Occam's Sword

Occam’s Sword

Dust swirls about my feet,
kicked up by the broom with which I sweep.
The delusions my mother knew,
the shifting sands of reality,
the Truth that I seek—
they all spin in my mind like whirls of sand.

One splinter of sand wedges in the desert of my mind and plagues me:
Why can’t we populate the universe with unicorns, dragons, and demons to infinity?

The question came to me while reading Joseph Campbell’s account of Occam’s Razor in The Masks of God: Creative Mythology.
On page 583, he recounts the significance of this principle in Western intellectual history.
Medieval philosophers, known as Realists, claimed—with great authority—

that for every word there must be a corresponding reality.

Along came Ockham.
With simple clarity, he declared:
Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

In a single stroke, he deflated the Realist's grand ontology.

And yet I wondered: Why?
Why can’t we add to our collective ontology to infinity?

My answer arrived in a flash and in perfect symmetry.
I see with my mind’s eye two principles, paired side by side, vertically:

Objects are not to be multiplied                                                                 Matter and energy cannot be created.

Objects are not to be eliminated.                                                              Matter and energy cannot be destroyed.

Thus, we cannot multiply objects like dragons, unicorns, and demons because it would violate the conservation of matter and energy.
To think otherwise would be like randomly adding or subtracting atoms and molecules to or from the periodic table and our collective database of molecules.

Thus, there is a balance between the scientific catalog of objects and reality, with neither more nor less on either side, in number and kind.

Our thought and language are bound—constrained by the laws of physical reality.
That is why we cannot multiply or eliminate objects endlessly.
To think otherwise is to be swept into delusion.

With splinter now a sword withdrawn, I look down at the floor, the dust of confusion swept away,
and see myself reflected there.