More Indications Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Think or Remember

Several of my previous posts have examined the unsuccessful attempts of neuroscientists to give credible answers to basic questions that might be asked by a person believing their claims that brains produce minds and that brains store memories:

• In my previous post "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Store a Memory," I examined an article by a neuroscientist in The Guardian, one entitled "What happens in your brain when you make a memory?" I showed the lack of credibility in the supplied answer, which wasn't even a self-consistent one, with the author switching from a claim that memories are stored in synapses to the different claim that memories are stored in neurons. 
• In my previous post "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory," I looked at the answers given at an expert answers site to the question "How are memories retrieved in the brain?" In general we got the impression that none of the writers had a credible story to tell. 
• In my previous post "Exhibit B Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory," I looked at the glaring inadequacies of a paper entitled "The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval."  I pointed out the authors simply ignore the whole speed problem of explaining instant memory recall.  Their paper makes no mention of such a thing, and doesn't use words such as "speed" or "quick" or "fast" or "instant" or "instantaneous."  The authors also ignore the issue of how a brain could decode (during memory retrieval) encoded information stored in a brain. Their paper does not use the words "decode," "decoding" or "translate."  The paper merely refers in passing to some research they claim has "potentially interesting translational implications," but give no details to clarify such a claim.  Nor does the paper have any discussion of some theory of a read mechanism that could be used to read memories from brains. Searching for the word "read" in the paper produces no relevant sentences. 

In the same vein, let me discuss a recent article on The Conversation web site, one entitled "How Your Brain Decides What to Think." The article is written by Valerie van Mulukom, an assistant professor of cognitive science. The author gives no sign that she understands any such thing as how a brain could think or decide. All we know is that humans think things and decide things, not that brains do such a thing. 

The article starts out by making an appeal to a dubious social construct, something called the "default mode network," which is not a discrete thing in the brain, and not something clearly suggested by nature, but merely some arbitrary concept invented by neuroscientists. We read this:

"How do thoughts seemingly completely unrelated to the present pop into our heads? Why do we remember certain things and not others? Why does our mind go off on tangents and why do we have daydreams? Underlying these processes is a shared pattern of common brain activity, in regions which together make up the 'default mode network', discovered and named by neurologist Marcus Raichle in the early 2000s. It’s engaged when we are daydreaming, thinking about ourselves or others, recalling memories, or imagining future events."

The "default mode network" reference is to a not very relevant or impressive paper entitled "A default mode of brain function." That paper attempted to draw conclusions based on extremely dubious brain scan studies guilty of the usual Questionable Research Practices that plague the great majority of brain scan studies, problems such as way-too-small study group sizes, and the use of misleading colorization. Figure 1 of the "A default mode of brain function" paper refers to another paper that was based on extremely dubious studies using way-too-small study group sizes (with Table 1 of that paper showing an average of only 9 subjects per study group). And so it goes in the very dysfunctional world of neuroscience: one paper drawing dubious conclusions based on some other papers that used dubious practices or shoddy research methods; and when you go through the laborious process of tracing the citations back to the original studies, you must always end up with dubious research based on things such as brain scans with way-too-small study group sizes. 

Claims made that there is such a "default mode network" are criticized in the paper here, which finds such claims unsound. A paper here claiming to find signal strength changes in this "default mode network" merely finds changes no greater than 1 part in 200 (and often much less), which is unimpressive, since whenever changes so small are reported, you should suspect mere random fluctuations, mere noise that is being misinterpreted as a sign of something significant. 

As for the claim made by van Mulukom that this "default mode network" is "engaged when we are daydreaming, thinking about ourselves or others, recalling memories, or imagining future events," it is contrary to the main claims originally made about such a network, such as this claim made by the previously mentioned paper: "The Default Mode Network (DMN) regions exhibit deactivation during a wide variety of resource demanding tasks."  The people introducing the idea of a "default mode network" described it as a baseline or "rest mode" that could be studied when people's minds were at rest. On page 17 of the paper here, we read this claim:

"It has been repeatedly found that a set of brain structures display correlated temporal fluctuations in their hemodynamic response and the very same structures display reduced activity when any of a large number of cognitive tasks is deliberately performed. This network has been named the default mode network (DMN) (e.g., Shulman et al. 1997; Gusnard and Raichle 2001; Raichle and Snyder 2007; Buckner et al. 2008)."

But van Mulukom has strangely described this supposed "default mode network" as "engaged when we are daydreaming, thinking about ourselves or others, recalling memories, or imagining future events." This conflicts with the main way such a supposed "default mode network" has often been described. Neurons fire continuously throughout all parts of the brain. So you would never do anything to explain why a mental activity occurs by merely mentioning that some brain activity is going on in some parts of the brain while that mental activity is occurring. 

What is going on with van Mulukom's answer seems to be just another example of the strategy long-used by neuroscientists, a strategy which can be described like this: when someone asks you how the brain does something, just refer to some part or subset of the brain, to make it sound like you understand the matter. A different neuroscientist gives us an example of how this works:

"Yet a minority—the clever ones—always asked a series of awkward questions. 'Where in the brain does perception occur?' 'What initiates a finger movement before cells in the motor cortex fire?' I would always dispatch their queries with a simple answer: 'That all happens in the neocortex.' Then I would skillfully change the subject or use a few obscure Latin terms that my students did not really understand but that seemed scientific enough so that my authoritative-sounding accounts temporarily satisfied them....My inability to give satisfactory answers to the legitimate questions of my smartest students has haunted me ever since. I had to wrestle with the difficulty of trying to explain something that I didn't really understand."

