Aesthetic Materialism

  Can Occam's Razor be derived from the principle of the null hypothesis? And, along the way, would the concept of "symmetry" (in the scientific sense) arise? I'm not sure, and I'm trying to sharpen my thoughts on the subject. Suppose you have never seen anything before.  (You were born completely blind, and are about to undergo an operation which will give you normal eyesight, or some such conceit.) You don't know what color anything is.  There's a leaf in front of you.  Should you assume that it is green?  (Assume that, for some reason, no one has ever told you what color leaves are, etc..)  No, at least not if you are being scientific.   In the absence of any evidence, you should adopt the null hypothesis.  What exactly is the null hypothesis, here?  "The leaf is not green"?  Perhaps more accurately, "The leaf could be any and every color, or no color; we must not make any prejudicial assumptions about any color."  Or perhaps eve...

    Two Types of Authority Weber had his 3 forms of authority: traditional authority, legal/rational/bureaucratic authority, and charismatic authority.  I prefer to look at most of the history of civilization, or at least huge swaths of it, as a struggle between 2 forms of authority, which I call executive authority and ecclesiastic authority.  By "ecclesiastic" here, I do not necessarily mean anything related to any church or organized religion, though religion, in its various guises, can and often does become deeply involved in both forms of authority.  Instead, I am referring primarily to the original sense of the word, ἐκκλησία in Greek.  For centuries, the ekklesia meant the popular assembly that in many respects held significant power in several ancient Greek city-states.  Different city-states had different kinds of ekklesia, of different numbers of people, with different powers and responsibilities.  The most famous ekklesia, of course, wa...