From a sociological perspective the academia tribe of neuroscientists has many similarities with the academia tribe of cosmologists (scientists who study the universe as a whole). Both are belief communities zealously committed to advancing unproven dogmas. The unproven dogmas of the neuroscientist belief community include the dogma that the brain is the source of the mind (or the same thing as the mind), and the belief that memories are stored in the brain. The unproven dogmas of the cosmologist belief community include a belief in primordial cosmic inflation (the idea that the universe underwent exponential expansion for an instant at its beginning), the dogma of dark matter and the dogma of dark energy.
But there is one important difference between these belief communities: cosmologists have shown a willingness to postulate the existence of invisible realities to try to make up for things they cannot explain, but neuroscientists refuse to do such a thing, clinging to a "the brain explains it all" dogma that dramatically fails to account for observational reality. To explain this difference, let me describe why cosmologists claim that there is dark matter and dark energy.
What led to the belief in dark matter was the discrepancy shown in the visual below. Astronomers thought that the rotation velocity of stars (the speed at which they rotate around the center of the galaxy) should decrease the more the stars are located from the center of a galaxy (which would be the behavior shown by the blue line below). But instead stars rotated around the center of their galaxy with the speed shown in the red line.
Unable to account for such observations by anything they knew of in the visible universe, cosmologists postulated the existence of an invisible: "dark matter" existing in greater amounts than ordinary matter. Something rather similar led to cosmologists postulating the idea of dark energy. Scientists seemed to observe the universe expanding at an accelerating rate they could not account for by using only the known matter and energy in the universe. To account for the rate of the universe's expansion, scientists began to postulate that most of the universe's mass-energy exists in the form of a mysterious "dark energy" that acts as a "cosmological constant," a kind of repulsive force.
A scientific web site explains dark energy like this (failing to see the irony of matter-of-factly making an exact "72%" claim about a merely hypothetical substance):
"Dark Energy is a hypothetical form of energy that exerts a negative, repulsive pressure, behaving like the opposite of gravity. It has been hypothesised to account for the observational properties of distant type Ia supernovae, which show the universe going through an accelerated period of expansion. Like Dark Matter, Dark Energy is not directly observed, but rather inferred from observations of gravitational interactions between astronomical objects. Dark Energy makes up 72% of the total mass-energy density of the universe."
We see in these examples cosmologists seeming to act according to a principle like this: "If what you have directly observed cannot credibly account for what we see in nature, then be willing to postulate some very important mysterious invisible reality that cannot be directly observed." But neuroscientists refuse to follow such a principle. Nature gives us innumerable examples of mental phenomena that cannot be credibly explained by brains (phenomena discussed in the posts of this blog). But rather than intelligently postulating some mysterious reality beyond the brain, our neuroscientists just keep senselessly claiming that the brain explains everything.
But what if neuroscientists were to act according to the same principle quoted above? Then we might read a conversation something like the imaginary conversation below:
Science journalist: We are here with Professor Smith, and I will ask him about his interesting theory of a "dark brain." Professor Smith, what is this "dark brain" that you postulate?
Professor Smith: What I call the dark brain is a mysterious invisible reality that must exist in each of our bodies, in addition to our visible brains. I believe that the dark brain is made of some kind of matter or energy that we cannot directly observe.
Science journalist: Why do we need to postulate such a "dark brain"? Why can't we just assume that there only exists the regular physical brain that doctors see when they open up someone's skull?
Professor Smith: There are all kinds of powerful reasons. One reason is that the known physical brain cannot account for memory formation and memory persistence. Humans can remember things very well for fifty or sixty years, but there's nothing in the known physical brain that can account for that. The reigning theory is that memories are stored in synapses, but that's ridiculous, because the proteins in synapses only last for a few weeks, and synapses are attached to dendritic spines that don't last for years. There's also nothing in the known physical brain that can account for instant memory formation. Don't tell me that's "synapse strengthening," which would take minutes or hours. We've examined synapses with the most powerful microscopes. No one has ever found a human memory by microscopically observing synapses or any part of the physical brain. We can't even find any information storage code in the known physical brain, outside of the genetic code used by the DNA of all cells, which only has chemical information, not conceptual or memory information.
Science journalist: But at least the known physical brain can explain memory recall, right?
Professor Smith: Not at all. Humans can recall complex learned information instantly, given a single word. For example, if you say "Waterloo," I may instantly say "A battle in 1815 in which Napoleon Bonaparte suffered his final military defeat." But how could I retrieve such information instantly, using a visible physical brain lacking any of the things that make instant information recall possible? It would be like finding a needle in a haystack. We know from our work with computers the kind of things that a system needs to be able to instantly retrieve information: things like addressing, sorting and indexing. No such things exist in the visible physical brain.
Science journalist: So if we imagine this "dark brain" we can account for some things that the known physical brain cannot explain?
Professor Smith: Yes, exactly. There are all kinds of other things we observe that we cannot explain with the mere idea of the known physical brain. Consider out-of-body experiences. People often report floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from above such bodies, particularly during near-death experiences. There's no credible way to account for that using a physical brain trapped in your skull. But you can account for it assuming that someone's invisible dark brain can leave his body. Then there's the well-documented reality of ESP. You can't account for extrasensory perception with the known physical brain. But such a thing could be possible if we each have an invisible dark brain that has powers and limits we don't understand.
Science journalist: So has someone photographed such a "dark brain"?
Professor Smith: No, presumably because it's made of some kind of energy or matter we can't currently measure or photograph with our current instruments.
Science journalist: But is it scientific to postulate some important causal reality is invisible?
Professor Smith: Of course it is. That's what cosmologists and astrophysicists do constantly. Such scientists are always appealing to some invisible and mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" to account for things they can't explain. If cosmologists and astrophysicists can do that, why can't neuroscientists do something very similar, by postulating a dark brain that is not directly observable?
Science journalist: But what could be the cause of such a "dark brain"?
Professor Smith: We don't know. There could conceivably be some natural cause of dark brains. But if there was a natural cause, dark brains would have to have originated through some way unlike anything evolutionary biologists or developmental biologists understand.
The imaginary Professor Smith might have great success in advancing such a theory, just as long as he kept using this term "dark brain" and avoided using the term "soul" or "spirit," which would mean basically the same thing. Neuroscientists might well be willing to believe in something exactly the same as what the common person understands under the names of "soul" or "spirit," as long as such a thing was described using the term "dark brain." But neuroscientists senselessly refuse to believe in such a thing (despite so many reasons for believing in it) as long as someone uses the terms "soul" or "spirit." It's like there is a tribal taboo that neuroscientists are committed to, one that unreasonably forbids them from using the words "soul" or "spirit."
This is quite clever, amusing, and plausible.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for the kind words, Robert.
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