Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

Imagine looking at your hand, and knowing nothing of cells, nothing of biochemistry, nothing of DNA. You've learned some anatomy from dissection, so you know your hand contains muscles; but you don't know why muscles move instead of lying there like clay. Your hand is just... stuff... and for some reason it moves under your direction. Is this not magic?

"The animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine ... 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 of matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of these particles are directed to produce derived mechanical effects... 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."
        -- Lord Kelvin

This was the theory of vitalism; that the mysterious difference between living matter and non-living matter was explained by an elan vital or vis vitalis.  Elan vital infused living matter and caused it to move as consciously directed. Elan vital participated in chemical transformations which no mere non-living particles could undergo - Wöhler's later synthesis of urea, a component of urine, was a major blow to the vitalistic theory because it showed that mere chemistry could duplicate a product of biology.

Calling "elan vital" an explanation, even a fake explanation like phlogiston, is probably giving it too much credit.  It functioned primarily as a curiosity-stopper.  You said "Why?" and the answer was "Elan vital!"

When you say "Elan vital!", it feels like you know why your hand moves.  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.  Your curiosity feels sated, but it hasn't been fed.  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 the greater lesson lies in the vitalists' reverence for the elan vital, their eagerness to pronounce it a mystery beyond all science. Meeting the great dragon Unknown, the vitalists did not draw their swords to do battle, but bowed their necks in submission. They took pride in their ignorance, made biology into a sacred mystery, and thereby became loath to relinquish their ignorance when evidence came knocking.

The Secret of Life was infinitely beyond the reach of science! Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond! Lord Kelvin sure did get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something.

But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory.  If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person.  There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.

Vitalism shared with phlogiston the error of encapsulating the mystery as a substance. Fire was mysterious, and the phlogiston theory encapsulated the mystery in a mysterious substance called "phlogiston". Life was a sacred mystery, and vitalism encapsulated the sacred mystery in a mysterious substance called "elan vital". Neither answer helped concentrate the model's probability density - make some outcomes easier to explain than others. The "explanation" just wrapped up the question as a small, hard, opaque black ball.

In a comedy written by Moliere, a physician explains the power of a soporific by saying that it contains a "dormitive potency".  Same principle.  It is a failure of human psychology that, faced with a mysterious phenomenon, we more readily postulate mysterious inherent substances than complex underlying processes.

But the deeper failure is supposing that an answer can be mysterious. If a phenomenon feels mysterious, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. The vitalists saw a mysterious gap in their knowledge, and postulated a mysterious stuff that plugged the gap. In doing so, they mixed up the map with the territory. All confusion and bewilderment exist in the mind, not in encapsulated substances.

This is the ultimate and fully general explanation for why, again and again in humanity's history, people are shocked to discover that an incredibly mysterious question has a non-mysterious answer.  Mystery is a property of questions, not answers.

Therefore I call theories such as vitalism mysterious answers to mysterious questions.

These are the signs of mysterious answers to mysterious questions:

• First, the explanation acts as a curiosity-stopper rather than an anticipation-controller.
• Second, the hypothesis has no moving parts - the model is not a specific complex mechanism, but a blankly solid substance or force. The mysterious substance or mysterious force may be said to be here or there, to cause this or that; but the reason why the mysterious force behaves thus is wrapped in a blank unity.
• Third, those who proffer the explanation cherish their ignorance; they speak proudly of how the phenomenon defeats ordinary science or is unlike merely mundane phenomena.
• Fourth, even after the answer is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same quality of wonderful inexplicability that it had at the start.

Comments

[Kevin Reid]

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?

[Roy Haddad]

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).

[James Bach]

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

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

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.

[Stuart Armstrong]

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...

[Michael Rooney]

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

[Nick Bostrom]

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.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

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.

[michael vassar]

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.

[nick]

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.

[martin lb]

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.

[projectshave]

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.

[J Thomas]

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.

[Shane Legg]

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.