Why ESP Discredits the "Brains Make Minds" Claim

The evidence for ESP is overwhelming. You can read about some of that evidence by reading my posts below:

• The post here discusses abundant ESP evidence gathered by Soviet scientists, including evidence of "telepathic knockouts," in which a person could be made unconscious at the command of a distant person, who might be as much as a thousand miles away. 
• The post here discusses a New York Times article reporting how a court case was won by an amazing demonstration of telepathy by the person who had been arrested. 
• The post here discusses many impressive feats of telepathy, including several very dramatic cases witnessed and documented by a physician. 
• The post here discusses cases of people very noticeably feeling a strange worry or distress at the time of a distant disaster involving one of their friends or loved ones. 
• The post here discusses a phenomenon of eyeless sight abundantly documented by an early twentieth century observer (and corroborated by many subsequent observations). 
• The post here discusses many cases of dramatic ESP performed by hypnotized subjects. 
• The post here describes an extremely well-documented subject performing ESP, the blind or nearly-blind invalid Mollie Fancher who while blindfolded passed endless tests of paranormal perception, and who routinely would correctly describe unseen visitors arriving at her door, outside of her field of view. 
• The post here discusses abundant evidence of ESP gathered by a chemistry professor at a very prestigious university. 
• The post here discusses compelling evidence of ESP gathered by a doctor. 
• The post here discusses a summary of compelling experimental evidence for ESP, published on the mainstream Cornell physics paper server. For example, a summary of ESP tests using the ganzfeld protocol reveals that that over 46 years of tests, there were 4841 trials, producing 1520 successes, a hit rate of 31.5%, far over the expected-by-chance hit rate of 25%. 
• The post here describes astonishing ESP results produced by the blind or nearly-blind Loraina Brackett. 
• The post here describes extremely dramatic ESP results produced by a Mrs. Morel studied by Eugene Osty. 
• The post here discusses extremely dramatic ESP results listed in a government document. 
• The post here discusses some dramatic cases of clairvoyance. 
• The post here discusses the very well-documented case of Alexis Didier, who demonstrated clairvoyance countless times in public exhibitions.
• The post here discusses a six-year investigation of the French Royal Academy of medicine, one which resoundingly found in favor of the reality of clairvoyance. 
• The post here discusses dramatic evidence for spontaneous ESP gathered in abundance by Louisa Rhine.
• Similar accounts (including a very dramatic one from my own experience) are provided in this post and in this post. 
• Dramatic evidence for ESP from the nineteenth century is discussed in this post and this post this post. 
• Some dramatic experimental results in favor of ESP are discussed here, along with computer experiments shedding light on the vast improbability of their occurrence by chance. 
• Compelling experimental results in favor of ESP are discussed here. 
• The dramatic success of remote viewing experiments long funded by the US government is discussed here. 
• Some dramatic accounts of ESP that I can personally testify to are included in my account here. 
• An enormously successful remote ESP test (with two persons in different locations) is described in this post. Guessing 1850 cards selected by chance by a professor at a remote  location,  a woman guessed an average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, achieving a phenomenal 73% accuracy rate (instead of the expected accuracy rate of 20%). We would never expect to get a result this good by chance if every person on a billion trillion inhabited planets was to be given such a test. 
• The enormously convincing experimental results produced by Joseph Rhine (particularly when testing with Hubert Pearce) are discussed here. 
• Very powerful evidence for ESP in autistic subjects is discussed here. 
• 21st-century evidence for ESP is discussed here. 

I have had experiences like this

Let us consider the question: is it possible to explain ESP by any hypothesis preserving the idea that brains generate minds? One possibility sometimes mentioned is the idea that ESP occurs when some kind of unknown radiation or wave travels from one brain to another. 

In the book The Personality of Man by G. N. M. Tryrrell we have a good explanation of why such a hypothesis does not work.  To understand the explanation fully, you need to understand what is called the inverse square law. This is a law that applies to known types of radiation such as light and radio waves. According to this law the strength of any radiation decreases by a factor of 4 whenever the distance between two objects is doubled.  So, for example, if you are 10 million kilometers from the sun, your spaceship will get a certain amount of radiation energy from the sun; but if you move your spaceship so that it is 20 million kilometers from the sun, your spaceship will get one quarter of that radiation. 

