In fact, only the first two of these forms appear in his surviving works and the third was written by a later scholar. William used the principle to justify many conclusions, including the statement that "God's existence cannot be deduced by reason alone." That one didn't make him very popular with the Pope.
Many scientists have adopted or reinvented Occam's Razor, as in Leibniz's "identity of observables" and Isaac Newton stated the rule: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is:
"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."
I begin with Occam's Razor because before understanding what to do about doomsday we must first define what doomsday actually means. Occam's Razor teaches us to choose the simplest theory because it's usually the better one.
Doomsday to some means some kind of armageddon scenario involving supernatural mumbo jumbo and the associated 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. To others it means some kind of enviromental holocaust or maybe a global killer asteroid crashing into the planet causing a nuclear winter that lasts for a million years.
The simplest answer lies in the edifice upon which our entire civilization is built. Oil. There is almost nothing in your house right now that could get there without oil. Your toothbrush is made of plastic, which comes from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every car tire. All the food in your grocery store is grown with pesticides and fertilizers that are made from oil. It is then harvested by tractors which run on oil based fuels and brought to market, an average of 1500 miles, using diesel powered trucks or trains.
Human popluation has catapulted from a plateau of about 1 billion ... which was relatively stable for a couple of thousand years ... to over 7 billion today, all because of one thing, oil. Oil is a finite resource and it will run out. There is no escaping this fact. And there is nothing that can come even close to replacing a tiny percentage of the energy requirements we currently rely on oil to deliver.
So what, really, is "doomsday"? The day that we finally run out of oil? No. Doomsday happens long before the oil supplies finally are exhausted. Doomsday happens when cost of extracting, refining and delivering that oil exceed the energy delivered. With only a handful of global mega-corporations controlling the supply we are already seeing the knock-on reactions predicting a global energy crisis. The oil industry is right now, as we speak, beginning the "bumpy road" of the oil price explosion. They are allowing the prices to rise up to the very limit of our ability to continue to consume it, then pumping up the supply briefly to allow demand to spike again.
So fragile is our current economic paradigm that a single natural or man-made disaster that drastically disrupts oil supplies can shut down EVERYTHING. I mean EVERYTHING. Grocery store shelves will not be re-stocked. Mail will not run. Police and Fire emergency vehicles will sit idle. In the chaos that will quickly overwhelm us all governments will immediately seize for themselves whatever oil supplies remain in the name of defense .... and yes folks ... those hated words, "martial law" will be on the tips of everyone's tongues.
Most of you will welcome with open arms the troops marching into your towns, taking over your schools ... moving into your spare bedrooms. If Americans have demonstrated nothing else in the past 30 years .. they have unequivocally demonstrated their willingness to accept any amount of tyranny in exchange for so-called security.
So, what is doomsday? It's the moment when we finally realize that we can no longer survive without the help of our government. The so-called independence we enjoy today is but one disaster away from being proven the complete fiction that it is.
The oil WILL run out. There is no escaping this fact. The profit motive that makes our world "work" will insure that no reasonable alternative will even be contemplated until the final disaster is already at your doorstep.
My advice ... open your eyes to the whole planet. Where can you live without oil or money? There are places .. find them. All the trillions of dollars in the world will mean very little when the engine finally breaks down.
What is Occam's Razor?
Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Ockham was the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born.
The principle states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Sometimes it is quoted in one of its original Latin forms to give it an air of authenticity:
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora"
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
In fact, only the first two of these forms appear in his surviving works and the third was written by a later scholar. William used the principle to justify many conclusions, including the statement that "God's existence cannot be deduced by reason alone." That one didn't make him very popular with the Pope.
Many scientists have adopted or reinvented Occam's Razor, as in Leibniz's "identity of observables" and Isaac Newton stated the rule: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is:
"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."
I begin with Occam's Razor because before understanding what to do about doomsday we must first define what doomsday actually means. Occam's Razor teaches us to choose the simplest theory because it's usually the better one.
Doomsday to some means some kind of armageddon scenario involving supernatural mumbo jumbo and the associated 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. To others it means some kind of enviromental holocaust or maybe a global killer asteroid crashing into the planet causing a nuclear winter that lasts for a million years.
The simplest answer lies in the edifice upon which our entire civilization is built. Oil. There is almost nothing in your house right now that could get there without oil. Your toothbrush is made of plastic, which comes from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every car tire. All the food in your grocery store is grown with pesticides and fertilizers that are made from oil. It is then harvested by tractors which run on oil based fuels and brought to market, an average of 1500 miles, using diesel powered trucks or trains.
Human popluation has catapulted from a plateau of about 1 billion ... which was relatively stable for a couple of thousand years ... to over 7 billion today, all because of one thing, oil. Oil is a finite resource and it will run out. There is no escaping this fact. And there is nothing that can come even close to replacing a tiny percentage of the energy requirements we currently rely on oil to deliver.
So what, really, is "doomsday"? The day that we finally run out of oil? No. Doomsday happens long before the oil supplies finally are exhausted. Doomsday happens when cost of extracting, refining and delivering that oil exceed the energy delivered. With only a handful of global mega-corporations controlling the supply we are already seeing the knock-on reactions predicting a global energy crisis. The oil industry is right now, as we speak, beginning the "bumpy road" of the oil price explosion. They are allowing the prices to rise up to the very limit of our ability to continue to consume it, then pumping up the supply briefly to allow demand to spike again.
So fragile is our current economic paradigm that a single natural or man-made disaster that drastically disrupts oil supplies can shut down EVERYTHING. I mean EVERYTHING. Grocery store shelves will not be re-stocked. Mail will not run. Police and Fire emergency vehicles will sit idle. In the chaos that will quickly overwhelm us all governments will immediately seize for themselves whatever oil supplies remain in the name of defense .... and yes folks ... those hated words, "martial law" will be on the tips of everyone's tongues.
Most of you will welcome with open arms the troops marching into your towns, taking over your schools ... moving into your spare bedrooms. If Americans have demonstrated nothing else in the past 30 years .. they have unequivocally demonstrated their willingness to accept any amount of tyranny in exchange for so-called security.
So, what is doomsday? It's the moment when we finally realize that we can no longer survive without the help of our government. The so-called independence we enjoy today is but one disaster away from being proven the complete fiction that it is.
The oil WILL run out. There is no escaping this fact. The profit motive that makes our world "work" will insure that no reasonable alternative will even be contemplated until the final disaster is already at your doorstep.
My advice ... open your eyes to the whole planet. Where can you live without oil or money? There are places .. find them. All the trillions of dollars in the world will mean very little when the engine finally breaks down.
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