Looking up an old college professor I used to hang out with, I ran into one of his peers. He brought forth Carnap, a name I haven't heard since my days at State.
Carnap tends to evade the traps of epistemological confusion with the notion of utility. Carnap's razor, as contrasted with Occam's is conservative of utility, whereas Occam's tends to dismiss complexity. I happen to think Carnap's is a better system for determining the value of a knowledge framework, however there are two things missing I think.
In the observable universe there are several dynamics that I think need to be taken axiomatically. The first is that of the net energy of a system. The second is the role of emergent behavior, or 'one-wayness'.
In every aspect of human behavior and of the behavior of objects in space, there must be some energy used in order for change to occur. The amount of change is directly proportional to the amount of energy expended. This applies to all things. You cannot instantly understand calculus any more than you can instantly transport yourself to a position in space one mile away. So whether or not you are configuring your thoughts or your body some effort is required. The question of free will vs predestination figures in this. You may have free will to make the choice of climbing Everest, but unless and until you climb Everest, there is no change. The decision to clime Everest may take 1/2 calorie of effort in your mind, but to configure your mind and body to actually accomplish the deed takes a great deal of energy. There are also limits to the way that energy must be applied to your mind and body in order to accomplish the task. It is in this manner that one must also evaluate the knowledge framework of Climbing Everest.
It may take, the average man 200 hours of reading and research into mountaineering to be adequately mentally prepared. It might take him an addition 200 hours of exercise and physical conditioning to accomplish minimum fitness for the task. Each of these energy factors are determined in some way by external factors as well as the man's pre-disposition to the framework of Climbing Everest. In another, less fit or less mentally capable person these 400 hours would be insufficient. Indeed our ideas of what a 'superhero' might be depends upon our understanding of the amount of time and energy such a being can absorb in order to climb a mountain. It might take Superman equally 1/2 calorie of effort to decide to get to the top of Mt. Everest, but because he is super he can immediately generate the energy needed and get there in 15 minutes under his own power. Whereas a mere mortal would need to spend money, thereby leveraging other external powers, to fly him into the country, purchase supplies and equipment, hire assistance, etc. We might simplify this into a thermodynamic equation and say that it requires 30Kilowatts of energy to climb Everest with the understanding that no human being could absorb that much energy in 15 minutes. Their body would be destroyed. And yet 30KW could launch some inert projectile to that same height and location. Free will is thus externally constrained by physical and intellectual circumstances, energy and time must be applied in order for a single human, or a society to accomplish change. When we speak of this in terms of societies, we speak in terms of economics.
So it is not merely enough to consider the utility of a knowledge framework, one must consider its efficiency in terms of the thermodynamics and economies of accomplishing change. The razor then gets more complex, but also more accurate in describing what the costs are associated with maintaining the utility of the framework. It is not merely the intentionality of the framework that is to be judged in the context of better or worse, but the cost.
Now there are certain other axioms of the natural world that serve to make a framework of knowledge more or less efficient. That is the 'one-wayness' of certain natural phenomena. The most obvious is the passage of time. There is no amount of energy a human might possess to stop, slow or reverse the passage of time. Einstein theorized (after the use of an enormous amount of mental energy) that a human being or object travelling near the speed of light would experience time differently and we can take that for what it's worth. However it must be understood that it take an enormous amount of energy to get a human near light speeds even if that speed is relative to another object.
Another type of one-wayness is what I would call non-adaptive emergent behavior. The perfect example of this is knots of string. If you apply random energy to a string, say by leaving it in your pocket all day and periodically putting things in and out of that same pocket. It is very likely at the end of the day that the string will have knots in it. This is the essense of evolution. Certain things, even with randomness have meaning. As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I would add that if it's moving quickly backwards (with energy) it is right more than twice a day, and if it's moving slowly forwards it might not be right once in a whole day. The efficiency of a knowledge framework also depends upon its ability to make use of such non-adaptive emergent behavior and one-wayness of natural phenomena.
We might say that the numbers between 2 and 4 might not be 'real', but human beings have developed number systems over the ages. It makes sense for a new knowledge framework to make use of numbering systems that already exist - that have evolved in the collective human experience as randomly jostled as it may have been by the energies of the universe. It then makes sense to observe that strings will knot and humans will count. Frameworks built upon these natural one-way phenomena will be more efficient. That is not to say that knots won't be untied or humankind could not be reduced to innumeracy, but both of these would require focused and directed ... what? You guessed it. Energy.
There are all sorts of ways of thinking through philosophical questions that are made plain, I think, with this thermodynamic context.
As I mentioned at the top, I speak about the net energy of a system. This means that knowledge frameworks require a certain amount of constant energy to maintain their state. If people stop going to university to study philosophy, only certain low-energy observable philosophical understanding will be maintained in humanity - common sense if you will. It took me only about 20 minutes to write this document, but these are things I've been thinking about for a long time. Now that I can save it to the web, with the assistance of your attention and the many subscribing entities to this space, it may persist in an easily accessible form. With any luck it will meet with its appropriate criticism, some additional energy will be spent in rebuttal and we might craft an even better understanding.
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