No Solid Principle Justifies "Brains Make Minds" Thinking

In the posts on this blog, I have shown that the facts do not justify conventional claims that the brain is the source of the human mind, and claims that memories are stored in brains.  But could there be some kind of general principle that justifies thinking that brains make minds? Let's look at some possible principles, and see how well they stand up to scrutiny. 

One possible principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is a principle that physical effects must be explained by physical causes.  But this is not a defensible principle to justify "brains make minds" thinking. For one thing, mental effects such as thinking and understanding are not physical effects. Secondly,  it would seem that many physical effects are not caused by physical causes, but are instead caused by mental causes. If John becomes enraged at Joe, and punches Joe,  that is not a physical cause causing a physical effect, but a mental effect causing a physical effect. 

Another possible principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is a principle that mental effects must be explained by physical causes.  But this is not a defensible principle to justify "brains make minds" thinking. Consider this case: John becomes very sad because his true love Mary has become very sad.  This would seem to be a case of a mental effect being produced by another mental effect, and countless other examples of such a thing could be given.  It would not seem to be true that mental  effects must always be explained by physical causes. 

Another possible principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is a principle that scientists must never explain things by imagining invisible causes. A person could evoke this principle, and then say, "So rather than evoking some invisible cause for things mental, we must think of a visible cause: the brain."   But this is not a defensible principle to justify "brains make minds" thinking. The fact is that outside the world of neuroscience, scientists often evoke invisible causes to explain things.  

To explain the movements of bodies in the solar system, scientists evoke a universal law of gravitation.  Gravitation is very much an invisible cause. You can observe someone falling from gravity, but the force of gravitation is itself invisible.  To give another example, cosmologists (scientists who study the universe as a whole) habitually evoke two never-observed invisible things as explanations: dark matter and dark energy.  Such invisible and never-observed things are pillars in the explanation systems of cosmologists. So it simply isn't true that scientists must never explain things by imagining invisible causes.  If neuroscientists were to stop telling us that our brains make our minds, and were to start teaching that our minds arise from some mysterious "mind source" external to our bodies, this would be nothing very different from what cosmologists have been doing for decades, by appealing to invisible never-measured dark matter and dark energy. 

Another possible principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is the long-standing principle of Occam's Razor. This was originally stated as the principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." One could appeal to the Occam's Razor principle when trying to justify a belief that brains make minds.  The reasoning might go like this:

"If we imagine that a brain is the cause of all of the mind and the storage spot of memory, that is simpler than imagining some soul is involved. For if you imagine a soul, you must also imagine some soul-giver or a soul source; and then you are postulating two things, not just one (a brain). But it is better to avoid postulating multiple  things if you can postulate only one thing. That's the long-standing principle of Occam's Razor." 

This argument is fallacious because it misstates Occam's Razor. According to the wikipedia.org article on Occam's Razor, the principle is inaccurately paraphrased as the principle that "the simplest explanation is usually the best one."  It is not a valid principle that we should always prefer the simpler explanation or the simplest explanation.  For example, if we imagine atoms as being hard indivisible particles as some ancient thinkers did, that is simpler than imagining atoms as usually being structured of multiple electrons, protons and neutrons. But in this case the more complicated explanation postulating more things is the correct one.

Occam's Razor is the principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity," and that "beyond necessity" part is a crucial part of the principle. Occam's Razor is the principle is that we should not assume additional causal factors unless we need to do so.  Below are some examples of correct and incorrect applications of Occam's Razor:

(1) A man was shot in the back when a rifle bullet tore into his flesh. Should we assume that two people pulled the trigger, or only one? You don't need two people to pull a trigger. So according to Occam's Razor, we should assume only one person pulled the trigger. 

(2) A man was killed when he was simultaneously shot in the back and also struck by an arrow that hit him in the front. We cannot evoke Occam's Razor to say there was only a single killer.  Here there is a necessity for postulating multiple causes. So it is quite consistent with Occam's Razor for us to assume there were two killers, one shooting from the front, and another shooting from the back. 