Next in her article van Mulukom gives us some dubious references to brain networks, referring to an "executive control network" that is not actually anything anyone has shown to exist. She says this:

"When the default mode network is engaged, other networks in the brain are down-regulated or become less active, such as the executive control network and other brain regions involved in attention, working memory, and decision-making. This is what allows the brain to wander."

This is just a claim that a brain switches around between different networks when doing different things, which doesn't amount to any explanation of how a brain could think or remember. Similarly, if you claim that your refrigerator can write essays and write computer programs, and someone asks how a refrigerator could do that, you are not giving any credible explanation if you say something like "My refrigerator switches between different electric circuits, using one circuit to write essays, and another circuit to write computer programs." 

Often arbitrarily using words such as "circuit" or "network," the names neuroscientists give to particular regions of the brain reflect arbitrary social conventions and speech customs of the neuroscientist community. The wikipedia.org article on the supposed "default mode network" show no actual contiguous regions of the brain, but two areas on different sides of the brain. There is no solid rationale for calling such separated regions  a network. Since the concept of the "default mode network" was introduced, claims about what it consists of and how it behaves have fluctuated very much in the neuroscience literature. If you do a Google image search for "default mode network," you will see 7 or 8 different depictions, which all disagree with each other about which parts of the brain make up such a network. A reference to so unstable and arbitrary a concept should not do anything to persuade us that van Mulukom has done anything substantial to explain  how a brain could think or remember. 

In the last five paragraphs of the essay, van Mulukom does nothing to suggest that she has any understanding of how a brain could produce a thought or recall a memory. We merely have five paragraphs talking about thought and memory, the kind of thing someone might write if they were trying to describe thought and memory without saying anything about a brain. There is no mention of anything specifically neural or specifically brain-related other than a passing use of the phrase "thoughts and memories brought up through the default mode network." Again, the author is using the phrase "default mode network" contrary to how that phrase was originally used in the neuroscience literature, to refer to some baseline state at which a mind is at rest, or some parts of the brain that become less active during cognitive activity.  

No one can ever give any explanation of how a material thing could produce an abstract idea. We do, however, have some idea of how certain machines are able to process data in a way that some attempt to compare to thinking.  Although they are incapable of conscious thought, computers can do logic and data processing by means of things such as these:

(1) a central processing unit, a small part of a computer with a unique architecture unlike any other part of the computer;

(2) an operating system, an extremely complex library of software functions of general usefulness;

(3) application programming code that follows various syntax rules so it can be executed by an interpreter or a compiler;

(4) things such as "if/then" logic, variables that store text or numbers, and programming control structures such as loops.

No such things exist in the brain. With the exception of the genetic processing apparatus that exists throughout the body, which processes only lists of amino acids in DNA, there is no place in the brain where some sequence of instructions is processed the way a computer processes sequential instructions. The brain has nothing like a computer operating system, and no application programming code. There is no place where we see "if/then" logic being processed, and we can find no place in a brain where variables store values such as numbers and text strings. We cannot detect in the brain anything like the engineering that a computer uses to process information.  It has been pointed out by one expert that current neuroscience theories are not even able to explain how a brain could store a single number. 

As for memories, we know from computers the kind of things a system needs for it to allow the permanent storage and instant retrieval of memories: things such as a read/write unit for writing information and reading information, a stable place allowing newly acquired information to be stably stored for decades, an encoding system capable of storing information as tokens, and a system of addressing and indexing, allowing fast retrieval of particular items of information. No person has ever found any such things in the brain. The brain has nothing we know of capable of writing memories, nothing we know of capable of reading memories, no addressing system, no sorting system, no indexes, and no known encoding system by which human learned knowledge could be translated into neural states or synapse states. It is claimed that memories are stored in synapses, but such things are very unstable, being built of proteins with an average lifetime of less than two weeks, and being connected to unstable dendritic spines that do not last for years. Closeup microscopic examination of the main structural part of synapses (synaptic terminals) shows nothing that looks anything like stored information.  

The ability of humans to think, imagine, remember things for a lifetime and instantly recall rarely remembered facts is not credibly explained by brains. Claims that such things are produced by brains are speech customs parroted by a belief community that neuroscientists belong to, similar to dogmas passed down from generation to generation within some church.

Attempting to explain memory, van Mulukom has made this hesitant statement: "It’s thought that the brain stores memories in a reconstructive, associative way, storing memory details in a distributed manner and bringing them together upon retrieval – rather than in a strictly reproductive way, with video replays of whole events stored in chronological order." Instead of making it easier to explain how memories could be retrieved from a brain, this idea greatly worsens the problem. 

Particular neurons in the brain are not addressable. There is no position location system or sorting system that could possibly be used by the brain to identify the exact tiny location of a stored memory. Also, humans do not at all remember any numbers associated with a storage location in the brain. I may learn the story of how George Patton led a tank army and helped liberate Bastogne during World War II, but I do not at all learn any “brain location coordinate” or location address that I associate with the name of George Patton, some neural location number that I could use to instantly retrieve the exact location of the information that I had learned about George Patton.

