Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

Nitpick:

The Secret of Life was infinitely beyond the reach of science! Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond!

But Kelvin (in your quote) qualified it with "... hitherto entered on". Whether or not "infinitely" is fitting, doesn't this imply that Kelvin did not think that future scientific inquiry could not succeed?

Could it not also have been partly due to earlier scientists underestimating the degree to which qualitative phenomena derive from quantitative phenomena? Their error, then, was in tending to assume this quality was immune to study, rather than in assuming the quality itself.

Since you can say "Why? Elan vital!" to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, etcetera.

But you say earlier 'Elan vital' was greatly weakened by a piece of evidence. In that light, it's hypothesis could be stated "the mechanisms of living processes are of a different kind than the mechanisms of non-living processes, so you will not be able to study them with chemistry". This is false, but I don't think it's entirely worthless as a hypothesis, since biochemistry is noticeably different from non-living chemistry.

I think 'elan vital' makes some sense, even in a modern light. Most of the reactions in our body would not occur without enzymes, and enzymes are a characteristic feature of life. So perhaps we can say that 'elan vital' is enzymes! There is at least one experiment I can think of that could have been interpreted to show this too: I believe it involved fermentation being carried out with yeast-water (no living yeast, but clearly having their enzymes).

I like your list of signs of a curiosity stopper. I don't necessarily think that "elan vital" meets those requirements (as Roy points out), but perhaps it did for many people or at some times.

I like the list because my brain feels a little more limber and a little more powerful, having pondered it. The list is a curiosity ENHANCER, and an anticipation SHARPENER.

-- James

Since you can say "Why? Elan vital!" to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, etcetera.

But you say earlier 'Elan vital' was greatly weakened by a piece of evidence

Heh. A fair point! Every mysterianism, though it may fail to predict details and quantities, is ultimately vulnerable to the one experience in all the world that it does prohibit - the discovery of a non-mysterious explanation.

These are the signs of mysterious answers to mysterious questions: Anothe good sign is that the mysterious answer is always in retreat. Suddenly, people explain some phenonmena, previously thought to be explainable only by "elan vitale" or "god" or "the influence of platonic Ideals". And the mysterious answer retreats to a smaller realm. And that realm just keeps on shrinking...

This post reads rather like a pastiche of Dan Dennett (on consciousness and free will).

And to continue the thread of Roy's comment as picked up by Eliezer, it might have been a fairly reasonable conjecture at the time (or at some earlier time). We have to be wary about hindsight bias. Imagine a time before biochemistry and before evolution theory. The only physicalist "explanations" you've ever heard of or thought of for why animals exist and how they function are obvious non-starters...

You think to yourself, "the folks who are tempted by such explanations just don't realize how far away they are from really explaining this stuff; they are deluded." And invoking an elan vital, while clearly not providing a complete explanation, at least creates a placeholder. Perhaps it might be possible to discover different versions of the elan vital; perhaps we could discover how this force interacts with other non-material substances such as ancestor spirits, consciousness, magic, demons, angels etc. Perhaps there could be a whole science of the psychic and the occult, or maybe a new branch of theological inquiry that would illuminate these issues. Maybe those faraway wisemen that we've heard about know something about these matters that we don't know. Or maybe the human mind is simply not equipped to understand these inner workings of the world, and we have to pray instead for illumination. In the afterlife, perhaps, it will all be clear. Either way, that guy who thinks he will discover the mysteries of the soul by dissecting the pineal gland seem curiously obtuse in not appreciating the magnitude of the mystery.

Now, in retrospect we know what worked and what didn't. But the mystics, it seems, could have turned out to have been right, and it is not obvious that they were irrational to favor the mystic hypothesis given the evidence available to them at the time.

Perhaps what we should be looking for is not structural problems intrinsic to certain kinds of questions and answers, but rather attitude problems that occur, for example, when ask questions without really caring about finding the answer, or when we use mysterious answers to lullaby our curiosity prematurely.

