The web site The Conversation at www.theconversation.com is one of numerous mainstream web sites that attempt to propagate the talking points of materialist thinkers, usually in a very one-sided way in which all kinds of very important relevant facts are hidden from readers. Recently the site had an article entitled "When Will I Be Able to Upload My Brain to a Computer?" A neuroscientist professor named Guillaume Thierry answers a reader's question, which was this:
"I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? Richard Dixon."
Professor Thierry answered the question in a poor fashion. He spoke largely as if the underlying assumption behind the question was a valid one. He should have discussed many facts of neuroscience that indicate the underlying assumption behind the question is an incorrect one. Although the question is rather awkwardly phrased, it is rather clear what assumption was behind the question asked by Mr. Dixon. The assumption was that there is some information and matter arrangement in a brain which somehow constitutes a person, and that it might be possible to transfer such information and matter arrangement to a computer.
The first thing that Professor Thierry should have discussed is that there is zero evidence that brains store information in the way that computers store information. Computers store information in a binary format which is also sometimes called a digital format. In such a format information is stored by a series of ones and zeros, such as 101010011010010101100101010111000. There is no evidence that brains store information in any such manner. There seems to be nothing in a brain or neurons or synapses that would allow storage of information in any such manner. We can imagine a physical structuring of an organ that would allow the storage of long binary sequences such as 10010101000011110001010101000111100101. The brain seems to have no physical component allowing any such storage.
We do know that neurons store information, but the only information ever discovered in a neuron is genetic information, the information stored in the nucleus of every cell. Such information is merely low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up particular protein molecules. The only type of information that has been discovered in neurons is the same low-level chemical information found in kidney cells and skin cells and heart cells and foot cells. No one has ever discovered any binary sequence such as 10010101000011110001010101000111100101 in a human brain.
Besides mentioning that there is no sign of any mechanism in a brain that could possibly store digital or binary information such as used by computers, Professor Thierry should have also mentioned that there is simply no physical signs of learned information stored in a brain in any kind of non-digital or non-binary organized format that resembles some kind of system of representation. We can imagine other ways in which information could be stored in a brain, some way that did not involve the simplicity of repeated ones and zeroes. If any other way was used, it would tend to have an easily detected hallmark: the hallmark of token repetition. There would be some system of tokens, each of which would represent something, perhaps a sound or a color pixel or a letter. There would be very many repetitions of different types of symbolic tokens. Some examples of tokens are given below. Other examples of tokens include nucleotide base pairs (which in particular combinations of 3 base pairs represent particular amino acids), and also coins and bills (some particular combination of coins and bills can represent some particular amount of wealth).
Other than the nucleotide base pair triple combinations that represent mere low-level chemical information such as amino acids, something found in neurons and many other types of cells outside of the brain, there is no sign at all of any repetition of symbolic tokens in the brain. Except for genetic information which is merely low-level chemical information, we can find none of the hallmarks of symbolic information (the repetition of symbolic tokens) inside the brain. No one has ever found anything that looks like traces or remnants of learned information by studying brain tissue. If you cut off some piece of brain tissue when someone dies, and place it under the most powerful electron microscope, you will never find any evidence that such tissue stored information learned during a lifetime, and you will never be able to figure out what a person learned from studying such tissue. This is one reason why scientists and law enforcement officials never bother to preserve the brains of dead people in hopes of learning something about what such people experienced during their lives, or what they thought or believed, or what deeds they committed.
Besides seeing no signs of stored memory information in brains, scientists are completely lacking in any detailed credible theory of how it is that a brain could store the type of things that people learn during their lifetimes. The difficulties of coming up with such a theory are endless. One gigantic difficulty is that humans learn a dizzying variety of things (sights, sounds, sensations, words, music, feelings, thoughts, concepts, muscle movements, and so forth), meaning that no imaginable system of symbolic encoding could handle even a third of the types of things people can learn. Another difficulty is that people are capable of remembering extremely long sequences of words and letters. But the very alphabets that are used to store such letters have only existed for a few thousand years. There is no evidence that humans have undergone some great brain change in the past few thousand years that might help to explain a storage of great amounts of information using alphabets that have only existed for a few thousand years. A scientific paper discussing human evolution in the past two thousand years tells us that "aside from height and body mass index (BMI), evidence for selection on other complex traits has generally been weak," and that there are merely faint signals for human evolution in a few other areas: "increased infant head circumference and birth weight, and increases in female hip size; as well as on variants underlying metabolic traits; male-specific signal for decreased BMI; and in favor of later sexual maturation in women, but not in men," in addition to "strong signals of selection at lactase and the major histocompatibility complex, and in favor of blond hair and blue eyes." There is no mention of any dramatic brain evolution that might explain a recent ability to store memories using alphabets that only arose in the past few thousand years.
The same problem exists in regard to explaining a human ability to remember oral music. Such music is expressed using a musical notation system that is only a few centuries old. But humans have no problem remembering vast lengths of oral music. In his prime performing years Placido Domingo was famous for having memorized male operatic roles in countless different operas, which altogether made up very many hours of singing he could perform without error.
The inability of neuroscientists to explain such wonders of memorization is not some minor shortfall. There is literally not a neuroscientist in the world who can give a credible detailed explanation of how anyone could store the simple phrase "my dog has fleas" in his brain or even the first line of the song "Mary had a little lamb." Yet there are Islamic scholars who have memorized every line of their holy book of 114 chapters, and actors and singers who have perfectly memorized very long roles such as Hamlet and Siegfried.
When asked to explain such things, all neuroscientists can do is mention little facts that fail to sound anything like an explanation for human memory. They may utter phrases such as "synaptic strengthening," ignoring the fact that the lifetimes of the proteins that make up synapses are about 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember thing. The failure of neuroscientists to explain other aspects of human mentality is just as large. No neuroscientist has a credible explanation for such basic human mental realities as imagination or abstract thinking or insight.