So if a memory or learned information is stored in some exact spot of the brain, how could your brain ever instantly find that exact spot? It seems that it could never do this, which would be like instantly finding a needle in a giant haystack. The brain would never know the exact spot to read a particular memory.

You do not at all get around this difficulty by suggesting the idea that a memory or a piece of learned information is scattered or distributed in multiple locations across the brain. The main difficulty is explaining instantaneous recall. If a brain has to search scattered storage locations in the brain, that would not be any easier than finding a single storage location; it would instead be harder. We would then have the same problem: how is it that those exact locations can instantly be found? Similarly, if  a family is somewhere in New York City, and you don't know their address, without an electronic device you won't be able to find the family very quickly; and it's not going to be any easier if the family is scattered across three different apartments in different parts of the city, which would make finding the family even harder. You do not solve a "how was the needle instantly found in the haystack" problem by converting it to the even harder problem of "how were just the right few needles instantly found in multiple haystacks?" Moreover, the idea of a brain instantly bringing together scattered fragments to instantly make a unified conceptual whole creates an "instant reassembly" problem that would be an additional explanatory nightmare, with such a thing being some miracle of instant assembly as implausible as someone instantly assembling cut-up pieces of a photo after the pieces had been scattered in pages of different books on different bookshelves.  

A 2022 paper makes this confession:

"We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."

A recent paper on memory gives us an example of authors who can't get their story straight. First, we hear the utterly false claim that "Over the last few decades, numerous discoveries have been made regarding the properties of memory ranging from identification of the molecular mechanism(s) underlying memory formation to establishing the different temporal phases of memory." No such identification has occurred. Then we are told "the physical form of memory is elusive," a statement contradicting the previous boast. Almost all of the references in the paper are references to junk science experimental studies that did not provide good evidence for anything, because the studies were guilty of Questionable Research Practices, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes. In a particular section we have a quote showing the authors cannot get their story straight:

"In conjunction with recent engram studies which indicate that a subpopulation of ‘engram cells’ store a given memory, it is appealing to assume that a particular memory resides in a distinct population of synapses made by axons terminating on engram cells, or by axons of engram cells onto target cells which may comprise inhibitory interneurons as well as excitatory projection targets. Engram studies remain largely at the level of the cellular engram, though there is a growing body of engram studies that are driven by and give insight into the synaptic engram."

Our authors are flip-flopping all over the place, switching between a narrative that memories are stored in cells, a narrative that memories are stored in synapses outside of cells, and a narrative that memories are stored in axons outside of cells. There is no good evidence for any of these claims. The authors sound like some husband asked why he is home very late, who says, "I was working very late at the office -- uh yeah, I'm late because I went to a baseball game, seriously, I'm home late because I went to a movie." 

A 2019 paper is entitled "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase." We read this in the abstract:

"The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost. Having perseverated on a paradigm — divergent thinking — that is theoretically incoherent, the field has neither produced intelligible data on the brain mechanisms of creativity nor developed alternative approaches to study the topic. This paper brings into sharp focus the three confounds — validity, false category formation, compound construct — that cripple this paradigm and shows how the use of in-vogue neuroscientific concepts — right brains, prefrontal cortex, default mode network, connectivity — might have contributed to the illusion of progress in the field." 

A 2022 scientific paper says, "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." A 2015 paper "The Unsolved Problems of Neuroscience" very optimistically lists the following as some of the "Problems that we should be able to solve in the next 50 years":

• What causes psychiatric and neurological illness?
• How do learning and memory work?
• How do we make decisions?
• How does the brain represent abstract ideas?

No progress has been made on any neural explanation of the the last three of these, contrary to the insinuations of van Mulukom. Mario Capecchi, a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, states, "I would agree that our most glaring ignorance is how our brain works which can be couched in various paradigms." A Princeton professor of neuroscience named Lynn Enquist says, "The major and exciting problem is the brain – how does it work?" Another neuroscientist named Eagleman lists these as unsolved problems:

"How is information coded in neural activity? How are memories stored and retrieved? What does the baseline activity in the brain represent? How do brains simulate the future? What are emotions? What is intelligence? How is time represented in the brain? Why do brains sleep and dream? How do specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another? And, finally, What is consciousness?”

Scientists say things like this because they have no understanding of how a brain could store a memory, no understanding of how a memory could last for a lifetime, no understanding of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory, no understanding of how conceptual information could be transfered between different parts of a brain, and no understanding of any neural way by which a brain could come up with an idea or an insight or make a decision.