People with the benefit of hindsight failing to realize how reasonable vitalism sounded at the time is precisely why they go ahead and propose similar explanations for consciousness, which seems far more mysterious to them than biology, hence legitimately in need of a mysterious explanation. Vitalists were merely stupid, to make such a big deal out of such an ordinary-seeming phenomenon as biology - consciousness is different.

This is precisely one of the ways in which I went astray when I was still a diligent practitioner of mere Traditional Rationality, rather than Bayescraft. The reason to consider how reasonable mistakes seemed without benefit of hindsight, is not to excuse them, because this is to fail to learn from them. The reason to consider how reasonable it seemed is to realize that not everything that sounds reasonable is a good idea; you've got to be strict about things like yielding increases in predictive power.

Eliezer: It doesn't seem to me that you really engaged with Nick's point here. Also, I have pointed out to you before that there were lots of philosophers who believed that consciousness was unique and mysterious but life was not long before science rejected vitalism.

The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms... Modern biologists were coming once more to the acceptance of something and that was a vital principle.

Given what we know now about the vastly complex and highly improbable processes and structures of organisms -- what we have learned since Lord Kelvin about nucleic acids, proteins, evolution, embryology, and so on -- and given that there are many mysteries still, such as consciousness and aging, or how to cure or prevent viruses, cancers, or heart disease, for which we still have far too few clues -- this rather metaphorical and poetic view of Lord Kelvin's is certainly a far more accurate view of the organism, for the time, than any alternative model that posited that the many details and functions of human body, or its origins, could be most accurately modeled by simple equations like those used for Newtonian physics. To the extent vitalism detered biologists from such idiocy vitalism must be considered for its time a triumph. Too bad there were to few similarly good metaphors to deter people from believing in central economic planning or Marx's "Laws of History."

Admittedly, the "infinetely different" part is hyperbole, but "vastly different" would have turned out to be fairly accurate.

I don't really see the problem here. the causal link from mind to body is not very much more understood today as it was in Lord Kelvins time. To propose that there is a life force involved may not have empirical basis but can be validated by personal experience. And to suggest that there can be nothing more than enzymes, nerve signals, molecules floating around etc. is perhaps also failure to admit ones own ignorance.

Secondly it seems to me that there is a philosophical/existential way of seeing things that is different from the more dry scientific point of view that one usually finds on this blog.

" If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. "

The problem with this statement is that reality is relative and our understanding of it depends on the our limited ways of knowing about it. So to state that something is a mystery or is unknown might also be a recognition of this limitation. Something at one level of understanding might be something different on another level.

But of course this should not prevent us from trying to find out what is hiding behind the mystery.

I just read "The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" in Emile by Jean Jacques Rousseau. He's responsible for intelligent design (that annoying "who made this watch?" story), and an early "who caused the big bang? GOD did!" argument. I think this falls into your "mysterious answer" category. Positing a supernatural being doesn't really answer anything, it just moves the mystery into a new, man-made construct.

I don't think "elan vital" needed to be a curiousity stopper. It could be a description.

Some things are alive. Some are not. Live things are different, they do things that dead things do not. It's a difference that's worth noticing. If "elan vital" is a synonym for "alive" and not an explanation, then it's useful. It doesn't have to stop you from asking what the difference is.

Urea is not alive. That was a red herring. But it suggested a new idea, one that will probably be realised someday soon. In theory there's nothing about cells that we can't understand in detail. Probably within 50 years we'll be able to create a living cell from nonliving components. If not 50 years, certainly within 200 years. We're very close.

I think Kelvin gets a bit of a raw deal in the way people often quote him: "[life etc.] is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry".

By cutting off the quote there it sounds like he is claiming that science will never be able to understand life. However, as you show above, he continues with, "... hitherto entered on." Thus, the sentence is making a claim about the power of science up to the time of his writing to understand life. This is a far more reasonable claim.

I am wondering what kind of force it is that causes ones shoes to come off during a forceful impact.

