When Neuroscientists Matter-of-Factly Tell "Old Wives' Tale" Explanations

Why do cells reproduce? Why does a cell split into two to become two cells? Our biologists don't even understand this.

On a web page entitled "The Mystery of Cell Division," a scientist confesses that scientists don't understand how cells -- with a complexity of "airplanes" -- could self-reproduce. 

"Scientists have been trying to understand how cells are built since the 1800s. This does not surprise us and, as scientists ourselves, we have always been puzzled at how cells, such complex structures, are able to reproduce over and over again. Even more astonishing is that, despite the frequency of cell division, mistakes are relatively rare and almost always corrected. According to Professor David Morgan from University of California, the complexity that we observe in cells can be compared to that of airplanes."

If you do a Google search for “why do cells divide,” you will get various answers referring to "grand purpose" type of causes -- what are called "final causes" in the terminology of Aristotle's philosophy. A web site may state that cells divide to replace old, dead or damaged cells, or that cells divide so that an organism can grow, or that cells divide so that an organism can reproduce. But these are all “grand purpose” reasons, and none of them is a low-level reason. What we do not understand is: what cell-level reason is it that very complex cells divide into two identical complex cells? Considering only the cell itself, and not some higher purpose, what would cause a very complex cell to reproduce by splitting into two?

Scientists do not understand such a thing. They have identified particular stages in the most common type of cell reproduction (called mitosis): stages such as prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase. But without referring to higher-level “grand purpose” reasons, scientists do not understand why (on the individual cell level) a cell would pass through such phases and reproduce. A university press release confesses that "there are many remaining mysteries about how cells perform this remarkable feat." The answer is not at all "the cells follow the instructions in DNA." DNA and its genes do not contain any instructions for making cells or any specification or blueprint of a cell (contrary to the misstatements so often made about DNA and genes). 

M. Pitkanen (who has a PhD in theoretical physics) has written the following about cell division:

"Replication is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. It is really something totally counterintuitive if cell is seen as a sack of water plus some chemicals. We have a lot [of] facts about what happens in the replication at DNA level but how this miracle happens is a mystery. At cell level the situation gets even more complex."

A university press release discusses scientific ignorance about the basic question of cell division. It states the following:

"When a rapidly-growing cell divides into two smaller cells, what triggers the split? Is it the size the growing cell eventually reaches? Or is the real trigger the time period over which the cell keeps growing ever larger?...'How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology,' said Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology at UC San Diego...'Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question.' ”

The press release claims that some study has "shed light" on this mystery, but the study mentioned doesn't sound very impressive, merely being something that mathematically analyzed cell growth, and claimed to have found a "principle of cell-size control," without discussing a cause for such a thing. 

It would be easy to understand cell reproduction if cells were very simple. Imagine if a cells were just uncomplicated little blobs kind of like little bubbles. Then a cell might be able to reproduce easily enough by a simple collision. When one cell collided with another, it might cause a large cell to break up two smaller cells. But what goes on in cell reproduction is gigantically more complicated than that.

Cells are so complicated that they are sometimes compared to cities, and the organelles in cells (such as the mitochondria, ribosomes and Golgi apparatus) are sometimes compared to buildings in a city. You will vastly underestimate the complexity of a eukaryotic cell (the type of cells in the human body) if you look at one of those cell diagrams that shows only a few organelles in the cell. In some cells there are millions of ribosomes, and thousands of mitochondria, as well as many other types of organelles. So when a cell reproduces, it's like some complicated machine made an exact copy of itself. Using Morgan's statement that cells are as complex as airplanes, this is as much a wonder as if some airplane were able to make an exact copy of itself.

The discussion above clarifies a point of the greatest importance: scientists do not understand the origin of cells. Specifically:

•  Scientists do not understand the origin of the simplest types of cells, called prokaryotic cells. The question of the origin of the first prokaryotic is pretty much equivalent to the question of the origin of life. Scientists have made no real progress in understanding the origin of life.  Even the simplest prokaryotic cell is an enormously complex thing, with roughly the same amount of functional information as a 100-page technical manual. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell scientists study is a cell requiring hundreds of different types of proteins, each a separate complex invention requiring hundreds of well-arranged parts.  The total number of well-arranged parts needed for even the simplest life is greater than 10,000. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever produced life from non-life. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever produced  the building components of one-celled life (protein molecules).  If fact, no experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever even produced  the building components (amino acids) of the building components of one-celled life (protein molecules). The much discussed Miller-Urey experiment did produce amino acids, but that experiment was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. 
• Scientists do not understand the origin of eukaryotic cells, the more complex type of cells used by humans and other mammals. The problem of explaining the origin of eukaryotic cells is gigantically greater than the problem of explaining the origin of prokaryotic cells, because  eukaryotic cells are many thousands or millions of time more complex than prokaryotic cells. 
• Scientists do not understand how extremely complex eukaryotic cells are able to reproduce.  The answer is not that cells read instructions in DNA specifying how to build  eukaryotic cells. There is no such set of instructions in DNA or its genes. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein molecule. Eukaryotic cells are built of building components called organelles. DNA and its genes do not even specify how to construct organelles.  In fact, DNA and its genes do not even specify a layer of structure between protein molecules and organelles: the layer of protein complexes (specialized teams of proteins). 

In the book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:

"What happened on Earth – known as eukaryogenesis – was not the product of random mutation and the subsequent sifting of acquired characters that have differential fitness (the essence of natural selection). Instead there appears to have been a single event of mind-boggling improbability, for it involved two life forms interacting in a most novel way....Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small microbes with no cell nucleus and no mitochondria. Everything changed when one unicellular life form, known as an archaebacterium, ended up inside another, called a eubacterium."

On another page Cobb says this:

"We could in principle calculate the probability of the appearance of eukaryotes, but we would soon run out of zeros...That weird hybrid was our ancestor, and its existence – and therefore ours – was incredibly improbable. As far as we are aware, no such event happened before or since."