Tyrrell states this:

"(1) In the first place, any such physical radiation would have to be generated by a material transmitter of some kind, which would presumably be located in the brain or body of the agent. Since telepathy is known to take place over long distances, such a transmitter would have to be powerful enough to send a message over some thousands of miles. It could scarcely, therefore, be of microscopic dimensions. No such transmitter has ever been found in any human brain or body. A corresponding receiver would also have to exist in the body of the percipient B. ; and that has never been discovered either. (2) All known physical radiation obeys the inverse square law connecting intensity with distance. There is no evidence that telepathy obeys this law. If it did, a person who could transmit a telepathic message across the ocean would produce an enormously more powerful effect across a table. This kind of thing has never been observed. (3) Physicists possess a variety of sensitive instruments for detecting different kinds of radiation; yet they have never detected telepathic radiation, which, if it were physical, would be unlikely to have escaped them. 

These are all very good objections that are rather perfectly stated. Item 4 on Tyrrell's list moves toward a very weighty objection, although he states it imperfectly. He states this:

(4) A much more serious objection, however, lies in the fact that in order to transmit ideas by any physical means whatever, use has to be made of a pre-arranged code. Unless such a code exists and is understood by both parties beforehand, no information can be transmitted by physical means. Spoken language is a code; written language is another. Unless the person spoken to or written to understands the language, he can receive no information. Even gestures and facial expressions are a code. Every code requires to be consciously applied and consciously interpreted; so that a physical theory of telepathy necessitates not only the existence of material transmitters and receivers but a conscious agent at each end to operate them and to code and decode the messages. Systems of dots and dashes, or audible words spoken into a microphone are, of course, the usual ways of encoding telegraphic, telephonic and radio messages. It would be utterly absurd to suppose that some unseen demon within us speaks words aloud into a telepathic transmitter situated in our brain or elsewhere in our body; yet without some such supposition a physical theory of telepathy will not work." 

The point that Tyrrell is getting at is a good one: that information can only be sent long distance through some biological process or physical process if the information is encoded according to some coding system, and the same system is used by the transmitter and the receiver.  For example, you can read information on the web only because both the publisher of the information (the web site you are on) and the receiver of the information (your web browser) are using exactly the same encoding protocols, which include things such as the ASCII protocol and the HTML protocol.  We now know  (contrary to what Tyrrell states) that there does not need to be "a conscious agent at each end," but there at least has to be at least a software or machinery or biology on both the transmitting and receiving ends, and both have to use the same protocol for successful communication to occur.   Such a requirement is just another reason why the idea of brain-to-brain ESP communication is untenable.  There would have to be some secret undiscovered brain biology by which thoughts were encoded for long-distance transmission, and also some secret undiscovered brain biology by which a brain could decode encoded thoughts that had been transmitted by some undiscovered form  of radiation.  

The overall requirements for brain-to-brain ESP would be something like this:

(1) Some undiscovered system in the brain capable of encoding thoughts for long-distance ESP transmission. 

(2) Some undiscovered antenna-like system in the brain capable of transmitting such encoded thoughts over vast distances.

(3) Some undiscovered form of radiation (never detected by physicists) by which thoughts can be transmitted long-distance from brain to brain, apparently without any inverse-square kind of signal diminution with distance (unlike light and radio signals). 

(4) Some undiscovered reception system in the brain capable of receiving such ESP thought signals (very hard to imagine, as a human body has nothing like an antenna for receiving signals). 

(5) Some undiscovered decoding system in the brain capable of decoding such encoded ESP thought signals, and causing them to produce corresponding ideas in the mind of the receiver. 

This list of requirements is so great and so far-fetched that it is clear that the idea of ESP being a brain-to-brain communication by means of radiation is one that must be rejected. 

There is a good reason why materialists tell us the lie that there is not good evidence for ESP.  They tell us this lie because it is one of quite a few lies that they very much need to tell. The existence of ESP is sufficient by itself to discredit all claims that human minds are merely the product of the brain. 