I think you have overlooked the possibility of non rational knowledge. Maybe science is limited to the rational, empirical search for casuality, but there is meaning beyond this specific mode of cognition. This is to say, I don't think a exception of reductionism is necessarely admition of mystery. It may be acceptance of thought independent of matter, or, simply put, to believe that the mind comes before the material universe. Once again the old egg-chiken problem. You don't need a linear solution. A circular causality, where cause and effect are not ontologically absolute, but may adapt to the circumstances or points of view. Just as you mentioned, drawing diagrams of [cause]->[effect] do not amount to learning, for it has no influence on what you know. It has utility only if this takes place in a 'thingspace' where a network of ideas models the experience of the mind. In this case, those diagrams may operate as little brain apps, allowing for coherent behavior. This is rationality. Search for truth and beauty is not confined by reason. I think this is the whole point of doubting pure reductionism, not arguing for mystery and cherishing ignorance, as your words imply.

1) Great post and great comments.

2) Like a few people have mentioned, using a life force as an explanation isn't necessarily a bad thing. It depends what you have in mind. You could believe in the life force but not be breaking any of the four curiosity stoppers. It would be interesting to know how many people used life force as a curiosity stopper when it was popular. I would guess that most people did use it as a curiosity stopper. Sounds like a good job for those experimental philosophers to show they do more than just polls about intuitions.

3) "You have a little causal diagram in your head that says ["Elan vital!"] -> [hand moves]. But actually you know nothing you didn't know before. You don't know, say, whether your hand will generate heat or absorb heat, unless you have observed the fact already; if not, you won't be able to predict it in advance."

I disagree that you know nothing more than you did before. When I think of a life force I picture different things than, say, electrical force. Maybe your concept of life hasn't substantially changed, but it has been enriched slightly, and the more you enrich a concept the more falsifiable it becomes. I would argue that the more falsifiable a concept is, without being shown to be false, the more useful it is (in general). For instance, if I said meaning was holistic, I think this is somewhat analogous to saying motion in the living is generated by a life force. It loosely constrains other things you can believe about meaning or life.

Phlogiston exists. We call it "absence of oxygen". Nobody acted like positive charge wasn't real when they found out it was the absence of electrons.

"But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory."

"To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance."

"Every mysterianism, though it may fail to predict details and quantities, is ultimately vulnerable to the one experience in all the world that it does prohibit - the discovery of a non-mysterious explanation."

Wow! Certainly no shortage of great insights and quotable aphorisms in this posting and commentary. Yet I will still claim that mysterious answers can be rendered not just harmless, but positively helpful if you exploit them properly. How to exploit them? Well, first you recognize them by the suggested 4 signs. Then you turn around sign #1 and treat them as a curiosity-magnet rather than curiosity-stopper. Then you turn around sign #2 by empirically investigating to find the moving parts. (Like the folks around Delbruck who thought that investigating life would reveal new laws of physics.) And finally, avoid falling into the traps implicit in signs #3 and #4.

Am I the only one who, while reading this post, thought “why doesn’t the same apply to anything else we ever discover”?

Elan vital (and phlogiston and luminiferous aether etc.) were particles/substances/phenomena postulated to try to explain observations made. How are quarks, electrons and photons any different? Just because we recognise these as the best available theory today, I am not sure I understand how one is a curiosity-stopper any more than the other.

The real curiosity-stopper is the suggestion that something is forever beyond our understanding and that attempting to research it is destined to be futile. Your quote from Lord Kelvin exhibits this mentality, but only very slightly. Certainly a lot less than some of that stuff you hear from religious people who think God explains everything but is beyond our understanding. I think the history of science shows that this mentality is continually diminishing, and Lord Kelvin’s quote may simply be a transitional fossil.

I still see traces of this mentality today. Ask a cosmologist what happened in the first few seconds after the big bang and they might say the particle horizon makes it fundamentally impossible to see beyond the point where the universe became optically transparent. I think many people think similarly about consciousness — not because they think we can’t dissect the brain and figure out how it works, but rather because they think we will never be able to come up wtih a coherent, useful definition of the term that reasonably matches our intuition. I think each of these are curiosity-stoppers.

While I understand how there are some questions that cannot be completely answered, I feel as though you have chosen to ignore the fact that science at that time was inadequate to really understand the underlying science. Even today there is no complete understanding of any field, just educated guesses based on experiments and observations. Elan vital was just one theory of attempting to describe why life happens, and it was based on the fact that life had something more than un-living matter. However, further experiments altered this theory. Would you say the same thing about Quantum Theory, or the Electromagnetic Spectrum, or even E=mc^2? So far, those theories, while truthful when modeling current events, have not been conclusively proven. However, by aggressively insinuating that anyone who uses a theory that has not be uncategorically proven as fact is lacking in rational thought, then you belittle the field of science and all that it has achieved.

I'm new to reading this blog and am slowly going through the sequences. Eliezer, I'm enjoying your writings a lot and they are really helping to change my way of thinking.

A thought I had while reading this and figured I'd ask for other thoughts:

" To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance."

I know people who are perfectly content to "worship their own ignorance." Why do you think they don't value knowing enough to go further? Is it just because they have hit a semantic roadblock and don't realize it?

(Also, I have no idea how to correctly quote a post or a comment. Help?) :)

I'm new to reading this blog and am slowly going through the sequences. Eliezer, I'm enjoying your writings a lot and they are really helping to change my way of thinking.

A thought I had while reading this and figured I'd ask for other thoughts:

To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.

I know people who are perfectly content to "worship their own ignorance." Why do you think they don't value knowing enough to go further? Is it just because they have hit a semantic roadblock and don't realize it?

Your hand is just... stuff... and for some reason it moves under your direction. Is this not magic?

Yeah, I think it is. The one model we start with is the model of ourselves. Our hand moves because we will it to do so. If that were the only model I had, that's how I'd interpret the universe - every event was the result of the will of some being.

And stopping at "The Wizard Did It" makes perfect sense. We experience our own decisions as sufficient causes for our own actions.

I wonder how long it took for the concept of mechanism to take hold.

I would like to suggest that the concept of "beauty" in art, relationships and even evolutionary biology seems to satisfy EY's criteria of being a mysterious answer.

If I ask, "how does the male peacock attract female peacocks" and one answers "because his tail is big and beautiful", haven't they failed to answer my question? Beauty in this response is a 1- curiosity stopper, 2- has no moving parts, 3- Is often uttered by people with a great deal of pride (the painting is so beautiful!), and 4- leaves the phenomenon a mystery (In the case of the peacock, I still don't really know why female peacocks like big colorful tails).

I understand why elan vital is a mysterious answer, but what makes the question mysterious? Isn't the question "why does living matter move?" a perfectly intelligible one, and the point is simply that we can do a lot better in answering it than "elan vital"?

Funny to see how perfectly dark matter is used as a mysterious answer, in the sense of "How could the universe be expanding? Dark matter!" And I always thought that everything NGC told me as a kid was true and logical and rational. Another childhood memory crushed...

What would you have had these biologists use instead? Would you prefer they had no model? It seems clear to me, though I may be wrong, that these scientists had a model (elan vital), and when later evidence came along (modern biology?), they discarded it in favor of a different model. Would you have them instead have picked a different model in the first place? Or have no model at all?

For all the posts implying that people who came up with the concepts of phlogiston and elan vital were just using science without the benefit of today's education is missing the point.

Today's scientists come up with ideas like string theory or dark energy, but they don't stop there: they are frantically trying to find evidence for them and so far failing. So they are just neat ideas that might explain a lot if shown to be true,, but not much more than that. General relativity goes on providing evidence supporting it, including the new evidence for "frame dragging".

