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.
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.
We don’t need to imagine. We are in exactly this position with respect to consciousness.