Obviously we have here a fairy tale, an "old wives' tale." Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how eukaryotic cells originated, just as they have no credible tale to tell of how prokaryotic cells originated. Whenever they refer to eukaryotic cells arising by fantastically improbable combination accidents, biologists are merely engaging in the most farfetched hand-waving. Because neither prokaryotic cells nor eukaryotic cells specify in their DNA how to make either a eukaryotic cell nor any of its organelle components, there is no conceivable lucky combination accident of prokaryotic cells that would result in eukaryotic cells with the ability to reproduce to make other eukaryotic cells. 

In light of all of these ocean-sized explanatory shortfalls, what are we to make of a recent statement at the beginning of an essay by neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow?  Simply that it is a gigantically unbelievable "old wives' tale," a tall tale that should not at all be classified as science.  Here is how Critchlow begins her essay (which you can read here):

"About 2 billion years ago, evolution performed an improbable experiment. A larger ancestral cell engulfed a smaller bacterium. It should have been a meal. Instead, it became a merger. The bacterium survived inside its host, and together they forged one of the most consequential partnerships in the history of life. The host offered shelter and access to oxygen. The bacterium supplied something revolutionary: a vastly more efficient way to generate energy.  From this intimate alliance emerged the eukaryotic cell – and with it, the possibility of complex life. Every plant, animal and thinking being traces its lineage back to that ancient symbiosis."

This is the preposterous tall tale called endosymbiosis or eukaryogenesis.  It's a ridiculous story along the lines of  "we got eukaryotic cells after a prokaryotic cell gulped its way to becoming 1000 times more complex."  No sensible theorist should ever tell this tale, which has zero credibility.  The tale is not an example of science with a capital "S," because no one has ever observed any such event occurring. Science with a capital "S" is facts established by observations, not math-oblivious wild tales describing events unlike any that have ever been observed. 

The truth is that scientists do not have any credible explanation for the origin of either of the two major classes of cells.  Scientists do  not have any credible explanation for the origin of prokaryotic cells, and scientists  do not have any credible explanation for the origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.  Neither one of these origins has any Darwinian explanation.  You may start to realize how bogus are all "Darwin explained it all" claims when you realize that scientists these days are not providing a Darwinian explanation for either the origin of prokaryotic cells or the origin of eukaryotic cells. The "giant complexity leap by engulfing" tall tale Critchlow gives is not any type of Darwinian explanation, and is actually an explanation attempt hugely contradicting Darwin's favorite principle that "nature does not make leaps." 

Critchlow makes the untrue claim that an origin of eukaryotic cells created "the possibility of complex life,"  ignoring the fact that even the simplest type of cell (prokaryotic cells) is itself a very complex thing requiring half a million very well-arranged base pairs and hundreds of types of proteins, most being a separate type of complex invention requiring hundreds of well-arranged parts. Her little "gulping"  tale does not even try to explain more than one of the many differences between prokaryotic cells and eukaryotic cells. It's kind of like someone saying that a real working car arose from a palm-sized toy car, because the toy car got bigger. 

As many scientists have confessed, DNA and its genes contain no specifications for building the structure of bodies, and no specifications for building the structure of eukaryotic cells. So there is no conceivable event by which some combination accident or gulping accident involving prokaryotic cells could explain the origin of eukaryotic cells.  One prokaryotic cell might make itself more complex by gulping something, but that would not do anything to cause future cells to have the same increased complexity. 

After reading the neuroscientist Critchlow tell the enormously unbelievable fairy tale quoted above, you might start to get a suspicion along these lines: maybe neuroscientists may tend to tell tall tale yarns having no credibility, while reciting such groundless "just so" stories as if they were facts. And such a suspicion would actually be correct, because of  many other examples of absurd unwarranted narratives that neuroscientists like to tell. One of the most ridiculous is the claim that some mere strengthening of synapses can explain the wonder of human memory storage.  It is a tale as absurd as the "huge leap in organization by a gulping accident" tale Critchlow tells to try to explain the origin of eukaryotic cells.  Complex information never gets stored by some mere act of strengthening. Equally absurd is the tale that your ability to instantly recall complex relevant answers occurs from some process in neural tissue lacking any addresses, indexes or sorting, the type of things that make a fast retrieval of information possible in physical systems. 

What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of the origin of prokaryotic cells?  They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how the first prokaryotic cells arose." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of the origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells?  They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how the first eukaryotic cells arose." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of how human cells reproduce? They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how cells as complex as humans have are able to reproduce." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of how humans learn things? They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how a human being can learn anything using a brain in which learned information has never been found by microscopic examination." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of how humans recall things? They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how a human being can recall anything using a brain lacking any addresses, indexes and sorting, in which learned information has never been found by microscopic examination."

Yesterday I discovered a 2021 paper by two scientists who attempt to persuade us that some progress was made by neuroscientists in learning about a physical basis for memory. In the last few paragraphs, their pretensions fall apart, as the scientists make this confession, which makes it sound as if scientists have no real understanding of any physical basis for memory:

"Despite the tremendous efforts in the field to clarify the molecular  basis of memory processes, some very important questions remain unanswered... How does one singular memory get recalled when it is behaviorally relevant? How are the molecular mechanisms in memory systems not only flexible to allow immediate and quick learning but also persistent to store information during long-lasting periods?...Where is the information stored for long-term? Is there such thing as a memory code?...Despite half a century of research, we are still only scratching the surface of the molecular basis for memory function."

Schematic depiction of some types of experts

Mistakes in the Neuroscience Chapter of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence

 At the link here, we have a link to something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, a document designed to guide judges in the United States who are evaluating claims of scientific evidence.  The page gives this description of that manual:

"A joint product of the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition supports judges in managing cases involving complex scientific and technical evidence by describing the basic tenets of key scientific fields and by providing examples of cases in which that evidence has been used. It is intended to assist judges in identifying issues commonly in dispute and to help judges reach an informed and reasoned assessment of those issues based on expert evidence that is faithful to the law and within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge."

Alarm bells should go off when we read that phrase "the basic tenets of key scientific fields." Tenets refers to beliefs, not facts. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a tenet as "a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true especially : one held in common by members of an organization, movement, profession, etc."

In Volume II of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition (which you can read using the link here) we have on page 1185 a chapter on neuroscience, one entitled "Reference Guide on Neuroscience."  We get this description of the two authors: 

Henry T. Greely, J.D., is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law; Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics; and the Director of Center for Law and the Biosciences, at Stanford University. Nita A. Farahany, J.D., Ph.D., is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and Philosophy and Founding Director for the Initiative for Science and Society at Duke University

We have a chapter that is being used to guide the decisions of United States judges when evaluating attempts to introduce neuroscience as evidence; but neither of the authors of the chapter is a neuroscientist (judging from the statements above and online statements of their educational backgrounds, and defining a neuroscientist as someone with a PhD or Master's Degree in neuroscience). The authors make some serious errors in their chapter, and I guess we should not be surprised given their lack of deep expertise in neuroscience. One of the authors (Henry T. Greely) is the author of a book with the very strange title "The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction." 

Greely and Farahany start out with groundless bombast by claiming "science’s understanding of the human brain is increasing exponentially" and that "we know almost infinitely more than we did thirty years ago."  To the contrary, there has been little real important progress in neuroscience in the past 30 years. Thirty years ago we knew the basic facts about the brain that we now know. There has been no real progress in proving the main claims that neuroscientists like to make about brains, such as the claim that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories.  Although there has been lots of use of fancy new technologies, this has not led to any great discovery during the past 30 years. Neuroscientists are still basically where they were 30 years ago, without any real understanding of how a brain could produce thought, self-hood, imagination, learning, recall or the lifelong preservation of memories. The microscopic examination of brain tissue has still failed to discover any trace in brain tissue of anything a human has learned. 

In the next paragraph Greely and Farahany say something that contradicts their previous boasts. They confess, "We still remain very far from a deep and broad understanding of how human brains work." But then they make this untrue statement: "If, as neuroscience indicates, our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain, our increased ability to discern those physical states will have huge implications for the law." Neuroscience does not actually indicate that "our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain," although such a belief is widely held in the belief community of neuroscientists. The facts of neuroscience, psychology and medical science again and again contradict the claim that "our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain." Among those facts are the following:

• It is a fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of their brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains.
• Human brains (all very severely handicapped by a lack of any addresses and indexes, cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages.
•  There is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous relevant recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, when someone is asked a trivia question,  given the lack of any coordinate system or addressing or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found.
• There is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states. 
• It is a fact that old humans can reliably remember experiences they had more than 50 years ago, an ability that should be impossible given the very rapid molecular turnover and structural turnover in synapses (which neuroscientists typically claim to be the storage place of memory), and given that the proteins that make up such synapses have short average lifetimes of only a few weeks, 1000 times shorter than the length of time humans can remember things. The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days).
• It is a fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind.
• Quite a few humans (such as HSAM subjects with normal brains who can remember every day of their adult lives, people who do very complex calculations "in their heads" with blazing speed, people who memorize very complex information with blazing speed, and people who memorize the entire text of long books) have demonstrated exceptional memory performance and exceptional cognitive performance that is impossible to explain under any theory of the brain (something having no component bearing any resemblance to a memory storage device). 
• It is a fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when their brains had flatlined, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here).

After some preliminary rhetoric, Greely and Farahany start getting into details. They give us a long discussion of the features and anatomy of the brain, one that is pretty factual and unobjectionable. But on page 1199 they start repeating "old wives' tales" of neuroscience literature. They state that the amygdala "modulates learning and memory." The claim is not well-established, and "modulates" is a rather vague word. More specifically, the authors dogmatically claim that "memories appear to be stored over much of the cortex." There is no scientific basis for this claim, and the use of the phrase "appear to be" indicates that the authors lack a firm scientific basis. Very much tissue from all parts of the brain has been microscopically examined, including tissue from recently deceased people, and tissue extracted from living people as part of surgical operations. Such microscopic examination has never revealed the slightest trace of anything a human has learned or experienced. 

A recent scientific paper basically confesses that scientists lack any understanding of how a brain could store memories. It states this (referring to vacuous hand-waving ideas that are untenable because of reasons such as the high structural instability of synapses and dendritic spines):

"Finally, one of the major unresolved questions in the study of brain learning is the nature of its underlying mechanism. Specifically, it is not yet known whether learning primarily results from modifications of synaptic weights[42], [43], [44] and dendritic learning[45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50] or from changes in network topology."

See the section entitled "Human Memory (Often Claimed to be Stored in Synapses)" in my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post here for more than 40 statements by more than 100 scientists, all confessing that scientists do not have any good understanding of how a brain could store memories. Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device or component for storing learned information. 

Some surgical operations serve as a test for the claim that memories are stored in the brain. For example, to treat very bad seizures, doctors sometimes remove half of the brain in a radical operation called a hemispherectomy operation.  We have quite a few cases of people who had such operations without reporting a loss of memories, and without seeming to suffer a loss of memories.  Such cases directly contradict Greely and Farahany's claim that "memories appear to be stored over much of the cortex," and also contradict all claims that memories are stored in the brain. You can read about such cases in my post "Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain" here. 

