Miracles vs "Miracles"

I was re-reading Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, two philosophically-inclined gentlemen who use humor to explain concepts and issues in philosophy.  And in the chapter on epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge and how it's acquired) I came across something I missed on my first read of the book.  In it, it is stated that according to David Hume, the 18th century British philosopher with an empirical bent, the only reasonable grounds for believing something is a miracle is that trying to explain it any other way results in ever wilder explanations.

A "floating" leaf!  A small miracle?

O.K., Hume is one of the many revered names I encountered in the Philosophy 101 class I once took, but I must not have found much that I found fascinating in the great man's theories because I don't remember anything about him but his name;  but then, this time around something about that definition of miracles struck me:  if all possible alternative explanations for a miracle are even more improbable than the miracle itself, wouldn't that make those alternative explanations miracles themselves, only "more miraculous"?  Are there degrees of miraculousness -- much like  the *degrees of infinity in math -- and so, using **Occam's Razor, one must choose the simplest miracle?  Granted, I realize the above definition of a miracle paraphrased from the book is a gross simplification of what must have been an awesomely complex thesis, but it just seems to me that if a miracle is defined as something that breaks the laws of nature, then by necessity any hypothesis that is more improbable than that miracle is simply something that breaks more laws of nature, and so, as long as we're allowed to break the laws of nature here, why not go whole hog and break as many as we can think of, and just call it "more miraculous than ordinary miracles", just like "more infinite than your basic ordinary infinity" (which is absolutely a valid concept in modern mathematics).

I actually wanted to pose this question to the authors through their website platoandaplatypus.com, but for some reason I kept getting the "403 error. forbidden" screen, so that was that.

A too, too prosaic explanation -- a spider's web, in this case

*Georg Cantor, the 19th century mathematician, came up with the then-shocking idea that infinity is not a single, vague idea;  that there is actually an infinite set of infinities (known as "transfinite" numbers), each being infinite but greater than the prior infinite set.  The "smallest" infinity is the set of natural numbers (the basic "counting" numbers, as in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.., to infinity, at least in principle).  The transfinite series is itself infinite;  there is no "largest" infinity, as no matter how high you go in the series of infinitely large sets, it's always possible to create a still larger set by consolidating all the prior, smaller sets as members.

**The "rule" that when there are multiple possible explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one that will do the job is usually the best one, named after William of Ockham -- and yes, he was a philosopher.

Another Old Photo

taken inside my old flat.

I miss the collection of books, music and movies that filled it before it became necessary for me to move back to Korea after a lifetime in Los Angeles.  But after spending a fortune to have all my artwork professionally packed and insured and shipped off to Korea, I simply ran out of budget and couldn't afford to have all the other stuff sent along, too.

Many of the LPs were part of my father's collection, but the rest were all my own, collected over the decades.  Now when I look up the books I used to own, it's shocking how rare and expensive some of them are.  Some are long out of print and can't even be found.  I found a used copy of The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney with the famous hallucinatory illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff -- the edition I used to own -- offered for sale at AbeBooks at $600 USD.  Another edition (also used) was listed at $2000!  As for the movies, aside from the usual classics and popular favorites I had also accumulated all sorts of lesser-known and obscure titles, artsy experimental films and cult favorites on DVD, now all but impossible to track down.  And hundreds of older Korean movies, also no longer available.

Speaking of which, for the longest time I had little interest in Korean culture (aside from a few favored Korean restaurants) and had no interaction with the larger Korean community in L.A. unless strictly necessary.  Then, in 2003 I came across a newly-released Korean movie called A Tale of Two Sisters (directed by Kim, Jee-woon and remade in the States in 2009 as The Uninvited), gave it a try and I was hooked!  It was beautiful, complex, scary, mysterious and bittersweet -- even the soundtrack was wonderfully poignant, and remains among my favorite compositions to this day.  My eyes were opened to a whole new world of cinema (and by extension... yes, to Korean music and drama series as well😏) and I started collecting Korean movies left and right.  And not satisfied with just watching them by myself, I started going over to my friend Evelyn's house every few weeks with a few Korean DVDs to watch with her (she was an Emmy-winning script writer;  she spent a great deal of her time watching all sorts of movies in any case, both for her work and for personal pleasure... R.I.P., Ev).  I even formed a group with local Mensa members that met downtown once a month to have dinner, walk over to my place and watch Korean movies.  Some of those movies were hard-to-find small productions and simply can't be found any more, whether online or as DVD.  I guess I'll never stop missing them.  They were a big part of my life.