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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?
(a) not when you say "infinitely"
(b) "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"
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...
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. ...
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 compl...
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 ...
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.
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) "Yo...
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 rende...
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...
The difference between electrons and elan vital is that the former come with equations that let you predict things. If you said "electricity is electrons" that would be a curiosity-stopper, but if you said "electricity is electrons, and by the way they obey the Lorentz force equation [F = ...] and Maxwell's laws [del E = ...]" that would be an explanation.
I wouldn't call the luminiferous aether a curiosity-stopper, because it was an actual theory that did make predictions (it was essentially falsified in one experiment).
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...
I'm in a very nitpicky mood today:
'Elan vital' seems to predict that there won't be things that are sort-of alive, like viruses; from what I've read about it it suggests that aliveness is all-or-nothing. It may also predict that things that are dead shouldn't be able to be made to move by electrical stimulation of the nerves.
In contrast, "elan vital" doesn't make any predictions. It doesn't drive curiosity because there's no way to test it and get results that we can then try to understand better.
Honestly, how much direct familiarity do you have with the actual historical vitalist theories, as opposed to third- or fourth-hand strawman accounts peppered with a few convenient soundbites, such as the one presented in the original post here?
One of the worst tendencies often seen on LW is the propensity to thrash these ridiculous strawmen instead of grappling with the real complexity of the history of ideas. Yes, historical scientific theories like vitalism and phlogiston have been falsified, but bashing people who held them centuries ago as dimwits who sought to mysticize the questions instead of elucidating them is sheer arrogant ignorance.
Even the original post itself lists an example where vitalism (i.e. its strong version) made concrete predictions that could be falsified, and which were indeed falsified by Woehler's experiments. Another issue where (weaker) vitalism made falsifiable predictions that lead to hugely important insight was the question of the spontaneous generation of micro...
The problem is that the "parable" is presented as an account of the actual historical vitalist theories. As such, it seriously misrepresents them and attributes to them intellectual errors of which they were not guilty in reality. It's similar with other LW articles that use phlogiston as a whipping horse. If you look at a real historical account of these theories, you'll see that they implied plenty of anticipated experiences, and were abandoned because they made incorrect predictions, not because they were empty of predictive power and empirical content.
As for "deserved pride," if an exposition of your insight requires setting up strawmen to knock down, instead of applying it to real ideas actually held by smart and accomplished people, past or present, then something definitely seems fishy. Not to mention that pride is hardly a suitable emotion to feel just because you happen to live at a time in which you were able to absorb more knowledge than in earlier times -- especially if this means feeling superior to people whose work was the basis and foundation of this contemporary knowledge, and their theories that provided decisive guidance in this work. Yes, you do know more than they did, but while they made decisive original contributions, what have you done besides just passively absorbing the existing knowledge?
But I am superior to them. I have a better understanding of the world.
Also, it is questionable if our supposedly better individual understanding of the world would survive any practical tests outside of our narrow domains of expertise. After all, these days you only need to contribute some little details in a greatly complex system built and maintained by numerous others, of which you understand only a rough and vague outline, if even that. How much actual control over the world does your knowledge enable you to exert, outside of these highly contrived situations provided by the modern society?
One could argue that a good 19th century engineer had a much better understanding of the world judging by this criterion of practical control over it. These people really knew how to bootstrap complex technologies out of practically nothing. Nowadays, except perhaps for a handful of survivalist enthusiasts, we'd be as helpless as newborn babes if the support systems around us broke down. Which makes me wonder if our understanding of the world doesn't involve even more "mysterious answers" for all practical purposes outside of our narrow domains of expertise. Yes, you can produce more technically correct statements about reality than anyone in the 19th century could, but what can you accomplish with that knowledge?
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"?
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 "...
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?
Think of them as 3-year-olds who won't grow up until after the Singularity. Would you kick a 3-year-old who made a mistake?
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 th...
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 spe...
[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
...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 ne
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?
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: