15. On Mysteries 🔗

A thread about mysteries.

A mystery is a clear pattern that points dramatically to the existence of an unexplained coherent phenomenon, preventing you from ignoring it, but without immediately elucidating it by also pointing to some obvious possible explanations.

A minimum level of drama is necessary otherwise it’s too easy to ignore. The more personal the mystery, the lower the drama needed for it to be perceived as such. Mystery noise in your car = mystery illness next door = murder in next town = serial killer in neighboring country

In a non-mystery, obvious explanations will seem individually sufficient and collectively necessary: ISCN. Holmes’ law (when you’ve eliminated impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true) is the related belief that there is always a non-mysterious explanation

Alternately, Holmes’ law is the idea that there are no “real” mysteries. All mysteries are apparent. The explanation will seem obvious in hindsight. Or in other words, will elucidate the apparent mystery within your current world view, requiring no expansion OR contraction of it.

So a real, non-Holmesian (like non-Euclidean) mystery is one whose elucidation will require you to expand or contract your world view. If it recurs, or consequences (usually bad, sometimes good) accumulate, it’s a active mystery. Else, a cold mystery.

A mystery is potential ontological debt OR credit that you hope will turn out in hindsight to be mere epistemological debt: an apparent mystery. Ie that you can explain it eventually in terms of things you already know, without introducing new entities or eliminating old ones.

Take a weird recurring god-shaped stain on a wall. Atheists hope it can be explained without requiring formation of a new belief in god. Literalist theists hope god won’t be possible to eliminate as a suspect (taking him a step closer to full unemployment, their greatest fear)

The thing is, the anticipation of ontological expansion OR contraction is anxiety-provoking even if the material effects of the existence of the mystery are good. Why? Because the presence of a mystery says something about the future computational burden of life itself.

Expansion is easier. Adding a new ontological primitive (‘Thing’) to a world view makes all future thinking harder. It is open-ended future computation cost. Contraction is subtler: you now have to go through and refactor your entire world view to see if Thing can be eliminated.

Contraction though is a bounded short term cost with long-term benefit. You only have to audit existing beliefs for the continued necessity of Thing that has lost an important explanatory contest. Its adaptive fitness in your head has been lowered.

Why? Because a world view should be the fewest possible Things all doing comparable amounts of explanatory “work” in your world view. You don’t want epistemological slackers or free loaders in your ontology. Things that elucidate fewer phenomena are computationally costlier.

If most Things help elucidate 1000 non-mysteries, the one Thing that helps elucidate only 3 things is an ontological dog, the opposite of a god, who elucidates way too many things. You don’t want dogs in your ontology. You want to fire them if possible.

Less obviously, you also want to fire gods: Things in your ontology that do way too much work, but don’t do them very well. Like only accounting for things in hindsight, never with foresight. Or worse, just naming them. Both gods and dogs are bad head employees. Deadwood.

A mystery is an opportunity to do some ontological creative destruction in your head. Eliminate a dog that isn’t pulling its weight epistemologically, or a god that’s half-assing too many things.

Whether a Thing in your head is a god or a dog is actually a relative rather than an absolute condition. A god explains more than other Things, a dog explains less. Gods weaken into either average Things, or turn into dogs and are at risk of being fired. Darwin in your head.

“Compression” can be viewed as eliminating both dogs and gods from your ontology so you have the fewest possible, equally hard-working ontological primitives in your head. Euclid’s fifth postulate was fired for doing too little. As were aether and phlogiston and other goddogs.

In general, try to solve mysteries with Holmes’ law. Start with the obvious (abduction), eliminate the impossible (deduction), make less obvious things more obvious (discovery/investigation), repeat till you’re down to 1 explanation. Confirm with further tests (induction)

But there should be no mysterious loose ends. Lestrade and Japp always make the same mistake which Holmes and Poirot don’t: dismiss seemingly trivial loose ends. Holmes and Poirot have a lower threshold for mystification. They won’t accept implausible accounts even for trivia.

They know that Holmes’ law and ISCN only apply in a closed set. Eliminating the impossible in an open set with explanandum “leaks” doesn’t get you certainty. Just makes you inclined to feed confirmation bias by ignoring “coincidences” or implausibly explaining away “trivialities“

Mysteries don’t care about importance. Small mysteries have to be explained as plausibly as big mysteries. Reasonable doubt creeps in as surely through an unimportant implausibility as an important one. Entire world views are only as plausible as their least plausible argument.

But occasionally, this approach will stall and you’ll be faced with a genuine rather than apparent mystery. You’ll need to follow Dirk Gently’s law: don’t eliminate the impossible. Ie entertain the possibility of needing to adding/eliminating primitives.

Removing god from “mystery of wall stain” is trivial. Removing god from “creation of life” is not.

Adding is never trivial. You can’t add just a local ghost to explain a case. You must add ‘ghost’ as a base class to universe (you have inescapable existence proof).

Removing a dog — ontological primitive that has very few explanations it is needed in — is something like extinction. Beyond a point, it is doomed as a breeding, self-perpetuating, employed Thing, and any loss of an explanatory contest “job” might be the last.

Anyhow, that’s it for my elucidation of the mystery of mysteries. Stay mentally healthy and computationally robust by constantly solving both Holmesian apparent, or epistemological, mysteries and Gentlyian ontological ones. Head Darwinism ftw.

See Kathleen Belin’s essay “The Game’s Afoot: Predecessors and Pursuits of a Postmodern Detective Novel” (in Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction) for some of the background that inspired this thread. Amazon.com: Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture): 9780313304620: Delamater, Jerome H., Prigozy, Ruth: Books