Ockham, Me and My Mind
I am a practicing emergency physician. When a patient presents to the emergency room, a triage form is filled out, upon which is listed the “chief complaint”. It is not unusual to find a chief complaint like this one: “Abdominal pain, fever, spider bite, headache, back pain, feet burning, vaginal discharge, runny nose, I might be pregnant”. There are other variations on the above. You may think I’m making this up, but I’m not. My job is to quickly and efficiently diagnose the problem, treat the patient appropriately, and arrange for disposition. The principle of parsimony, or Ockham’s razor is a tool I use regularly.
I first heard of William of Ockham as a medical student doing an emergency medicine rotation. When I presented the patient to the attending physician and explained what I thought was going on with the patient, I was pointed to Ockham and his famous razor. Instead of the 2 or 3 diagnoses I wished to give the patient, the attending appealed to Ockham to give only 1 diagnosis which would exlpain all the data. William of Ockham was a fourteenth century Englishman who developed this principle of parsimony, as it is also sometimes called. Stated succinctly, it states that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. If a problem can be explained on the basis of one thing, then that is to be preferred over an explanation based on several things.
So, what does this have to do with me and my mind? Ockham’s razor is often used by naturalists or physicalists to support their view that there is no “mind” apart from the physical body, or that there is no “God” other than nature itself, or that there is nothing else “out there” which we need to explain our natural world. God is not necessary. The mind is not necessary. Since we do not need those things to understand our world, they should be shaved off our explanation just as my unwarranted diagnoses should have been shaved off my list. The principle of parsimony demands that we do not multiply entities beyond what is necessary.
There are obvious problems with this application of the razor’s use in this instance. First, this principle provides no guarantee that our answer is the correct answer. Now, I’ve already explained that I think the principle is often helpful and is one I use on a daily basis. However, there are times that the more complicated answer is the correct one. Sometimes, there really are 3 or 4 unrelated processes which account for the symptoms of my patient. I would commit malpractice to always condense the number of diagnoses to the simplest.
Second, Ockham’s razor only applies if both theories have adequate explanatory power. If the theory with only one entity explains the data far less effectively than the one with two or more entities. The theory with more entities may be warranted. In fact, I would submit that naturalism or physicalism provides a very inadequate explanation of the world in which we live. These theories entail convoluted, complicated concepts in order to attempt to explain that which we experience. Our explanation becomes far more complex than the explanation which provides for non-physical entities such as God or the mind. For example, physicalism has to invent new concepts to make its explanation adequate, such as “supervenience,” “epiphenomenalism”, “weak externalism”, “non-reductive physicalism”, “materialist dualism”, etc.
I therefore conclude, that Ockham’s razor actually favors a dualist understanding of reality.