A Doctor Carves Up Claims About Mental Illness, Brain Structure and Genes

The Mad in America site (www.madinamerica.com) is not a philosophy of mind site, but a site dealing with the shortfalls of biological psychiatry, a psychiatric approach based on the idea that mental illnesses are mostly caused by brain states (as opposed to a person's life history and living conditions). At the Mad in America web site there are often well-written and scholarly articles that help to debunk some of the claims of "brains make minds" claimants. An example was a recent article by Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD.  Near the beginning he makes this statement: "Despite 15 years of intense studying, I have been unable to find any important contribution of biological psychiatry to our understanding of the causes of psychiatric disorders and how they should best be treated." Referring to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the doctor says, "The fact is that ADHD is a social construct and that no reliable studies have shown any biological origin for this construct, or that the brains of people with this diagnosis are different to the brains of other people." The doctor states this:

"Another textbook noted that the findings obtained with structural and functional scans were inconsistent and varying, especially those obtained with functional MR scans that measure small changes in blood flow to various areas of the brain while the patient is given various tasks. This whole area is a mess of highly unreliable research. A 2009 meta-analysis found that the false positive rate in neuroimaging studies is between 10% and 40%.  And a 2012 report written for the American Psychiatric Association about neuroimaging biomarkers concluded that 'no studies have been published in journals indexed by the National Library of Medicine examining the predictive ability of neuroimaging for psychiatric disorders for either adults or children.' "

The doctor then tells us this about a 2012 analysis of brain imaging studies:

"Carp found that many of the studies didn’t report on critical methodological details about experimental design, data acquisition, or analysis, and many studies were underpowered. Data collection and analysis methods were highly flexible. The researchers had used 32 unique software packages, and there were nearly as many unique analysis pipelines as there were studies. Carp concluded that because the rate of false positive results increases with the flexibility of the design, the field of functional neuroimaging may be particularly vulnerable to false positives. Fewer than half of the studies reported the number of people rejected from analysis and the reasons for rejection, and the median sample size per group was only 15, which generates an enormous risk of selective publication of those results that happened to agree with the investigators’ prejudices. The order of processing procedures also permits substantial flexibility in the analyses. Replication is essential for the trustworthiness of science, and scientific papers must report experimental procedures in sufficient detail that allows independent investigators to reproduce the experiments. This is far from the case in imaging studies."

The doctor tells us that the same Carp analyzed a single brain scanning study, and found that using all of the different analysis pathways in the literature, that some "6,912 unique analysis pipelines" could be applied to the data, with almost as many different possible results arising from such analysis differences. That's pretty much a situation that can be described as "whatever you want to see, you can find," just by doing trial and error with different analysis pipelines until you see what you want. You can describe the situation with a rule of "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." 

The doctor tells us this:

"In 2022, other researchers used three of the largest neuroimaging datasets available including a total of around 50,000 individuals to quantify brain-wide association studies’ (BWAS) effect sizes and reproducibility as a function of sample size.76 The median sample size was only 23 people. The researchers found that BWAS reproducibility requires samples with thousands of people. As a commentator wrote, the study showed that almost every person diagnosed with depression will have the same brain connectivity as someone without the diagnosis, and almost every person diagnosed with ADHD will have the same brain volume as someone without ADHD.77 Yet, in the small studies, correlations were almost always greater than 0.2 and sometimes much larger, which, as the researchers wrote, should not be believed."

To help understand what is going on, imagine some scientist who happens to believe in astrology, and who believes that wealth is associated with month of birth. Using a large sample size such as 1000 subjects, no significant correlation will be found between these things.  But it will be easy to report some small correlation if the researcher uses some small sample size such as only 15 subjects, and if he doesn't pre-register a particular specific hypothesis (such as the hypothesis that people born in June tend to end up wealthier), and if the researcher is free to not publish any result not matching what he hopes to find (something called the file drawer effect).  Free to look for either slightly greater wealth or slightly less wealth for people born in any of 12 months of the year, and using only a small sample size such as 15 subjects, there will be a good chance that a small correlation will be found. Such a study (finding what is only false alarm noise) resembles the typical brain scanning study using only a small number of subjects. But for the scientist doing such a brain scan study, things are even easier. Instead of having only 12 months of the year to test, looking for some spurious correlation, such a scientist has hundreds of tiny brain regions he can check, until a little "statistical significance" can be found. 

Unreliable junk correlations can always be found by people searching for such correlations in small data sets involving a small number of subjects such as 15. Such correlations will dissolve like the morning mist once a much larger set of subjects is tested. In general, we should have no confidence in any brain scan study that used only a dozen or two subjects in any of its study groups. Unfortunately, the great majority of such brain scan studies fall into such a category. 

The doctor cites the following, an indication that many brain scan papers may not even match the data collected:

"The experience of the Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Brain is also relevant to consider when assessing the merits of brain scanning studies in psychiatry. In 2020, he described what happened when he requested to see the raw data in 41 of the 180 manuscripts he had handled. Upon his requests, 21 of the 41 manuscripts were withdrawn by the authors, and he rejected a further 19 'because of insufficient raw data,' which suggested that the raw data might not exist, at least for some of the cases. Thus, only 1 of 41 papers (2%) passed his reasonable test."

On another page the same doctor states this about attempts to show a genetic basis for mental illness:

"Many billions of dollars have been spent by the US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) on finding genes predisposing to psychiatric diseases and on finding their biological causes. This has resulted in thousands of studies of receptors, brain volumes, brain activity, and brain transmitters. Nothing useful has come out of this enormous investment apart from misleading stories about what the research showed. This might have been expected from the outset. It is absurd, for example, to attribute a complex phenomenon like depression or psychosis or attention deficit and hyperactivity to one neurotransmitter when there are more than 200 such transmitters in the brain that interact in a very complex system we don’t understand."

