I don’t know about potentials vs fields, but this seems backwards if you mean it to apply to MWI. That interpretation tries to say that the quantum math describes reality and we need assume no further mechanism.
Beyond that, it seems to me that we don’t care about Occam’s Razor due to William of Occam’s philosophical fapping, nor due to someone proposing the ideal of Solomonoff Induction. We care because Isaac Newton claimed to use a version of the Razor (applied to causes) in making his practical discoveries. Unlike those other formulations, Newton’s four Rules for Natural Philosophy inspired the rest of modern science. And it looks to me like Einstein made his most famous discoveries by interpreting Rule 2 more strictly than Newton himself did.
I mention this because Newton wrote these rules specifically to reduce the appeal of taking his mathematical theory of gravity and adding Cartesian or Aristotelian “mechanisms”, without adding predictions. The analogy with MWI seems inexact (if MWI still has a mathematical hole) but precise enough to encompass your objection. Newton made one possibly-new physical observation that I can recall, and it related to one of his laws of motion rather than his actual law of gravitation. He justified the latter part of his theory solely on the grounds of simplicity, since it allowed the derivation of pre-existing rules drawn from pre-existing observations. (I think the ‘good’ kind of mechanism, the kind JoshuaZ mentions, also brings together previously separate postulates or allows us to make novel predictions.) You’ll notice that Rule 4, the one that says we need new evidence to justify “contrary hypotheses”, technically doesn’t say the preferred theory has to come first (at least not in this English version). The author was no fool. He just said we should take “propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true,” which means that either induction includes Newtonian simplicity, or effective science has to judge theories by some criteria beyond truth, or this method contradicts itself.
If Solomonoff Induction doesn’t at least give us Newton’s Rules in Newton’s case, then Solomonoff Induction fails at its job.
I don’t know about potentials vs fields, but this seems backwards if you mean it to apply to MWI. That interpretation tries to say that the quantum math describes reality and we need assume no further mechanism.
Beyond that, it seems to me that we don’t care about Occam’s Razor due to William of Occam’s philosophical fapping, nor due to someone proposing the ideal of Solomonoff Induction. We care because Isaac Newton claimed to use a version of the Razor (applied to causes) in making his practical discoveries. Unlike those other formulations, Newton’s four Rules for Natural Philosophy inspired the rest of modern science. And it looks to me like Einstein made his most famous discoveries by interpreting Rule 2 more strictly than Newton himself did.
I mention this because Newton wrote these rules specifically to reduce the appeal of taking his mathematical theory of gravity and adding Cartesian or Aristotelian “mechanisms”, without adding predictions. The analogy with MWI seems inexact (if MWI still has a mathematical hole) but precise enough to encompass your objection. Newton made one possibly-new physical observation that I can recall, and it related to one of his laws of motion rather than his actual law of gravitation. He justified the latter part of his theory solely on the grounds of simplicity, since it allowed the derivation of pre-existing rules drawn from pre-existing observations. (I think the ‘good’ kind of mechanism, the kind JoshuaZ mentions, also brings together previously separate postulates or allows us to make novel predictions.) You’ll notice that Rule 4, the one that says we need new evidence to justify “contrary hypotheses”, technically doesn’t say the preferred theory has to come first (at least not in this English version). The author was no fool. He just said we should take “propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true,” which means that either induction includes Newtonian simplicity, or effective science has to judge theories by some criteria beyond truth, or this method contradicts itself.
If Solomonoff Induction doesn’t at least give us Newton’s Rules in Newton’s case, then Solomonoff Induction fails at its job.