Philosophy: Simplicity does not equal falsehood.

One of the many objections I constantly hear concerning Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and why it is rejected, is its “simplicity.” When they speak of simplicity, her denouncers refer to the philosophy’s metaphysical essence (the existence of an objective reality) and the means by which this is established- namely the three axioms of Existence (existence exists) , Identity (there is something) and Consciousness (there is something of whose existence I am aware).

The post-modernist argument is that this is too obvious, we cannot trust our senses. Either the entire world is nothing more than a perception of your mind, or that there is a world of things in themselves but we will never be able to perceive them because our senses get in the way (Hume and Kant, respectively.) Post-modernist philosophers tend to distrust evidence because it is factual, and in their world view it is impossible for something to be factual due to there not being a reliable way to verify… well, anything.

Because of this strange and- dare I say it- malevolent approach to their own senses (the sense organs as tools of deception as opposed to tools for the gathering of information), their only option to reach an answer is to, essentially, make it up. This creates a certain strange psychology in which the more far-fetched and improbable a theory sounds, the more likely it is to be true.

An example: A post-modernist philosopher would not accept the following explanation:

“I released a red apple from my grip, and it fell down the chasm due to the law of gravity.”

Instead, he would find this one a lot more satisfactory:

“It appeared that I released a retinal pattern in the shape of an apple, which also caused in me the sensation of redness, from my grasp, at which point the scene-image or ‘apple’ began to shrink away.”

Because an apple is not an apple: it is nothing more (to these philosophers) than the illusion of an apple collected by retinal pattern and inputted onto the brain. The color red, also, is not a characteristic of the apple, but a ’sensation’- we do not see a red apple, we see a splash of red. And finally, it is not perspective that makes the apple shrink away, it is the ’scene-image’ of the apple that literally shrinks.

By these examples you can see the mentality that they must have: a consistent distrust of everything around them. For us- or most of us, those that are not overly mystical or follow an Eastern philosophy or a New Age cult- the idea that the very senses we developed to gather information from the world around us may be nothing more than a malicious practical joke seems utterly ridiculous. Arguing that the only way to perceive things correctly is trough mis-perception borders on lunacy. That is because we haven’t rejected reality but embraced it. To someone who consistently tries to escape from the existence of reality, an obvious explanation won’t do- it can’t reinforce his fantasies.

Thus, when someone tries to tell me that Rand’s philosophy isn’t fit to be taught due to its simplicity, I often have to question that. According to Occam’s razor, all other things being equal, the simplest theory is the most likely to be true — hence the importance of the concept of simplicity in epistemology. Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, and we can see by how the world works that everything that is superfluous is eventually phased out- not by some magical design, but because of logical application. One should be suspicious when someone demands that something be exaggeratedly ornate and complicated- the greatest con artists in the world often stun their marks through a flood of information.