The doctor dismisses claims that ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is caused by smaller brains:

"The study that claimed that children with an ADHD diagnosis have small brains has been widely condemned. Lancet Psychiatry devoted an entire issue to criticisms of the study. Allen Frances, chair of the DSM-IV task force (DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, issued by the American Psychiatric Association), and Keith Conners, one of the first and most famous researchers on ADHD, re-analysed the data and found no brain differences."

The doctor points out that many of the researchers claiming brain links to mental illnesses have financial conflicts of interests, which can happen when a researcher receives money (directly or indirectly) from some pharmaceutical manufacturer who stands to profit when scientists make "brain problems cause mental illness" claims. On another page of the Mad in America site, we read this: "A study published in the Community Mental Health Journal finds that two-thirds of psychopharmacology textbooks have authors and/or editors that receive payments from pharmaceutical companies." We read of 11 million dollars paid to "11 of 21 editors/authors over a seven-year period." 

Pharmaceutical manufacturer money is only part of the reason for regarding the typical experimental neuroscientist as being someone like a bribed juror.  Today's scientists live in a "publish or perish" culture in which scientists are judged by how many papers they get published and how many citations such papers get. A scientist will be far more likely to get the prized research grant money if he proposes an experiment that might help to confirm some existing dogma about the brain, rather than an experiment that might produce results conflicting with such dogmas. Also, a scientist who finds no link between brain scans and some mental state has to report what is called a negative result or null result. But many journals have a policy of favoring papers reporting a positive result. So such a scientist has a great incentive to fiddle with his data analysis pipeline until some positive result can be claimed. The more the reported result fits in with prevailing dogmas of neuroscientists, the more likely the paper will be to get published, and the more paper citations the scientist will get. The more some ambiguous or borderline or questionable result is described in a paper title or abstract as showing a clear and important result, the more the authors will get the prized paper citations. Being part of such an ecosystem in which only results claiming to support prevailing dogmas are rewarded, such a scientist may be no impartial judge of truth, but more like a juror bribed to reach a particular conclusion. 

Oh really?

In the article here, the doctor describes claims in psychiatry textbooks that psychiatric conditions such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances. He states, "The studies that have claimed that a common mental disorder like psychosis or depression starts with a chemical imbalance in the brain are all unreliable.'

Widely Read Scientific Paper Asks, "What If Consciousness Is Not an Emergent Property of the Brain?"

A recent scientific paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is entitled "What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models." The paper shows a view count of more than 30,000.  The paper (by Helane Wahbeh, Dean Radin, Cedric Cannard and Arnaud Delorme) has some good aspects and some shortfalls. 

The abstract states this:

"This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time. The mechanisms underlying these 'non-local' properties are vaguely suggestive of quantum entanglement in physics, but how such effects might manifest remains highly speculative."

It is very good to be paying attention to "phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time." But an immediate attempt to suggest such things are suggestive of quantum entanglement is probably misguided. Quantum entanglement seems to be a mysterious purely physical anomaly, having to do with very low-level microscopic things like particles, not very high-level non-physical things such as minds.  

The paper then starts talking about "consciousness." It is always a mistake when pondering the human mind to be using language that keeps using this very reductive term "consciousness" over and over again.  What we need to explain are minds, which involve a host of capabilities and very many diverse aspects, many very mysterious. The term "consciousness" is pretty much the weakest term you could use to describe human minds.  Using the term "consciousness" for the human mind is like using the word "roundness" to describe planet Earth, a magnificent panoply of organisms. 

I will pass over the paper's discussion of materialist theories of consciousness, some of which are discussed in other posts of this blog. In its middle the paper begins to discuss what it calls "non-local consciousness theories." Is that a good term to be using to describe alternatives to the dogma of "brains make minds"? No, that's not a very good term to be using. The first reason is that the shrink-speaking reductionist term "consciousness" is a very poor term to be using for the enormous wonder that is the human mind, something with so many different aspects and mysterious capabilities. The second reason why "non-local consciousness theories" is not a very good term to be using is that we should not box ourselves in to any assumption that the human mind is non-local. 

The following two ideas are both reasonable possibilities:

(1) There is some cosmic mind storehouse or mind source, and each person's mind is like a little piece of that cosmic mind; so your mind isn't really local. 

(2) Your mind very much is local, but not at all a product of your brain. At some point in your early history you were given a soul or spirit that is at this time locally confined to your body.  Such a gift may have come from some divine reality of cosmic mind-providing facility. After your body dies, that soul or spirit will be released, and will continue to exist. 

We cannot call scenario 2 a non-local theory of your mind, because it does postulate that your mind is currently quite a local reality. There is also quite a bit of parapsychology evidence suggesting that scenario 2 is more likely than scenario 1.  For example, during near-death experiences people often report floating out of their bodies, just as if they had a soul or spirit locally confined to a body before that happened. 