Below are some results reported in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pages 500-503, regarding work of W. E. Dandy, in which he removed half of the brains of patients. You can read the results in the preview here (without doing any registration). We read the following (I have put a few of the sentences in boldface):

“Dandy has completely removed the right cerebral hemisphere from eight patients. He has performed total extirpations of one or more lobes much oftener... There are tabulated below certain generalizations on the effects of removing the right hemisphere.... The operation was the complete extirpation of the right frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes peripheral to the corpus striatum. The weight of the tissue removed varies, with the pathological conditions involved, from 250 to 584 grm [grams].Coherent conversation began within twenty-four hours after operation, and in one case on the afternoon of the same day. Later examinations showed no observable mental changes. The patients were perfectly oriented in respect of time, place, and person; their memory was unimpaired for immediate and remote events; conversation was always coherent; ability to read, write, compute, and learn new material was unaltered. Current events were followed with normal interest. There were no personality changes apparent; the patients were emotionally stable, without fears, delusions, hallucinations, expansive ideas or obsessions, and with a good sense of humor; they joked frequently. They showed a natural interest in their condition and future. They cooperated intelligently at all times throughout post-operative care and subsequent testing of function.”

It would be rather hard to imagine a more decisive refutation of the claim that the human brain is the source of the human mind, and the claim that the human brain is the storage place of human memories. 

In the scientific paper here, we have on page 248 and page 250 before and after test scores for various subjects who had of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.  The IQ score differences are slight. IQ tests don't involve learned information, but almost any IQ test would be largely a test of memory, as it would be a largely a test of ability to read test questions.  On the same pages we have before and after test scores for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests given to various subjects who had  half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.   In these tests, someone is shown picture cards like the one below, and asked to name the words represented by the pictures.  These tests are tests of memory retention after removal of half of the brain.  On these memory tests there was no decline in the score of 21 subjects mentioned on page 248, and no decline in 7 subjects mentioned on page 250. 

An article in the LA Times tells us about memory preservation in a young girl who lost half her brain:

“How is it that 8-year-old Beth Usher of Storrs, Conn., can lose her left hemisphere, yet retain her large repertoire of knock-knock jokes? Beth’s memories survived not just the loss of brain tissue, but also the 32 days that she spent in a coma, the result of some brain stem swelling that occurred in response to the trauma of surgery. Shortly after Beth regained consciousness, her father began quizzing her about people and places from her past. Brian Usher didn’t get very far. 'Dad,' Beth interrupted, with a trace of impatience. 'I remember everything.' ”

In a scientific paper ("Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996") we read about how surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. Eleven of these children had the left hemisphere of their brains removed; most of the rest had the right hemisphere of their brains removed.  The paper states this:

"Despite removal of one hemisphere  [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved....Although there have been major concerns about loss of language after left hemispherectomy, all eleven of these children have regained virtually normal language....It is tempting to speculate, that the continuous electrical activity of these severely dysfunctional hemispheres interferes with the function of the other, more normal hemisphere. This might explain why motor function improves after hemispherectomy and why language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere, but does not seem to fully transfer before surgery. Perhaps it also partially explains intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex. We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor."

The observational results quoted above collectively defy Greely and Farahany's claim that "memories appear to be stored over much of the cortex," and they also dramatically discredit Greely and Farahany's attempt to persuade us that  "our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain."

On the same page 1199 Greely and Farahany incorrectly state that "the hippocampus is necessary for the creation of many kinds of memory." This claim is debunked in my widely read post "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths," which you can read here. On page 1216 the authors try to back up that claim about the hippocampus, offering this widely repeated but untrue claim:

"Our understanding of the role of the hippocampus in creating memories, as one example, was greatly aided by study of a patient known as H.M. When he was twenty-seven years old, H.M. was treated for intractable epilepsy, undergoing an experimental procedure that surgically removed his left and right medial temporal

lobes, including most of his two hippocampi. The surgery was successful, but from that time until his death in 2008, H.M. could not form new long-term memories, either of events or of facts."

The claim is untrue, and at the beginning of my post "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths," which you can read here, I cite quite a few examples of this person (H.M.) learning new things after his operation. For example, a  14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories after his operation. The study says this on page 217:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

In the same post ("Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths," which you can read here) I cite a great deal of evidence refuting the claim of Greely and Farahany that " the hippocampus is necessary for the creation of many kinds of memory." For example, A 2020 paper is entitled "Preserved visual memory and relational cognition performance in monkeys with selective hippocampal lesions." The paper states this:

"We tested rhesus monkeys on a battery of cognitive tasks including transitive inference, temporal order memory, shape recall, source memory, and image recognition. Contrary to predictions, we observed no robust impairments in memory or relational cognition either within- or between-groups following hippocampal damage."

Citing a previous study, the paper notes that "formation of new memories in the object-in-scene task, one of the most accepted tests of episodic memory used with nonhuman primates, was found to be unaffected by lesions of the hippocampus itself."  It also notes that "There is a concerning lack of clear causal evidence for a critical role of the hippocampus in visual memory, episodic memory, recollection, or relational cognition in nonhuman primates."

After some pages discussing various neuroscience techniques and technologies, Greely and Farahany finally make a claim of relevance to neuroscience and the law. They state on page 1221, "More than fifteen dif­ferent laboratories have collectively published twenty to thirty peer-reviewed articles finding some statistically significant relationship between fMRI-measured brain activity and deception." This means very little, because the use of way-too-small study group sizes is an epidemic in today's neuroscience. 

On page 1231 the authors confess this:

"There are now about twenty to thirty peer reviewed publications that, using fMRI, find statistically significant differences in patterns of brain activation depending on whether the participants were telling the truth or (typically) telling a lie when instructed to do so. Many of those publications find patterns that are dif­ferent from, and often inconsistent with, the patterns described in the other publications. Multiple inconsistent publications do not add weight to a scientific method or theory; indeed, they may subtract from it."

The authors make a good point on page 1233 (regarding introducing neuroscience evidence into a court case):

"The time necessary to introduce such evidence, and to educate the jury (and judge) about it, will usually be extensive. The possibilities for confusion are likely to be great. And there is at least some evidence that jurors (or, to be precise, 'mock jurors') are particularly likely to overestimate the power of neuroscience evidence.37 A high-tech 'picture' of a living brain, complete with brain regions shown in bright orange and deep purple (colors not seen in an actual brain), may have an unjustified appeal to a jury. In each case, judges will need to weigh possibilities of confusion or prejudice, along with the near certainty of lengthy testimony, against the claimed probative value of the evidence."