In the case of the mind and the brain, there are multiple necessities for assuming that the mind arises from something beyond the brain. They include the very short lifetime of proteins in the brain (about 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time old people can remember things), the rapid turnover and high instability of dendritic spines, the failure of scientists to ever find the slightest bit of stored memory information when examining neural tissue, the existence of good and sometimes above-average intelligence in some people whose brains had been almost entirely replaced by watery fluid (such as the hydrocephalus patients of John Lorber),  the lack of any indexing system or coordinate system or position notation system in the brain that might help to explain the wonder of instant memory recall, the good persistence of learned memories after surgical removal of half a brain to treat severe seizures,  the ability of many "savant" subjects (such as Kim Peek and Derek Paravicini) with severe brain damage to perform astounding wonders of memory recall, the fact of very vivid and lucid human experience and human memory formation in near-death experiences occurring after the electrical shutdown of the brain following cardiac arrest, and the complete lack of anything in the brain that can credibly explain a neural writing of complex learned information, a neural reading of complex learned information, or a neural instant retrieval of learned information.

So you cannot credibly evoke Occam's Razor to defend a belief that the mind is merely a product of the brain. Such a principle only applies to discourage cases when multiple causes are evoked "beyond necessity." But for the reasons above we seem to have many a necessity for postulating some cause of the mind beyond the brain.  

Another principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is the principle that every characteristic of something  must be explained in terms of the internal components of that thing.  Unfortunately, this principle is not a valid one, as the examples below show:

• The motion behavior of planet Earth is not at all explained purely by some internal components of our planet.  The motion behavior of planet Earth through the solar system is caused mainly by things outside of planet Earth, such as the sun and the universal law of gravitation which causes the sun to have a gravitational influence on the motion of Earth. 
• The temperature of planet Earth is not at all explained purely by some internal components of our planet. The temperature of our planet is mainly explained by an external influence: the heat that comes from the sun. 
• A person's opinions and behavior are not at all explained purely by some internal components of his body. Such opinions and behavior are largely determined by factors (such as social influences) coming from beyond the person's body. 

It is simply not true that scientists always explain something purely by discussing internal parts of that thing. Scientists frequently maintain that the main explanation for something's characteristics are causal factors outside of that thing. 

Another principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is a "follow the consensus" principle. It could be argued that there is a scientific consensus that memories are stored in brains, and that the mind is merely the product of the brain; so we should believe that.  But there are problems with this argument.

"Consensus" is one of the most abused words in scientific discourse. Very confusingly defined in multiple ways, "consensus" is a word that some leading dictionaries define as an agreed opinion among a group of people. The first definition of "consensus" by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "general agreement: unanimity."  We have no proof that there is any actual consensus among scientists that brains make minds or that brains store memories.  To the contrary, there are signs of serious doubts about such a claim.  In science literature these days it is often said that the problem of consciousness is an unsolved problem.  Elsewhere we read scientists flirting with panpsychism, an explanation for consciousness different from the idea that your brain produces consciousness.  

Let us consider a very interesting type of alleged consensus that I may call a "leader's new clothes" consensus.  Let us imagine a small company of about 20 employees that has a weekly employee meeting every Monday morning. On one Monday morning after all the employees have gathered in a conference room for the meeting, the company's leader comes in wearing flashy new clothes that are both very ugly and ridiculous-looking. Immediately the leader says, "I just paid $900 for this new outfit -- raise your hand if you think I look great in these clothes."   

Now if it is known that the leader is someone who can get angry and fire people for slight offenses, it is quite possible that all twenty of the employees might raise their hand in such a situation, even though not one single one of them believes that the leader looks good in his ugly new clothes.  In such a case the "public consensus" is 100% different from the private consensus. A secret ballot would have revealed the discrepancy. 

