One of the first things everyone is taught in a scientific statistics class is that correlation does not imply causation. Yet Occam’s razor–the very, very, very popular premise that the simplest explanation, all else held equal, is best (often taught as a bedrock of thought)–makes a mistake just as severe: indeed, the former fallacy is just a special case of Occam’s Razor, which is, yes, itself a fallacy. Both forget that, fundamentally, reality is not an equation. You simply cannot, ultimately, get at the truth, without understanding that the word is going to fail you in the end… unless you include a capital T. Reality is not simple, or testable. It’s Complicated. It’s Personal. It’s God.
Frequentist statistics has the same issue. Indeed, the whole “scientific method” is built on a lie (or at least, a mistake) which substitutes repeatability for logical necessity. The claim that the scientific method is valid is not, in itself, epistemologically well-founded: it can only be justified–indeed, even the belief that reality has any coherence whatsoever–can only be justified by appealing to an a priori assumption of predictability. Yet, predictability has not one, but at least two, very different plausible explanations.
First–and this is the interpretation most people are effectively using, even if they don’t admit it–is that reality operates according to laws, cause-and-effect relationships, that, at least in principle, never fail. Yes, sure, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics adds in a role for randomness. But this is not incoherent randomness, it is ordered randomness: a mathematical equation (be it the Schroedinger equation or anything else) still governs even the randomness, with the “wave-form collapse” datum popping out naturally, from whatever the equation says the probability distribution must be.
The other explanation is that reality is governed by a person. (Yes, an objection knocks at the door: Why pick a personal foundation-of-reality? Where does this idea come from–except religious narratives? How can this be offered as a mutually equal, a peer, explanation to the law-governance of the previous paragraph? Hint: this is really just our nemesis, Occam’s razor itself, dressed up in more informal language. See C.S. Lewis’ discussion of “receiving letters” in Mere Christianity for the answer: briefly, it is that we have direct experience of what it is like to be a person. Yes, we also have direct experience of a (usually) seemingly orderly external world. So… we have two pieces of epistemic data: why not treat them equal?)
And if reality is governed by a person, everything else (including repeatability) is subject to his personal discretion. And if Ultimate Reality is a person, it stands to reason that there may be other persons too, more powerful than us humans. And some of these persons might just happen to not be good, and not want us puny humans to figure out what is going on. So they may very well choose to make reality appear coherent where it suits them (plausible deniability), and make reality not appear coherent where it doesn’t suit them (e.g., someone figured out the truth and must not be believed). Indeed, such is the cause, and strategic motivation (on the demons’ part), for “psychosis.” The mentally ill understand the truth better than those who judge us.
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