Occam’s razor and axiomatics of human experience. The problem of reduction/proliferation of entities in the contemporary context

Abstract

This article discusses the principle of economy of thought and reduction of essences (“Occam’s razor”) in the context of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories. I. Kant’s skeptical attitude towards this principle and the necessity he stressed for the specification of essences anticipate the latest cybernetic approach to the almost infinite information capacity of each entity. The article introduces the concept of “Occam’s number” – the ratio of the number of essences to the number of entities they describe, as a language problem of the relationship of code and text and their relative length. The principle of reducing the length of texts by increasing the vocabulary (code) demonstrates that the limited proliferation of essences rather than their reduction is a way to the economy of thought. The rational limit of such proliferation is set by the number of signs of natural language as they express the axioms of human experience. The article considers the correlativistic (F. Collins) and emergent (G. Lisi) approaches that challenge the reductionist tendency in the natural science methodology (F. Crick).  In contrast to B. Kastrup's idealistic monism, the position of duomonism (or uni–duality) is proposed: the duality of the mental and the material that manifest themselves only one within the other, so that their inversion, mutual reciprocity is the primary reality of the uni–versе (“turning around one”). The current stage of civilization is dominated by the activity of the mental, because the advance of science and technology makes all material entities reproducible (simulacra) and gives priority to the irreducible reality of the subjective experience. Тhe axiomatics of human experience includes its intersubjectivity, thus the problem of multiple essences turns into the problem of multiple beings, the agents of con-sciousness as shared experience.