Someone, a woman, I forget her name, a physicist has lately questioned the parsimonius assumption or more accurately the whole beauty assumption, meaning, roughly, the most beautiful or parsimonious theory is correct. Just a data point to this conversation, not an argument.
Re: Solomonoff, if you're chucking away unnecessaries, which is what I understand Solomonoff to be doing (I had to be reminded what his theory was truthfully) then that's all well and good, let's chuck. But you still are left with the problem of whether the axioms are true. That's a different thing entirely except to the extent we define true operationally, as having predictive power over the things we understand and know about in the way we understand them.
We moderns are all deeply enmeshed with Scientism which is an ism that says logic and reasoning and the scientific method etc. are the only valid tools for aquiring certain (indubitable) knowledge. What if it's just not true ? Then what ?
Re: Solomonoff, if you're chucking away unnecessaries, which is what I understand Solomonoff to be doing (I had to be reminded what his theory was truthfully) then that's all well and good, let's chuck. But you still are left with the problem of whether the axioms are true. That's a different thing entirely except to the extent we define true operationally, as having predictive power over the things we understand and know about in the way we understand them.
We moderns are all deeply enmeshed with Scientism which is an ism that says logic and reasoning and the scientific method etc. are the only valid tools for aquiring certain (indubitable) knowledge. What if it's just not true ? Then what ?