Phlogiston and elan vital were ideas that died for the LACK of evidence. The discoveries of oxygen and electrochemistry killed them. However, when the ideas were proposed, if you didn't know the answer, you left it there or made something up. I might mention also caloric, which was a pure guess based on very little but quashed by science in the form of experiments whose results fitted the concepts of energy much better.

My mother's husband professes to believe that our actions have no control over the way in which we die, but that "if you're meant to die in a plane crash and avoid flying, then a plane will end up crashing into you!" for example.

After explaining how I would expect that belief to constrain experience (like how it would affect plane crash statistics), as well as showing that he himself was demonstrating his unbelief every time he went to see a doctor, he told me that you "just can't apply numbers to this," and "Well, you shouldn't tempt fate."

My question to the LW community is this: How do you avoid kicking people in the nuts all of the time?

No credit to Nietzsche for the analogy?

Another example: during the conversation between Deepak Chopra and Richard Dawkins, Deepak Chopra thinks that our lack of a very good understanding for the origin of language or jumps in the fissile record for example means that an actual discontinuity happened.

If a phenomenon feels mysterious, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.

I completely accept and (I think) understand this, however there are some phenomena that cannot, by their nature, be known.

A typical example is Cantor's proof that it is impossible to prove that there are "mid-sized infinities. More generally, Godel's incompleteness theorems prove that some things are ever unknowable. (If I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting, enlighten me. I'm no mathematician.)

More controversially, I suspect that consciousnesses may present a similar problem (for different reasons).

These might be described as inherently mysterious phenomena.

Desiring a mysterious explantion is like wanting to be in a room with no people inside. Once you explain it it's not mysterious any more. The property depends on your actions: emptyness is destroyed by you entering, mysticism is destroyed by you explaining it. Just an alternative to the map-territory way of putting it

How is "elan vital" different from, lets say "higgs bozon" in physics ? Both are hypothetical parts of reality, which needs further confirmation, and more detailed description.

My summary: A mysterious answer is a fake explanation that acts as a semantic stop sign. Signs for mysterious answers:

• Explanation acts as curiousity-stopper rather than anticipation-controller

• Hypothesis is a black box (no underlying principles to derive from)

• Social indication that people cherish their ignorance

According to the internet, "elan vital" was coined by Henri Bergson, but his "Creative Evolution" book is aware of this critique of vitalism, and asserts that the term "vital principle" is to be understood as a question to be answered (what distinguishes life from non-life?). He gives the "elan vital"/"vital impetus" as an answer to the question of what the vital principle is.

Roughly speaking^[1], he proposes viewing evolution as an entropic force, and so argues that natural selection does not explain the origin of species, but that rather the origin of species must be understood in terms of the different macrostates that are possible. The macrostate itself is the "elan vital" (and can differ by species), though of course the actual macrostate is distinct from the set of possible macrostates, which is determined by the environment and something that he calls the "original impetus".

A central example he uses is eyes. He argues that light causes the possibility of vision, which causes eyes; and that different functions of vision (e.g. acquiring food) cause the eyes to have varying degrees of development (from eyespots to highly advanced eyes).^[2]

The meaning of the original impetus is less clear than the meaning of the vital impetus. He defines the original impetus as something that was passed in the germ from the original life to modern life, and which explains the strong similarity across lifeforms (again bringing up how different species have similar eye structures). I guess in modern terms the original impetus would be closely related to mitosis and transcription.

(The book was released prior to the discovery of DNA as the unit of heredity, but after the Origin of Species. Around the time the central dogma of molecular biology was becoming a thing.)

... This description of his view actually makes me wonder if the rationalist community has been unfair to Beff Jezos' assertion that increasing entropy is the meaning of life.

1. ^{^}

   Using my terminology, not his. YMMV about whether it is actually accurate, though a more relevant point is that he goes in depth about the need to understand things, and basically doesn't support mysterious answers to mysterious questions at all. He merely opposes complex answers to simple questions.

