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Manfred comments on Examples of mysteries explained *away* - Less Wrong
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Oxygen != heat, or even fire. Fluorine can set things on fire, for example. And of course the wonderful thing about energy is that it can change forms. So phlogiston theory is thoroughly useless, though I agree it's not a really mysterious answer.
"Emergence" or "quantum effects" to explain how the brain works might fall into this category.
Depends on what is meant by 'emergence'. If you mean to say that 'emergence' itself is "mysterious" then I would disagree. Chemistry is 'emergent' from physics -- molecules possess attributes that their constituent atoms do not -- but no one would describe this as "mysterious". It's simply a question of scale.
Consciousness described as being 'emergent' from our neuroanatomy is hardly a 'mysterious' statement: it's simply a claim of "scale". One would not examine the exact behaviors of every atom in a molecule to predict its characteristics: no matter how much oxygen or hydrogen you have at room temperature the characteristic of "wet" would never be noted. Only dihydrogen oxide at room temperature (and in sufficiently significant quantities) has that characteristic. So too, potentially, is it with consciousness: while yes it is necessary to understand the workings of the constituent parts it is only by observing how they interact as a whole that consciousness can be comprehended -- in much the same way we would not discuss the phenotype of E.coli in terms of their spacetime tensor coordinates.
But I digress.
I've never heard of phlogiston being heat.
True, but the vast majority of fire people normally deal with is oxygen-related. Only knowing about oxygen being an oxidizer would be almost as useful as knowing about all of them, at least when you're thinking about fire. Only knowing about phlogiston would be exactly as useful.
Whoops! I seem to have gotten my phlogiston theory mixed up with my caloric theory, which stated that fire was in fact made of particles of caloric, a near-weightless fluid that flowed between bodies in contact, explaining heat and cold. Sheesh, alchemists loved conjecturing fluids.
I think you could call that a fluid without stretching the definition too much. Still, heat is an excellent example of something being explained away. They thought it was its own substance, like static electricity, but it turned out to be something that can easily be predicted by Newton's laws.
Surely you mean "easily in hindsight"?
I agree that phlogiston was not likely thought of as a mysterious answer at the time. I think that what justifies calling it a mysterious answer today is that we could justifiably notice that we are confused.
Whether it's confusing quality is a good reason to categorize it as a mysterious answer is a different issue, however.