On page 1246 Greely and Farahany talk about "retail" use of neuroscience in court cases, and make a bullet list of what they call "the most plausible categories for such retail uses." They include on their bullet list these items:

• "predicting future behavior for sentencing"
• "credibility or deception in current statements"
• "the existence or nonexistence of a memory of some event and, possibly, some information about the status of that memory (true, false; new, old, etc.)"
• "the presence of bias against a party"

The authors mislead us by claiming that such things are "plausible categories" for the use of neuroscience in court cases. Neuroscience can do nothing to predict future crimes; neuroscience can do nothing to tell us about credibility of deception in current statements; neuroscience can do nothing to determine "the existence or nonexistence of a memory of some event"; and neuroscience can do nothing to detect "the presence of bias against a party." If any reliable scientific testimony were offered along such lines, it would fall under the category of psychology rather than neuroscience. 

Talking about efforts to use brain scans to detect lies (an area that is a morass of junk science), the authors start out well, but then goof at the end, saying this:

"Currently, as far as we know, evidence from fMRI-based lie detection has not been admitted into evidence in any court, but it was offered—and rejected—in at least three cases, United States v. Semrau, 99 Wilson v. Corestaff Services L.P., 100 and a widely publicized murder trial, Maryland v. Smith, 101 in the early 2010s. Since then, efforts to introduce evidence from this technology have largely disappeared—we find no reported cases about such attempted uses since 2012— but the story of its rise and fall provides a good example of a path for new neuroscience evidence. And the underlying science still exists and could well end up in court again."

The underlying science still exists? No, it does not. Greely and Farahany actually make it rather clear in the following pages that there is no solid scientific basis for thinking that fMRI machines can detect lying. 

All in all, Greely and Farahany's chapter is not one I can condemn as something that should be trashed and completely replaced by the writing of some other writer or writers.  Their chapter is mostly fairly good work, and it deals fairly well with the limitations and weaknesses of today's neuroscience (although not discussing that half as well as it should do to properly advise judges dealing with attempts to introduce neuroscientist work as evidence).  But their chapter has some serious errors, and some utterly unnecessary affirmations of groundless neuroscientist dogmas. The chapter could be fixed with a few days' work. I would suggest taking out the false and dubious statements, and adding ten additional paragraphs warning judges of the low standards, bungling methods and very frequent errors in today's cognitive neuroscience, along with the frequent spreading in that field of groundless triumphal boasts. Then add ten other long paragraphs discussing all of the reasons for doubting the dogmas of today's neuroscientists, which are additional reasons why judges should be extremely careful about allowing the introduction of neuroscience  evidence in court cases. 

The job of properly advising people about the weighty question of whether the brain produces the mind and whether memories are stored in the brain is one requiring years of the deepest study of very many topics including neuroscience, psychology, parapsychology and relevant medical case histories and case histories of exceptional human mental performances. When people whose background is mainly in the law and legal matters offer their opinion on that question, we need not necessarily assume that they have adequately studied the relevant evidence, unless we have evidence of such scholarship.

He Ties Himself Into Knots Trying to Explain Away Out-of-Body Experiences

Materialism (the idea that all that exists is matter) and the pretty-much-the-same idea of physicalism (the idea that all that exists is physical) both fail to credibly explain minds. There is nothing in the brain that explains the main type of human mental capabilities.  For example, there is nothing in the brain that credibly explains human memory powers such as instant recall, instant learning and the lifelong retention of childhood memories. 

A credible alternative to materialism and physicalism is the idea of dualism. According to this idea, you have both a physical body and an immaterial soul. But dualism is not the only option for someone rejecting materialism and physicalism. There is also the idea of idealism. 

Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds and the experiences of such minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. 

Being a person who denies the reality of matter, an idealist needs to have a credible answer  to the question of why people report identical experiences of observing physical things that don't really exist independently of minds, according to the idealist.  For example, why do you and me and all of our relatives always have the same experience seeing a bright yellow thing in the sky during the day, and a bright white thing in the sky during the night? For a materialist or a dualist the answer is easy: because the sun really physically exists, and the moon really physically exists. But for the idealist who does not believe in the physical existence of the sun or the moon, this uniformity of observations is a problem that must be addressed. 

Berkeley got around this problem by imagining a divine reality (God) that causes such uniformity of perceptual experiences. So, according to Berkeley, when we look up at the sky and see the sun fairly often, it is not because there exists a physical sun independent of minds; it is instead because a divine mind is causing such perceptual regularities in our minds.  We know that movie directors can cause people to have certain uniform perceptual experiences. So, for example, all of the people who saw Saving Private Ryan in the movie theater had the same perceptual experience.  So it's not too implausible that a divine power could cause humans to have certain types of uniform perceptual experiences. 

The number of perceptual regularities that humans have are endless. Perceptual regularities are not just simple things such as the observation of a blue sky on a cloudless day or the observation of a round shape when we see the sun.  Perceptual regularities include the most detailed information that is observed with stunning consistency and regularity by humans. For example, every single time a human's chest is opened up for surgery, the same organs are seen in the same places. And every time a person's blood is analyzed, a chemist will see the same distribution of elements and chemicals.  A deeper analysis such as a DNA analysis would show that the sample always has the same type of genes, and that each type of gene has a particular arrangement of amino acids found only in that type of gene. Any theory that fails to credibly explain such perceptual regularities is worthless. 

It seems that just such a worthless theory was advanced in the 2017 paper "An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," a paper with too boastful a title. The author of the paper (Bernardo Kastrup) advances an offbeat theory of mind which he summarizes like this in the paper's conclusion:

"I have argued for a coherent idealist ontology that explains reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This idealist ontology also offers more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its thoughts. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms that we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. As such, the quest for artificial consciousness boils down to the quest for abiogenesis. The currently prevailing concept of a physical world independent of consciousness is an unnecessary and problematic intellectual abstraction." 