So the term "non-local theory of consciousness" is not a term that should be used for most viewpoints denying that your brain is the source of your mind.  It is better to refer to such theories as "top-down theories of the mind," contrasting such theories with "bottom-up theories of the mind" in which it is assumed that the mind arises from low-level neural activity. Another good term that you might use is to call such theories "non-neural theories of the mind."  It is a mistake to commit yourself unnecessarily to some idea that the mind is non-local, when there is so much to suggest that our minds are currently mostly local. 

The paper attempts to introduce the idea of "non-local theories of consciousness," saying this:

"Traditional materialists envision a world in which mathematics is more fundamental than physics, which is more fundamental than chemistry, which is, in turn, more fundamental than biology. Thus, in this way, physical processes are foundational to the generation of our biology. However, suppose we envision that consciousness is actually more foundational than physics. In that case, we can imagine that these other physical disciplines can arise from consciousness. In other words, if biology emerges from chemistry, chemistry from physics, and physics emerges from consciousness, then from this perspective, non-local consciousness phenomena would no longer be regarded as anomalous because consciousness can transcend some physical laws. Theories proposing this idea have been offered by Federico Faggin, Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, Vernon Neppe, and numerous others. Most of these theories are speculative, while others are supported through mathematical arguments or empirical data (Hoffman et al., 2015; Neppe and Close, 2020; Faggin, 2021b). We briefly review a sample of non-local consciousness theories."

We then are given little summaries of eight different theories called "non-local consciousness theories." Are all speculative, and the paper fails to give any compelling rationale discussed for any of these theories. The discussion of these sounds like strange metaphysics. Some excerpts:

"Operational probabilistic theory": "Faggin views the physical world as a virtual reality metaphor, in which sophisticated avatars controlled by conscious beings interact with each other, where the body that controls the avatar exists outside the computer and is not part of the program."

"Interface theory of perception": "Space and time emerge from conscious agents’ exchanges (Hoffman, 2014). Hoffman proposes that our perceptions (i.e., the conscious agents) are not views of a grounded truth but are more like a personal computer’s operating system and interface." 

"Analytic idealism":"Analytic idealism is a metaphysics that postulates consciousness as Nature’s sole fundamental ground and that all natural phenomena are ultimately reducible to universal consciousness....Because there is only one universal consciousness, individuated living beings are described as dissociated mental complexes of the 'fundamentally unitary universal mind' (Kastrup, 2021, p. 267)."  The description sounds intriguing, but the link is merely to a paper that is behind a paywall. Searching for "Bernardo Kastrup" on Google Scholar will, however, give you some interesting papers he wrote, such as the one here.  It is possible to advance a credible form of idealism (the idea that everything is mental), but it requires elements far beyond what Kastrup postulates, which seems to lack any idea that we are here on purpose.  What we need to explain are human minds and human mental phenomena in all their diversity, things vastly more than mere consciousness. So postulating a "universal consciousness" that we are fragments of does not seem adequate. 

"Triadic dimensional vortical paradigm": "To address these discrepancies, Neppe and Close describe a mathematical model in which we exist in a 9-dimensional finite, quantized, volumetric, spinning reality embedded in an infinite continuity (9D+)...The model proposes that the 4D world we ordinarily experience is the physical component of this 9D+ existence."

"Zero-point field":  "Joachim Keppler (2018) proposes a theory where the energy of the vacuum is the basis for consciousness, the so-called “zero-point field” (Keppler, 2018). This is a theory of panpsychism where consciousness permeates the universe yet is only concentrated and apparent in certain circumstances. Unlike other panpsychism theories, it is not the 'matter' that is conscious but empty space."

"Orchestrated objective reduction theory":  This seems to actually be a version of "brains make minds" claims, and does not seem to belong in a list of "non-local theories of consciousness."

"Schooler hypothesis of subjective time":  The speculation described does not actually sound like a non-local theory of consciousness.

"Theory of double causality": The speculation described does not actually sound like a non-local theory of consciousness.

None of the discussion of these theories seems to provide much of a reason for thinking that your mind does not come from your brain. In addition to the many shortfalls of the brain which indicate that it is not a credible source for our brain (which our paper authors have failed to mention), and in addition to the evidence from psychical research, which frequently involves evidence of capabilities and experiences that cannot be explained by assuming that your mind merely comes from your brain, there is a very large additional rationale for thinking your mind does not come from your brain. But the "What If Consciousness Is Not an Emergent Property of the Brain?" fails completely to mention any part of that rationale. A quick sketch of that rationale is below:

(1) Filled with a host of engineering effects and thousands of impressive extremely complex protein inventions, and a host of fine-tuned cellular complexities, a human body is an enormously organized dynamic structure that is not credibly explained by any theories of material science, which utterly fail to credibly explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full adult human body (a structure of enormous hierarchical organization not specified by DNA or its genes, which merely specify low-level chemical information).  

(2) Hitting many a "distant bullseye," the physical universe is an extremely fine-tuned reality with many laws and just-right fundamental constants that would be incredibly unlikely to ever exist in any random universe. 

(3) There is therefore an extremely large basis for assuming that our physical reality must be the result of some unfathomable purposeful agency acting to produce accidentally unachievable physical states. Purposeful agency is evident throughout biology, and the person denying such teleology is like a person on a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean who denies the existence of water. 

(4) Given such a large basis for assuming that our physical bodies arise from some unfathomable purposeful superhuman agency, it is plausible to assume that such a purposeful causal agency is also the ultimate source of our minds. 

