The Human Brain Project Spent Billions, But Failed to Bolster Claims About Brains Making Minds

In 2013 the European Union launched a 2.7 billion dollar Human Brain Project. Its incredibly ambitious goal was to create a super-computer model of the human brain. The EU's Human Brain Project announced goals of proving conventional dogmas about the brain. At the page here we read that "the HBP is conducting a coordinated series of experiments to identify the neuronal mechanisms behind episodic memory, and validate them by computational models and robotic systems."  This is an assertion of the unproven dogma that episodic memory can be explained by brain processes; and it is a goofy statement, given how silly it is to think that such a dogma could be validated by doing computer models or research into robots. 

Today (September 30, 2030) the Human Brain Project has officially concluded. It has released a statement here summarizing what it accomplished in its ten years of heavy funding, a statement entitled "The Human Brain Project ends: What has been achieved." We read the following statements that fail to mention any notable discoveries about the brain:

• "The HBP has produced more than 3000 academic publications and more than 160 digital tools, medical and technological applications, an open research infrastructure – EBRAINS – as well as a multinational and uniquely interdisciplinary community that would not have come together otherwise."
• "The HBP has driven outstanding advances in brain research and in the development of medicine and technology applications. Among the research highlights accomplished by the HBP are the world-leading 3D atlases of the brain, breakthroughs in personalised brain medicine, and the development of new brain-inspired technologies, e.g., in artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing.". 
• "The HBP has built a digital platform that fosters large-scale collaborations. The EBRAINS digital research infrastructure offers access to digital tools, models, data and services, facilitating the integration of brain science across disciplines and national borders."

There is no mention in the wrap-up document of any specific discovery that was made about the brain from all this research. The document does not claim that anything was done to back up the main claims neuroscientists make about brain, such as the claims that brains are the source of the human and the storage place of memories. 

The wrap-up document does have a link to a scientific paper. We read this:

"Over the last year, a position paper initiated by the HBP about the future of digital neuroscience has been collaboratively written by around 100 international authors from inside and outside of the project. 'The coming decade of digital brain research – A vision for neuroscience at the intersection of technology and computing' has been published, with an executive summary outlining the main points." 

The executive summary document makes no claims about specific important discoveries about the brain made by the Human Brain Project.  The document makes this untrue claim: "Using models of cerebellar, hippocampal and sensory areas, scientists are building robots increasingly capable of exploring and learning from their environment, based on principles from embodied cognition." Scientists do not build robots based on things they have learned about brains. So called "neural nets" do not have an architecture matching any brain architecture, and the brain has nothing like the logic-heavy software that drives robots. DNA is sometimes wrongly compared to software, but it lacks the "if/then" logic that is at the center of software.  

The summary document discusses a "roadmap" of future research goals that includes these not-yet-accomplished items on a "to-do" list:

"1. Identify and integrate the rules of plasticity,

learning and adaptation into existing multilevel brain models.

2. Identify constraints of brain plasticity and tools

to modulate it for the benefit of patients.

3. Reveal mechanisms of memory consolidation

and translate this to medicine and technology."

It sounds just as if nothing has been done to verify any brain basis for learning, and that the authors are "crossing their fingers" hoping that they might be able to discover such a thing in the future. But if there was a brain mechanism for learning, wouldn't scientists have already discovered it after spending billions since 2013 on brain research?  How could scientists still have failed to discover a brain mechanism for learning, if it existed, when biochemists discovered the DNA basis of inheritance around 1955, and scientific instruments are so much more powerful today? 

In a square marked "Cognition and Behavior" we have these "to-do" items as goals of future research:

1. "Develop a coherent framework describing

the mechanisms of cognitive functions using

a multiscale perspective, from sensory- and

visuomotor to more complex cognitive functions.

2. Formulate a coherent framework for language,

as a uniquely human complex cognitive function, integrating insights from linguistics and neuroscientific research using multilevel brain

approaches, and using brain development as a

window to specialisation.

3. Link concepts of different hypotheses about

self-consciousness to each other and to mechanisms at the cellular, molecular and genetic levels."

It sounds just as if nothing has been done to verify any brain basis for cognitive functions, and that the authors are "crossing their fingers" hoping that they might be able to discover such a thing in the future. But if there was a brain mechanism for cognitive functions such as thinking and understanding, wouldn't scientists have already discovered it after spending billions since 2013 on brain research?

The full paper referred to by the wrap-up document (co-authored by 100+ neuroscientists)  states this confession: "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." Got it: after spending billions, our neuroscientists are still empty-handed looking for a neural basis of memory and mind. 

What we have is a situation rather like scientists asking for billions to research finding crashed extraterrestrial spaceships at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, and then announcing (after spending those billions) that they hope in the next ten years to find evidence of a spaceship at the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Our neuroscientists of the Human Brain Project were given billions over ten years to back up their claims that brains store memories and that brains make minds. They failed to provide any evidence backing up such claims. And now they're like, "Don't worry -- we have those things on our to-do list." 

There are a couple of good principles to remember here. One is that if you don't know how, then you probably don't know if.  For example, do you not know how John Finkleheimer killed Sally Sorrow? Then you probably do not know that John Finkleheimer did kill Sally Sorrow. And if you don't know how brains can store memories or recall memories, then you sure don't know that brains do store memories or recall memories. You merely know that people store memories or recall memories.

Another good principle to remember is: if thousands of people spent billions of dollars looking for something in a human organ and didn't find it, then it probably doesn't exist in such an organ.  Many thousands of neuroscientists have used billions of dollars looking for some mechanism by which brains could store and retrieve memories, and they never found such a mechanism. They also never found any sign of learned information or human memories by studying brain tissue.  From such a failure we should conclude that such things probably do not exist in brains. 

Members of a rigid belief community with evidence-ignoring dogmas resembling the creed of some sect, our neuroscientists senselessly keep thinking to themselves, "To explain minds and memory, we must keep looking in the brain!"  A similar error might occur on a planet Evercloudy, one perpetually covered in thick clouds. Looking for the source of the heat that warms their planet, and being unable to see their sun, and lacking the imagination to postulate such a sun, the scientists on such a planet might follow a principle of "keep looking for heat sources on the ground or underground." But that would be a senseless principle. The main source of their planet's heat would be from something unseen, something outside of their planet. Since brain explanations for mind and memory are never credible, and since brains have very serious shortfalls which rule them out as explanations for mind and memory, we must look for a source of human minds outside of our bodies. Our scientists keep looking only for bottom-up explanations for minds, but they should be considering top-down explanations.