Just after describing an astonishingly exact account of telepathy (pages 23-25), Arthur W. Osborn states this in his very interesting book on precognition entitled The Future Is Now: 

"Many volumes have been filled with accounts of spontaneous telepathy and clairvoyance. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these facts destroy all mechanistic attempts to explain consciousness as being merely a product of neural functioning. If it is assumed that all our knowledge is derived only by means of the senses, then how can we know of events entirely beyond the reach of the senses?... Both spontaneous and experimental cases of paranormal cognition demonstrate that certain people do become aware of thoughts in other minds and of events at a distance under conditions of rigorous control which exclude the possibility of fraud and where it is impossible for any physical means of communication to operate....Clairvoyance and telepathy do indeed pose crucial problems for the classical theories of mind; and for those theories which postulate that consciousness is exclusively dependent on the physical organism they administer a coup de grace."

A coup de grace is a final blow given to a wounded person or animal to cause its death. 

In the quotes above, Tyrrell takes a wise approach. His approach is to start listing all of the things that would have to exist if brain-to-brain ESP was occurring. We should use the same approach when discussing other things attributed to the brain, such as memory formation and memory recall. 

Here is a list of the things that would have to exist in the brain for humans to be storing memories in the brain:

(1) Some system by which learned knowledge and human experiences are converted or encoded into neural states.  This is the most horrendous problem for anyone claiming brains store memories. You can't just "write learned knowledge" or "write experience" to a brain as effortlessly as one would pour water into a cup.  For knowledge or experience to be stored in a brain as neural states or synapse states, there would have to be some super-elaborate coding system capable of handling all of the countless different ways in which humans can acquire knowledge.  The coding system would have to be some "miracle of design" infinitely more complicated than the Morse Code, for it would have to store so many types of things: images, smells, sounds, music and text. We can't imagine any such system capable of storing English text arising before the year 1000 BC, because the English language and the English alphabet did not exist then.  So we would have to imagine this enormously elaborate encoding system arising in only the past few thousand years, contrary to the claims of Darwinists that evolution works slowly. 

(2) This encoding system would have to work enormously fast, to cover cases of instantaneous memory formation which routinely occur. 

(3) There would have to be some kind of write mechanism that would allow this encoded information to be stored in the brain as neural states or synapse states. 

(4) There would have to be some capability allowing this written information to be preserved for decades, despite all of the rapid structural turnover and rapid molecular turnover that occurs in the brain.  Proteins in the brain have an average lifetime of less than two weeks, and dendritic spines and synapses do not last for years.

(5) There would have to be some capability allowing a memory to be instantly found. So, for example, if you hear the name "Richard Nixon' and then instantly remember "US president elected in 1968 who resigned in 1974," there would have to be some neural mechanism by which you could instantly find a brain's stored information about Richard Nixon upon you hearing his name. 

(6) There would have to be some read capability by which a memory was read from some location in the brain where it was stored. 

(7) There would have to be some decoding capability by which this encoded information existing as neural states or synapse states was translated into conceptual information allowing the mind to experience a recollection. 

Just as there exists no evidence of the things mentioned by Tyrrell that would have to exist for brains to be responsible for ESP, there exists no evidence of the things mentioned above that would have to exist for brains to be responsible for memory storage and memory retrieval.  Specifically:

(1) Scientists have found no evidence of any encoding system by which a brain can translate learned knowledge or episodic experience into stored knowledge existing as neural states or synapse states. If such a system existed, it would have to have a large footprint in the genome, involving very many proteins dedicated to achieving such encoding; but no good evidence for such a thing has been found. 

(2) There is no evidence of any write capability in a brain that can store encoded information.

(3) No one has found any mechanism allowing a preservation over decades of memories stored in synapses or dendritic spines with such a high level of structural turnover and molecular turnover. 

(4) No one has found any mechanism in a brain that can explain the instant retrieval of memories. The brain has nothing like the type of things that would be required for such instant retrieval to work, things such as indexing or a coordinate system or a position notation system. So finding a memory stored in a brain would as slow as finding someone's house in New York City (at an unknown location in the city) if New York City had no street names and no house numbers. 

(5) No one has found any read capability in a brain that could read encoded learned information. A computer hard disk has a movable read-write head to write and read information from some particular spot on the disk, but nothing like that exists in the brain. The brain has nothing like the cursor that exists in a word processor program, something that keeps track of the current reading or writing position. 

(6) The brain has nothing like some decoding system that would allow learned information or episodic experience encoded in neural states or synapse states to be translated into a recollection occurring in the mind. 

Just as we must say that the brain is totally unsuitable for the job of extrasensory perception, we must say that the brain is totally unsuitable for the common chores of memory storage and memory retrieval.