2. ^{^}

   This is in contrast to our modern standard model of evolution, namely Fisher's infinitesimal model combined with natural selection, which would argue that random mutations increase the genetic variance in presence of photoreceptiveness of cells, number of photoreceptive cells, etc., which increases the genetic variance in sight, and which in turn increases the genetic variance in fitness, which then gradually selects for eyes. Henri Bergson argues this does not explain sight because it doesn't explain why there are all these different things that could correlate to produce sight. Meanwhile light does explain the presence of these correlations, and so is a better explanation of sight than natural selection is.

[C]onsciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent, subject to the direction of his will. It appears, therefore, that animated creatures have the power of immediately applying, to certain moving particles of matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of these particles are directed to produce desired mechanical effects.²

Full quote:

On the Power of Animated Creatures over Matter

The question, "Can animated creatures set matter in motion in virtue of an inherent power of producing mechanical effect ?" must be answered in the negative, according to the well-established theory of animal heat and motion, which ascribes them to the chemical action (principally oxidation, or a combustion at low temperatures) experienced by the food. A principal object of the present communication is to point out the relation of this theory to the dynamical theory of heat. It is remarked, in the first place, that both animal heat and weights raised or resistance overcome, are mechanical effects of the chemical forces which act during the combination of food with oxygen. The former is a dynamical mechanical effect, being thermal motions excited ; the latter is a mechanical effect of the statical kind. The whole mechanical value of these effects, which are produced by means of the animal mechanism in any time, must be equal to the mechanical value of the work done by the chemical forces. Hence, when an animal is going up-hill or working against resisting force, there is less heat generated than the amount due to the oxidation of the food, by the thermal equivalent of the mechanical effect produced. From an estimate made by Mr. Joule, it appears that from ~ to ~ of the mechanical equivalent of the complete oxidation of all the food consumed by a horse may be produced, from day to day, as weights raised. The oxidation of the whole food consumed being, in reality, far from complete, it follows that a less proportion than 4, perhaps even less than ~, of the heat due to the whole chemical action that actually goes on in the body of the animal, is given out as heat. An estimate, according to the same principle, upon veryimp effect data, however, is made by the author, regarding the relation between the thermal and the non-thermal mechanical effects produced by a man at work; by which it appears that probably as much as ~ of the whole work of the chemical forces arising from the oxidation of his food during the twenty-four hours, may be directed to raising his own weight, by a man walking up-hill for eight hours a day ; and perhaps even as much as ¼ of the work of the chemical forces may be directed to the overcoming of external resistances by a man exerting himself for six hours a day in such operations as pumping. In the former case there would not be more than 4, and in the latter not more than ¼ of the thermal equivalent of the chemical action emitted as animal heat, on the whole, during the twenty-four hours, and the quantities of heat emitted during the times of working would bear much smaller proportions respectively than these, to the thermal equivalents of the chemical forces actually operating during those times.

A curious inference is pointed out, that an animal would be sensibly less warm in going up-hill than in going down-hill, were the breathing not greater in the former case than in the latter.

The application of Carnot's principle, and of Joule's discoveries regarding the heat of electrolysis and the calorific effects of magneto-electricity, is pointed out ; according to which it appears nearly certain that, when an animal works against resisting force, there is not a conversion of heat into external mechanical effect, but the full thermal equivalent of the chemical forces is never produced; in other words, that the animal body does not act as a thermo-dynamic engine ; and very probable that the chemical forces produce the external mechanical effects through electrical means.

Certainty regarding the means in the animal body by which external mechanical effects are produced from chemical forces acting internally, cannot be arrived at without more experiment and observation than has yet been applied; but the relation of mechanical equivalence, between the work done by the chemical forces, and the final mechanical effects produced, whether solely heat, or partly heat and partly resistance overcome, may be asserted with confidence. Whatever be the nature of these means, consciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent, subject to the direction of his will. It appears, therefore, that animated creatures have the power of immediately applying, to certain moving particles 6f matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of these particles are directed to produce desired mechanical effects.