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...

  There is absolutely no evidence for utilitarianism.  For a rational person, there's no reason to believe in utilitarianism. Not only is there no evidence for utilitarianism, it's not even clear to me that there ever could be evidence for utilitarianism.  What possible evidence could anyone ever provide to prove that "One should do the greatest good for the greatest number?"  This to me sounds like a dogmatic axiom, not the result of any kind of scientific experiment.  Nothing in any test tube, microscope, telescope, or longitudinal study can support it.  As I've argued before, utilitarianism is disguised deontology - and that was charitable of me.  It may be more true to say that utilitarianism is disguised command theory. And the evidence we do have does not corroborate this arbitrary principle.  On the contrary.  Humans are animals, who evolved by way of a process of natural selection.  "The greatest good for the greatest number" is ...