This may sound somewhat impressive until we remember the very great folly of trying to reduce human minds and human mental experience to some bloodless abstraction called "consciousness." What we have to explain is not some mere abstraction called "consciousness" but the extremely complex and diverse reality of human minds, things such as imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings. You are not merely "some consciousness" but something gigantically more than that. 

It seem that what Kastrup was attempting to advance was an idealism along the lines of Berkeley (one denying that matter exists except as a part of mental perceptions), with the very big difference that there was no reference to any deity. Thinkers such as Kastrup have no good answer to the question of why humans would have uniform perceptual experiences of matter if matter does not exist. If you and I are merely fragments of some primitive "universal consciousness," as imagined by Kastrup, and if the moon if the sun and the moon did not materially exist. There would seem to be no reason why you and I have should have identical experiences of perceiving the sun and the moon.   And there is no reason why why you and I should have 1000 other types of identical perceptual experiences such as always having rocks feel hard and never perceiving a rock to be soft. 

The problem is that Kastrup has hitched his wagon to the bloodless, abstract, shrink-speaking term "consciousness,"  and imagined some "universal consciousness" which he describes (in his paper's abstract) as a mere "ontological primitive." Having done that, he is left with a "primitive" bloodless abstract "universal consciousness" that seems to lack any will or intention, and would therefore be incapable of intentional effects such as making sure that you and I have uniform experiences of observing the sky.  So it seems the idealism of Kastrup lacks the credibility of the idealism of Berkeley.  Reading Berkeley you tend to think "that might well be true." No one should think such a thing when reading the "analytic idealism"  theory of Kastrup.  He lacks any credible explanation of why human perceptual experiences would have so many consistencies. 

Kastrup has kept trying to sell his misguided ideology, which should actually be called "atheistic idealism" rather than the term Kastrup uses, "analytic idealism." Although Kastrup often seems to argue against materialism, I find much in common with materialism and Kastrup's position. Both are positions that can rely on shadow-speaking about human beings, in which human beings are depicted as mere shadows of what they are. Materialism claims everything can be explained by the "primitive" of mass-energy. Kastrup claims everything can be explained by some "universal consciousness" that he calls a "primitive," something he also calls "mind at large." The many stunning faculties of the human mind cannot credibly be explained  by appealing to something primitive, but can only be credibly explained by some purposeful agency vastly greater than the human mind.  It seems that in Kastrup's ideology humans are mere accidents of chance, just as they are in materialist ideology. 

It is amusing to read a post by Kastrup in which he seems to tie himself into knots trying to explain away out-of-body experiences. Out-of-body experiences are events that seem as incompatible with Kastrup's thinking as they are incompatible with the claims of materialism.  What goes on in out-of-body experiences is just what you would expect to hear reported if the world is made of matter, and you are a soul trapped in a body, a soul that can have the ability to leave such a body. In out-of-body experiences a person typically reports viewing his body from outside of his body, from a position about two meters away or a position near the ceiling of the room he is in. Out-of-body experiences seem to defy materialism, and to support the doctrine of dualism, that souls exist in addition to matter.  Out-of-body experiences do not seem to fit naturally with any doctrine of idealism. 

In the post here (entitled "The Phantom World Hypothesis of NDEs/OBEs") Kastrup tries to explain away such observations. He speculates that there may be what he calls a Phantom World somehow involved in such experiences. But he does not mean some world where spirits live. Kastrup's imagined Phantom World is some weird world of perceptual illusions. 

Kastrup says, "what follows is still very highly speculative and should be taken with a whole bag of salt." He confesses that he is not a scholar of near-death experiences and not a scholar of out-of-body experiences. It sounds like he is also not a scholar of paranormal phenomena, because he sounds very surprised that people should report experiences of being out of their bodies. No one who properly studied the huge amount of evidence for clairvoyance published in the nineteenth and twentieth century should be surprised at all by such reports. During the very widely reported phenomena of "traveling clairvoyance" people would often report viewing things far away from their current bodily location. 

Kastrup starts to argue against the reality of reports of out-of-body experiences, giving a very weak argument about evolution not being redundant. He argues that evolution would not have given us both the ability to see with our eyes and some other clairvoyant ability to see (when the heart is stopped) without our eyes.  Here Kastrup sounds just exactly like a Darwinist materialist, which tends to back up my suspicion that there is much in common between his thinking and that of a materialist. If the human race is not a mere accident of nature, but the result of transcendent causation, and humans have souls rather than minds-being-caused-by-brains, then we are not any mere products of evolution, and have no business making arguments such as "evolution would not have given us more than one way of seeing." 

Kastrup gives us this mumbo-jumbo "clear as mud" explanation of  the Phantom World he imagines:

" The result may be an inaccurate but rather complete cognitive map, a Phantom World. I call the resulting map a Phantom World because mind-at-large isn't actually perceiving the world; it isn't actually representing its own states on a screen of its own perception. Instead, it is merely inheriting the perceptual states of myriad former alters and spontaneously assembling them together through cognitive similarity and correspondence. The resulting pseudo-perceptual world is thus an approximation containing inaccuracies and imprecisions (the interpolations). Nonetheless, it should still feel as though it were a (colloquially physical) world perceived, since it is made of qualities of perception like the colours and sounds you and I see and hear. During a RED or OBE, I contend that the dissociative boundary that defines the individual mind of a person becomes weakened, porous, permeable, allowing for partial but direct access to external states in mind-at-large, without the intermediation of a screen of perception. And since these external states contain the Phantom World, the experiencer gains temporary access to that pseudo-perceived world.rld constituted of perceptual qualities originally generated by living people and other organisms. I suggest, therefore, that the experiencer is not actually perceiving the real world, but the Phantom World instead. For this, the experiencer indeed does not require working eyes or ears, for he or she is accessing the compound result of myriad episodic memories—the assembled jigsaw puzzle—of people who did have working eyes and ears. "

Don't ask me to untangle this gobbledygook of speculation. After several paragraphs more of equally tangled gobbledygook, Kastrup states that according to his Phantom World hypothesis, those having out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences "aren't truly perceiving the colloquially physical world around them."  This claim has already been falsified. Below are some cases already reported in the literature of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, cases in which people did perceive the world around them during out-of-body experiences, with their perceptions later verified as being accurate. (They are from a book discussed here.) 