On another web page a neuroscientist seems to confess that he and his colleagues have no idea of how groups of neurons could give rise to thoughts or emotions. He states this:
"We need to understand how circuits of cells give rise to a thought, an emotion, a behavior. And this will be extremely difficult to penetrate.”
I have repeatedly argued on this blog (in posts such as this and this) that physical limitations of brains mean that brains should be way too slow to account for things such as lightning-fast human thinking and recall. I found a scientific paper in which scientists confess just how bad is the speed problem within human brains. In the paper "Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules," six scientists (some of them neuroscientists) make this interesting confession:
"Synaptic transmission and axonal transfer of nerve impulses are too slow to organize coordinated activity in large areas of the central nervous system. Numerous observations confirm this view. The duration of a synaptic transmission is at least 0.5 ms, thus the transmission across thousands of synapses takes about hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. The transmission speed of action potentials varies between 0.5 m/s and 120 m/s along an axon. More than 50% of the nerves fibers in the corpus callosum are without myelin, thus their speed is reduced to 0.5 m/s. How can these low velocities (i.e. classical signals) explain the fast processing in the nervous system?"
Rather than candidly confessing such realities when asked about loading brains into computers, Professor Thierry speaks like someone with an underlying attitude of "we haven't done this yet because it's very hard." What he should have said is something like, "You should have every doubt that such a thing is possible, no matter how much we learn about the brain or computers." Similarly, suppose you ask a soil expert, "When will I be able to know all about the lives of all the previous owners of my land by analyzing the land's soil?" Such an expert will be giving you the wrong answer if he talks about how such a thing is hard. He will be pointing you in the right direction if he tells you there is no good reason to think that such a thing will ever be possible.
In responding to the question, Professor Thierry acted like a typical neuroscientist, by using the question to try and impress us by listing many little facts that he has learned. In answering the question he should have candidly confessed all of the things he does not know and does not understand about brains, mentality and memory. But neuroscientists don't like getting started on such a discussion, which rapidly leads us to questions that cause us to doubt the dogmas that neuroscientists keep spouting. So I'm sure Professor Thierry would have preferred not to start discussing his ignorance of why people near death so often report themselves floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from above, a type of observation entirely inconsistent with claims that brains are the source of the human mind. And I'm sure Professor Thierry would have preferred not to start discussing his ignorance of how humans are able to perfectly recall vast bodies of information, even though each synaptic gap transmits signals with a reliability of less than 50%, which should make such recall impossible if it were occurring from neural activity. And I'm sure Professor Thierry would have preferred not to start discussing his ignorance of how mind and memory is well-preserved after half of a brain is removed to treat very bad seizures in epileptics, an observational reality dramatically inconsistent with the dogmas of neuroscientists.
Instead of telling us the neuroscience reality that no one has ever found any memory information by studying brain tissue, Professor Thierry advanced a groundless and easily discredited speculation when he stated this: "Information in the brain is stored in every detail of its physical structure of the connections between neurons: their size and shape, as well as the number and location of connections between them." No one has any understanding of how learned information such as facts learned in school could ever be represented by changes in the sizes, shapes, numbers or locations of connections between neurons, nor does anyone have any credible detailed theory of how information could be stored in such a way. No evidence of symbolic tokens or information representation can be found by studying such connections. To the contrary, what we have learned about such connections (synapses) suggests the impossibility of the claim Thierry states. We know that synapses are "shifting sands" type of things, not stable structures that stay the same for decades. The proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks. Synapses are connected to unstable structures called dendritic spines, which have typical lifetimes of only a few weeks or months, and which don't last for years. See my post "Imaging of Dendritic Spines Hint That Brains Are Too Unstable to Store Memories for Decades" for the relevant observations.
Given all this structural instability in synapses and their attached dendritic spines, and the constant very high levels of molecular turnover in such things, we should not believe the speculation that synapses are storing human memories which can survive with remarkable stability for 50 years or longer. Resembling the tangled, ever-changing vines in a dense part of the Amazon rain forest, synapses no more resemble an information storage system than do some jumble of such vines. No neuroscientist could ever even tell a credible detailed tale of how the mere phrase "my dog has fleas" could be stored by some variation in the size, shape, strength, number or location of brain connections (synapses).
Alarm bells should go off in our minds when we read Professor Thierry state this: "The brain seamlessly and constantly integrates signals from all the senses to produce internal representations, makes predictions about these representations, and ultimately creates conscious awareness (our feeling of being alive and being ourselves) in a way that is still a total mystery to us." When someone claims that something occurs in way that is a total mystery to him, it is often the case that no such thing is actually occurring. We have no actual evidence that brains "produce internal representations" from sensory signals, and no permanent signs of such internal representations can be found by studying brain tissue. We know that humans make predictions, but do not know that brains make predictions, nor do we know that brains create conscious awareness. From near-death experiences that may involve vivid conscious awareness during cardiac arrest in which the heart has stopped and the brain is shut down, we have a very strong reason for doubting claims that brains produce conscious awareness. In general we should tend to be skeptical about claims that x produces y when such claims are made by people confessing that such a thing happens in some way that is a total mystery.
If some old person is afraid of death and asks you about mind uploading, you might think: don't burst the guy's bubble and throw cold water on his hopes. But there's no reason to keep afloat hopes of immortality by mind uploading. A much better thing to do would be to explain all the reasons why it is utterly fallacious to think that you will be able to transfer your mind and memory into a robot or computer, and to include within that discussion some mention of how such reasons (and also many other reasons) should lead you to suspect that your mind and memory will survive the death of your body, largely on the grounds that there is nothing in your brain or body that can explain your mind and your memory.
