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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

This is probably due to a built-in preference in our minds for something we later started calling Occam's razor.

Obviously there must have been something that started it all, and if there were n+1 things at some time, there might have been n things before, leading to the conclusion that there must once have been 1 thing.

These philosophies arise multiple times per evening in any pub where alcohol is served. It's just that most don't stick around for long enough, possibly due to bad marketing.

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Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).

The thinking starts with the beer, then progresses towards one entity, then backpedals because one needs a second to offset against, and from two comes three, and we have come full circle.

I see a similar pattern in the advent of abstract art. People have independently settled upon primary colors, primary shapes, and primary compositions, only to then get stuck in a rather limited playing field, from which people started again to create the total utter chaos that is called post-modernism.

My personal conviction is that neither religion not abstract art have found the key to understanding the universe. They merely reflect our limited way of thinking.

> Is it an in-built preference? I think a robust monism is still a fairly radical position, especially among religious views. For example even the branches of Christianity which tack more materially tend to draw a rigid boundary between creator/created, God/the universe, etc. (and if you interrogate lay views they tend to skew even more dualistically).

Can you expand on this a bit? I have an intuition about what you're saying, but I confess that the definitions can be a little slippery.

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