Case 2.1: A dying cancer patient remarked to Ricardo Ojeda-Vera (a doctor's assistant) that he had written a beautiful letter to his mother. Ojeda-Vera had written such a letter. The patient “described in detail exactly what he had written,” and accurately recounted that he had worn a green bathrobe while writing the letter. The patient claimed to have seen Ojeda-Vera writing the letter while she had “looked down on him from the ceiling.” Three days later the patient died.

Case 2.2: A patient reported having an out-of-body experience (OBE) during a cardiac arrest, and reported seeing a penny on the top of a cabinet. The cabinet was checked, and a penny was found there.

Case 2.3: In this well-known case, a woman named Maria reported floating out of her body during a cardiac arrest, and that during such an experience she saw a dark blue tennis shoe on a ledge near a window on the third floor. A search found such a shoe in such a location.

Case 2.5: At a hospital a woman who had a cardiac arrest reported having an out-of-body experience during which she floated out of her body, and saw a 12-digit serial number on the top of a six-foot tall respirator. The respirator was later checked and found to have exactly that number on its top.

Case 2.6: A man reported having an out-of-body experience during which he observed a 1985 quarter atop an 8-foot-high cardiac monitor. The top of the monitor was checked, and a 1985 quarter was found on its top.

Case 2.8: A man reported having an out-of-body experience during which he observed medical workers putting defibrillation paddles on him and gel. This matched his actual medical experience during his cardiac resuscitation.

Case 2.11: a woman reported floating out of her body during a cardiac arrest, and that during such an experience she rose up through the hospital's floors, rising up above the roof, where she saw the skyline and a red shoe. A search of the hospital's roof found a red shoe on the roof.

Case 2.12: A man reported that during his cardiac operation he floated out of his body and returned to his home, where he saw a caretaker having sex there with his girlfriend. The caretaker admitted this had happened.

Case 2.13: A woman reported that during her operation she floated out of her body and saw doctors telling her family (incorrectly) that she had died. It was later confirmed that the family had been told that.

Case 2.14: A woman reported having a near-death experience in which she looked down at her body from a corner of a hospital room during her operation. She then reported seeing in a paranormal way two of her grandmothers saying in a cafeteria that they were going to have a cigarette, even though neither smoked. It was confirmed that this improbable thing had happened.

Case 2.15: A patient in the intensive care unit of the hospital had a near-death experience in which he was reportedly able to hear the conversations of relatives elsewhere in the hospital, such as a waiting room conversation about a green toy tractor knocking down a wall of toy bricks. The conversations had occurred far away from his location in the hospital.

Case 3.1: A woman put under general anesthesia during her operation reported details of her operations from an “on the ceiling” perspective, and also correctly reported details of an operation in the adjacent operating room, such as the amputation of a leg and its placement in a yellow bag. She made the report as soon as she woke up, and had no way of knowing such information.

Case 3.7: A man missing his dentures correctly reported a nurse putting them in the drawer of a cart during his cardiac resuscitation, when he should have been completely unconscious.

Case 3.8 A man reported a near-death experience during cardiac arrest. He reported that during the medical efforts to revive him, he saw that a nurse dropped a tray and was scolded about it by a doctor. The account was confirmed.

Case 3.9 A woman had a near-death experience during cardiac arrest. She reported hovering in a corner of the room near the ceiling, and noticed a rose-shaped hair clip and a bottle breaking, details she should have been unaware of. The details were accurate.

Case 3.10 A patient unconscious during his operation reported floating above his body, and accurately described details of his operation.

Case 3.11 This dramatic near-death experience account is told in the youtube.com interview here. A patient was written off for dead, and had no vital signs for "close to 20 minutes." During that time he had "no heart beat, no blood pressure, no respiratory function."  But then in a seemingly miraculous manner the patient's vital signs reappeared, and he eventually "recovered fully." The patient described a near-death experience in which he observed post-it notes in the operating room that he should have been unable to observe because his eyes were taped and he was unconscious. The details were accurate.
 

Case 3.12 A patient whose heart was stopped reported a near-death experience in which he heard some paramedic say something to the effect that the patient would never revive, but a rookie paramedic could use the patient to practice CPR. After undergoing an amazing recovery, the patient told what he had heard to one of the paramedics, who was amazed that the man had apparently heard what the paramedic had said.

Case 3.16 Medical staff tried to save a patient who had undergone cardiac arrest, and they decided to stop the resuscitation efforts. They later found a faint pulse, and resumed the revival efforts. The man survived, and described the medical efforts trying to revive him. He “got all the details right, which was impossible” because he had no pulse during such efforts.

Case 3.18 A man who had a cardiac arrest during an operation reported to his doctor that he had seen a brown leather key fob fall out of the doctor's pocket during the operation. The doctor confirmed that such a thing had happened, at a time when the patient should have been unconscious.

Case 3.29: This case is the famous Pam Reynolds case, which I discuss here (while also discussing an equally astonishing case more recent).  While having her senses blocked and her temperature dramatically lowered during an operation that should have guaranteed unconsciousness, Reynolds reported a near-death that included very specific details of her operation she should have been unaware of. 

Case 3.30: A boy who underwent cardiac arrest recalled that during the medical efforts to revive him he "had been up in a corner of the room and had looked down on his body." He correctly recalled several details of the procedure. 