The point of this example is that appeals to some alleged public consensus are notoriously unreliable. So arguing from some alleged consensus of some group is a weak and unreliable form of reasoning.  The only way to get a reliable measure of the opinion of people on something is to do a secret ballot, and there virtually never occurs secret ballots of scientists asking about their opinions on scientific matters. We have no idea of whether the private beliefs of scientists differ very much from the public facade they present.  For example, we have no idea whether it is actually true that almost all  scientists think your mind is merely the product of your brain. It could easily be that 35% of them doubt such a doctrine, but speak differently in public for the sake of "fitting in," avoiding "heresy trouble" and seeming to conform to the perceived norms of their social group. 

The history of science shows many "consensus beliefs" that were later discarded. Less than a century ago, eugenics was once wildly popular in US colleges, but now stands in disrepute. It was once a reputed scientific consensus that homosexuality was a mental illness. Now anyone claiming that in a college would be condemned by his college superiors. To give another of many other examples I could cite, Semmelweis accumulated evidence that cases of a certain kind of deadly fever could be greatly reduced if physicians would simply wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, particularly after touching corpses. According to a wikipedia.org article on him, "Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community." Thousands died unnecessarily, because of the stubbornness of experts, who were too attached to long-standing myths and cherished fantasies such as the idea that physicians had special "healing hands" that would never be the source of death. The wikipedia article tells us, "At a conference of German physicians and natural scientists, most of the speakers rejected his doctrine, including the celebrated Rudolf Virchow, who was a scientist of the highest authority of his time."  Decades later, it was found that Semmelweis was correct, and his recommendations were finally adopted.   The wikipedia.org article notes, "The so-called Semmelweis reflex — a metaphor for a certain type of human behavior characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs, or paradigms — is named after Semmelweis, whose ideas were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries." 

More recently, in the year 2020 we were told countless times in the mainstream press that there was a scientific consensus that COVID-19 had arisen through a purely natural process, spreading from some animals that had the virus before humans. This alleged scientific consensus held for only about a year, until 2021, when many scientists started to confess that we don't know whether COVID-19 did or did not arise from a lab leak.  Below is from a Reuters article on a US government report on COVID-19 origins:

"The ODNI report said four U.S. spy agencies and a multi-agency body have 'low confidence' that COVID-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus. But one agency said it had 'moderate confidence' that the first human COVID-19 infection most likely was the result of a laboratory accident, probably involving experimentation or animal handling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Results such as this should shake our confidence in the idea that there is something compulsory about some alleged scientific consensus.  People tend to think that today's scientists have got things right because they have "state-of-the-art" equipment. Centuries from now (armed with vastly more sophisticated tools) scientists may look back on today's scientists the way today's scientists look back on 17th-century scientists, and think things like, "I can't believe way back then they were trying to figure out the mind by using those silly MRI machines."  Such scientists of the future may scorn today's community of neuroscientists, regarding it as a dysfunctional culture plagued by poor practices, overconfidence and hubris. 

To put things concisely, social proof is no proof, and "follow the herd" does not necessarily lead you to the truth. 

Another principle that could be evoked to try to justify "brains make minds" claims is a principle that scientists must only believe in things natural, so we can't believe in something supernatural (such as a soul that could explain the human mind).  The principle is far from a self-evident one. Given sufficient evidence for the supernatural, it would seem that scientists should believe in that, because their supreme rule should be "follow the evidence wherever it leads" rather than "only believe in things you think are natural."  Secondly, believing in some non-neural cause of the human mind does not necessarily require a belief in the supernatural. Humans could get something like a soul by means of some mysterious cosmic infrastructure that in some sense operates "naturally," rather than by one-by-one miraculous dispensations. So believing in a non-neural source of the human mind does not necessarily require you to believe in something miraculous or supernatural. 

In short, there is no sound general principle that can be evoked to justify thinking that the human mind is mainly a product of the brain, and that the brain is the storage place of memories.