William of Occam, who lived around 1300 to 1349, lived at a time when the rising material wealth of developing methods of pre-capitalist production in Europe were bringing democratic currents into being. His simplistic reductionist principle is completely in harmony with the rational steps of organising production in which monks were in the forefront, particularly in the great Benedictine monasteries (although he was a Franciscan).
His principle is a simplifying logical device, without any basis in wider reality. There is absolutely no reason in a complex universe, why there should be only one explanation for anything. Indeed to think there is is probably wrong.
His principle has been taken by later centuries. Bertrand Russell, the logical positivist in "A History of Western Philosophy" says "I have found this a most useful principle in logical analysis". He praises Occam by saying that he was "so far as logic is concerned, primarily a secular philospher."
As for imagining that we can be conscious of everything all the time, that is ridiculous. But it is a reflection of the bourgeois reductionist idea that society consists of discrete conscious individuals each with their own rights and liberties, rather than that we live in a matrix in a profoundly complex psycho-social world of which we are conscious only in part and only part of the time.
IMHO and in haste. Sorry to sound dogmatic in an attempt to puncture the dogmatic veneration of long dead man for purposes of bourgeois ideology. In fact no one really remembers, or could of course remember, the real William of Occam
Chris Burford
London
BTW I could not work out who sent the original post. No personal offence intended. Just an e-mail encounter on what seemed to me a small but significant remark.