Case 3.33: A man who underwent cardiac arrest reported an out-of-body experience in which he felt himself "rising up through the ceiling" and then seeing some hospital area  in which there were mannequins. Above the ICU he was in was a CPR training area in which there were dummies (resembling mannequins) used for CPR training. 

Such examples show us that Kastrup is incorrect in claiming that those having out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences "aren't truly perceiving the colloquially physical world around them," but are merely in some illusory Phantom World when they have such experiences. 

Kastrup's speculations about a Phantom World that is not some world of souls is as incoherent and unbelievable as his claims of us getting our minds because we are "alters" of some primitive mind-stuff of "universal consciousness."  Ironically, in another essay on his site, Kastrup complains about materialists engaging in ad-hoc construction of speculative "epicycles" to cover up their explanatory failures. It seems that the Phantom World imagined by Kastrup (not a world of spirits) is just such an epicycle. 

I may note how absurd is the "evolution would not be redundant" argument that Kastrup appeals to in trying to reason that humans could not have some clairvoyant ability in see in addition to their eyes. We know that the human body actually does have redundant features. You have two kidneys, but you can get along just fine with only one. You have two eyes, but can see very well with just one. You have two ears, but can hear with only one. A cave-man could get along well with a single arm.  Similarly, you have two lungs, but could live with only one.  So "evolution would not be redundant" is a very bad argument. 

It is utterly fallacious to argue against the existence of abilities on the grounds that evolution would not given them to us. The human mind has many an ability that cannot be explained as something evolution gave us to help us better survive and reproduce in the wild. These include things such as philosophical reasoning ability, the ability to perform and understand  advanced mathematics, the ability to produce and appreciate lofty works of art, and the ability to memorize very long bodies of text.  The co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace)  wrote an essay describing such abilities, his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," which you can read here.  The abundance of such abilities is one of the major reasons for thinking that scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of the human species. 

Kastrup thoughts on reports on paranormal phenomena should not be taken very seriously, as he confesses in one post a lack of interest in them (which we may presume is a failure to decently study them):

" I am not an expert in parapsychology and do not have the background required to say something of distinguished value here. I am also not personally very interested in extraordinary phenomena because I find the ordinary mysterious and confusing enough."

It is not clear why we should take anyone very seriously as a philosopher of mind who apparently does not study such a topic of such very high relevance to issues in the philosophy of mind. 

In the same post Kastrup confesses this, referring to Rupert Sheldrake:

"Rupert highlights that Analytic Idealism is still naturalist and reductionist. That is entirely correct. I think the world unfolds spontaneously, according to its own inherent dispositions (i.e., the observed regularities we call the 'laws of nature'), and without supernatural intervention from an outside agent beyond the boundaries of nature itself."

Kastrup's seems to denounce materialism, and uses language different from that of a materialist. But when it comes to the key questions thar really matter, such as whether the human race is a mere accident of nature, it seems that Kastrup's ideology at its core is pretty much the same as that of materialists. And his "analytic idealism" fails for the same type of reasons that materialism fails, in that it fails all over the place to explain the marvels of human bodies and the wonders of human minds. "Atheistic idealism" would be a more honest name for his philosophy. 

Kastrup can be a careless reasoner. In one post he states this: 

"There is nothing you can pin down about the infant, the child, the teenager or the young adult you once were that has remained intact in you today. Everything about them has changed: their bodies, appearance, feelings, dreams, thoughts, opinions, everything."

This is not true at all. An old person like me has many memories of his youth, and such memories have not changed. Although many of my opinions and feelings I had as a teenager have changed, I still have many of the opinions and feelings I had when I was a young man, and my feelings  towards my mother and siblings have not changed in 50 years. 

The same poorly-reasoned post gives me further suspicions that there is no huge difference between the thinking of Kastrup and that of a materialist, despite the superficial differences and differences in language. Kastrup's concept of death seems to be essentially identical to that of a materialist not believing in life after death. He seems to imagine a person's death as a "you will no longer be a separated alter of mind-at-large or universal consciousness" deal which is for all practical purposes the same as death without an afterlife.  Observational reality tells us a different tale, and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are part of the huge amount of evidence in favor of the survival of persons and souls after death. 

What goes on with Kastrup's writing seems like what goes on in the writing of physicist Paul Davies. Davies wrote one book entitled God and the New Physics, and another book called The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning. But don't be fooled by such titles, which give us the wrong idea about what Davies thinks. When you buy the books and read them you get content that any atheist will be happy with.  Similarly, any atheist will be happy reading Kastrup's works. In Kastrup's "Bizarro World" it seems that nothing has to be well-explained.  In Kastrup World we can believe in a world of the most enormous perceptual regularities, without any God or matter to explain such regularities.  It's pretty much a "you are excused from having to credibly explain anything" kind of deal, and "you are excused from having to study the details of reality."  This may be just what the besieged materialist is looking for, since he may be sick of hearing how so many of his explanations fail to hold water. 

Reality is enormously complex both physically and mentally. To properly study reality,  you must spend very much time studying the details of biology, biochemistry, physics, psychology, medical case histories and parapsychology, as well as studying the facts of neuroscience (not to be confused with the unfounded claims and groundless boasts of neuroscientists). But there's a shortcut. You can claim that matter does not exist, and that all that exists is "universal consciousness," and that we are all just fragments of "universal consciousness." That makes your explanation job real easy, because then you are postulating that there is really Only One Thing that exists.  Thinking that way is a convenient shortcut for the lazy, but it's pretty much the silliest shortcut. 

Below is a diagram from a future post of mine entitled "Why Many Subjects Must Be Deeply Studied for Someone to Properly Ponder the Origin of a Human." In the post I explain at great length why every one of these subjects should be studied deeply if someone is trying to have good ideas about how human minds and human bodies arise.  I will not attempt to give here a shortened explanation of my reasoning. 

Postscript: A long critique of analytic idealism can be read on the page here. I thank the author for emailing me the link to his critique.