For a fuller discussion of such a rationale, read my post "Your Physical Structure Did Not Arise Bottom-Up, So Why Think Your Mind Did?" 

After pretty much wasting the reader's time by talking about eight speculative theories claimed as "non-local theories of consciousness," the "What If Consciousness Is Not an Emergent Property of the Brain?" paper begins to discuss some reasons for believing that your mind does not come from your brain. These reasons include:

(1) "Perceiving information about distant locations": That's a timid term for what is discussed, which is remote viewing.  The paper fails to mention specific compelling evidence for remote viewing, although such evidence exists. A much better way of establishing "perceiving information about distant locations" would be to discuss the evidence for clairvoyance, which is massive, and stretches over about two hundred years. 

(2) "Perceiving information from another person" : again we have a timid term for what is discussed, which is ESP (extrasensory perception) or telepathy. Referring to the Ganzfeld protocol for ESP tests, we read this:

"The chance of the 'receiving' person correctly selecting the actual image is thus 25%. Over 120 published experiments have used this protocol, comprising about 4,000 individual trials, and the overall hit rate was just over 30%."

Results vastly better than this in large trials where the expected rate is 25% or less (with success rates as high as 73%) have been published, but our authors fail to mention them.  This is another example of a senseless, timid tendency of people to ignore parapsychology results gathered before 1970. 

(3) "Perceiving the future": we hear some details about the Bem precognition tests, with a claim that "There was a pre-stimulus effect demonstrating a physiological response prior to the unpredictable stimuli (fixed effect: overall effect size = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.15 – 0.27, z = 6.9, p < 2.71 × 10–12; Mossbridge et al., 2012)."

(4) "Apparent cognitive abilities beyond the experience/learning/skill of the person exhibiting them."  We get this interesting paragraph:

"Another example is Indriði Indriðason (1883–1912), who apparently spoke multiple languages he did not know (Haraldsson, 2012). Similarly, Alec Harris spoke at length to witness Sir Alexander Cannon in Hindustani and Tibetan, two languages that Harris would have had no way of knowing, but Sir Alexander did know (Vandersande, 2008, p. 113). Other xenoglossy cases have also been documented by University of Virginia scientist Ian Stevenson (Stevenson and Pasricha, 1979, 1980). While anecdotal and subject to the known biases of experiential reports, these cases have been meticulously well-documented. Similar cases of 'acquired' and 'spontaneous savants' refer to individuals who, either through a traumatic event or with no apparent cause at all, suddenly gain exceptional musical or mathematical skills (Treffert, 2009)."

(5) "Non-local consciousness experiences are common."  We are referred to some studies finding that psychical or paranormal experiences are very common.  One of the studies has the interesting result below, in which 20% of a sample of "elite American scientists" report having had an out-of-body experience (OBE),  and significant fractions of all groups reporting ESP experiences. 

(6) "Cognitive abilities can be retained when the brain is seriously compromised."  Very many types of cases of this type could have been reported, using items such as I discuss in my posts here and here. But the only phenomenon discussed is terminal lucidity. We get a citation of the paper here referring to this mysterious phenomenon. 

The evidence discussion in the second half of the paper is not half as strong as it could have been. But at least we can be thankful that the authors have introduced some readers to important evidence they may not have known about. Overall, the authors of the paper have been pretty clumsy and ineffective in presenting the case that the cause of human minds is something other than brains. The case for such a thing is many times greater than you would think from merely reading their paper. The biggest shortcoming of the paper is that the authors have totally failed to pay attention to a line of evidence extremely relevant to their subject, the many physical shortfalls of the brain which suggest very strongly that it cannot be the source of human mental phenomena such as instant learning, instant recall, very fast thinking, and the preservation of memories for more than 50 years. Such physical shortfalls of the brain include things such as the very short lifetime of synaptic proteins, the very high level of multiple types of signal noise in the brain, the lack of any known information writing or information reading mechanism in the brain capable of explaining the preservation or recall of school-learned information ("synapse strengthening" being no such thing), the lack of any addressing or indexing in the brain that could help explain instant recall,  and the unreliable transmission of signals in chemical sysnapses, which transmit a nerve impulse with a reliability of less than 50%.  Such very relevant physical shortfalls of the brain are discussed in detail in other posts of this blog. 

Another Case of Physicalism Yielding Massive Reality Denial

It is a very great fallacy of try to reduce the problem of human mentality (the problem of explaining human minds and human mental phenomena) into some super-shrunken problem called "the problem of consciousness," or maybe "the problem of experience." The people who try to do such a thing are like someone who tries to reduce astronomy into a mere problem of explaining comets. Just as explaining comets is only a tiny sliver of the job of astronomy, explaining consciousness is only a tiny sliver of problem of explaining minds. 

The silliness of people who pose a mere "problem of consciousness" or "problem of experience"  rather than a problem of human mentality is illustrated in the visual below. The word cloud on the screen shows a vast diversity of mental things to be explained: 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, recognition, attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, OBEs and NDEs. But the person in front of the screen has foolishly ignored this great complexity and phenomenal diversity, and has wrongly stated that all that he needs to explain is consciousness.

