Why do we prefer simplicity to complexity?
Channel: Sam Vaknin
Date: 2014-03-08

Why do we prefer simplicity to complexity? This preference runs through history: Aristotle, William of Ockham, Newton, Pascal -- all praised parsimony and embraced it as a guiding principle of work scientific. Biologically and spiritually, we are inclined to prefer things needed to things not needed. 

Moreover, we prefer things needed to admixtures of things needed and not needed. This is so, because things needed are needed, encourage survival and enhance its chances. Survival is also assisted by the construction of economic theories. We all engage in theory building as a mundane routine. A tiger beheld means danger -- is one such theory. Theories which incorporated less assumptions were quicker to process and enhanced the chances of survival. In the aforementioned feline example, the virtue of the theory and its efficacy lie in its simplicity (one observation, one prediction). Had the theory been less parsimonious, it would have entailed a longer time to process and this would have rendered the prediction wholly unnecessary. The tiger would have prevailed. 

Thus, humans are Parsimony Machines (an Ockham Machine): they select the shortest (and, thereby, most efficient) path to the production of true theorems, given a set of facts (observations) and a set of theories. Another way to describe the activity of Ockham Machines: they produce the maximal number of true theorems in any given period of time, given a set of facts and a set of theories. Poincare, the French mathematician and philosopher, thought that Nature itself, this metaphysical entity which encompasses all, is parsimonious. He believed that mathematical simplicity must be a sign of truth. A simple Nature would, indeed, appear this way (mathematically simple) despite the filters of theory and language. The "sufficient reason" (why the world exists rather than not exist) should then be transformed to read: "because it is the simplest of all possible worlds". That is to say: the world exists and THIS world exists (rather than another) because it is the most parsimonious -- not the best, as Leibnitz put it -- of all possible worlds.