Recently we had the publication of an essay by a physicalist who offers an attempt to solve what his essay describes as the problem of consciousness, with what his essay brags is an "ingenuously simple solution" to such a problem.  The physicalist attempted to explain the mind like this:

(1) He attempts to reduce a human mind to a mere perception of external objects. 

(2) He then says that your perceptions are simply the objects you are perceiving. 

Voila! Through such lunacy, the mind is eliminated. According to the physicalist, you simply are what you perceive. So when you look at some dog poop, you are the dog poop. 

This is very crazy indeed. Yes, you have perceptions, but you also have a mind, that includes beliefs, memories, ideas, knowledge, and many other things. There is nothing known in the physical world that corresponds to such things. No one has ever been able to observe beliefs, memories, ideas or knowledge in the human brain, and any one claiming to see such things in a brain is just someone seeing what he wants to see, like someone seeing the face of Jesus in his toast. 

Our physicalist writes this:

"So what is your experience? It is the subset of physical objects taking place relative to your body. The mind is identical with the (relative) object."

I notice a very big error in the quote above. We first have a question "what is your experience?" The answer then refers to "the mind," as if a mind is mere experience. No, a mind is an extremely diverse reality vastly more than just "your experience." Your experience is partially a stream of sensations that changes from day to day and hour to hour. Your mind is a stable thing that includes very much knowledge that persists from year to year, as well as beliefs and attitudes that can stay the same year after year. Your mind is vastly more than just your experience, and your mind is vastly more stable than your experience, which changes from hour to hour. 

Our physicalist states that his theory "has no place either for ideas or thinkers, only for relative objects that bring each other into existence by means of mutual causal relations." This is just a very silly form of reality denial. There really are ideas and thinkers, and any philosophy of mind that "has no place" for them is nonsense. The idea that there are no ideas is just itself a very dumb idea, like denying the existence of the sun and the moon.  Our physicalist is like a person who has written a book trying to prove there are no such things as books. 

What about all the mental realities other than perception? Our physicalist who has denied all such things makes a feeble attempt to make his denials not so embarrassing by claiming that imagination is a "special case" of perception. No, imagination is not a "special case" of perception. Perception is when you see things with your eyes open. Imagination (which can be entirely non-visual) is when you can get ideas about things you may have never seen. Imagination can involve eyes-closed visualization of something you have never seen. Or imagination can involve something that is not at all visual. I may imagine the abstract idea that an extraterrestrial civilization might be killed by a cosmic gamma ray burst, without having any visual image associated with such a thing. Imagination is not perception, and is not a "special case" of perception. 

Our physicalist then refers to intentionality, first-person perspective and self-consciousness, and claims that these are mere "epicycles." His references to epicycles is extremely inappropriate. In the philosophy of science, an epicycle refers to some imaginative and not-very-plausible hypothetical detail dreamed up to explain some shortfall in your theory. Things such as intentionality and first-person perspective and self-consciousness are not imaginative hypotheses but indisputable realities, and they were not invented to help anyone solve shortcomings of theories. 

What's going on in the physicalist's essay is mainly just massive reality denial, done in the service of physicalism (the utterly erroneous belief that nothing exists but the physical). He says that his theory of the mind "has no place for anything but objects in relation to each other (relative objects)." That's the most massive kind of reality denial, because so much of reality is reality other than "objects." Physicalism should come with a warning label like this: "CAUTION: This philosophical assumption can lead to reality denial a thousand times more severe than Holocaust denialism." Because physicalism is a position radically opposed to the massive irrefutable reality of human mental experience that is not physical, many a physicalist will become the most extreme type of denialist. 

Physicalism is like this

The physicalist's reasoning I have mentioned is an example of what you might call "desert-island reasoning." By "desert-island reasoning" I mean the kind of armchair reasoning someone might do after being stranded alone on a desert island, without having access to any books or communication devices. Desert-island reasoning is not based on studying the details of human experience or the details of the human body or the details of the physical universe. A good sign you have some desert-island reasoning is when you get a long essay (like the one I have quoted from) that does not include any mention of specific facts or the experiences of specific people, and does not include a link to any external writing. Desert-island reasoning will not get you very far in understanding minds. To get some good ideas about what a human mind is:

(1) Study at great length the vast diversity of human experience, including anomalous human experiences and anomalous medical case histories.

(2) Study at great length the organization and functional complexity and vast diversity of engineering effects in human bodies and in other organisms.

(3) Study neuroscience and the behavior of neuroscientists with a very close examination of the current methodological shortfalls of neuroscientists, a close examination of the church-like belief community conformism and overconfidence of neuroscientists,  and also a very close examination of the many physical shortfalls of the human brain that undermine claims that the brain is the source of the mind and the storage place of memories.

(4) Study the sudden origin of the universe and the evidence for enormous fine-tuning in the fundamental constants and laws of the universe. 

(5) Study carefully the biggest mysteries science has not been able to explain, such as the origin of life and the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body. 

All of this studying and additional thought  may lead you to eventually get some good ideas about the nature of the human mind, perhaps something like what I discuss here. You won't get very far by lazily ignoring such studies, and by merely trying to use a little armchair reasoning to get some "ingeniously simple solution" to long-standing problems of the mind.