Goofs at the Brains Blog Site

 A site with the title of "The Brains Blog" can be found at the URL of https://philosophyofbrains.com/.  It has a byline of "Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind." Let's look at some of the posts at the site:

• "Caitlan Mace: Vehicle Indeterminacy in Memory Neuroscience." The post starts out with a repetition of groundless boasts of neuroscientists about "memory engrams," with the author stating, "I draw on neuroscientific investigations of memory engrams, which are neural representations of memory that result from learning-induced changes, retain information about some fact, feature of the world, or past experience, and are used to retrieve that information for memory recall." All such claims are spurious and bogus, and are not backed up by any robust research. No one has ever discovered in a brain any such thing as a representation of a fact or anything anyone learned. Microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to produce a single sentence any one ever learned, and has also failed to produce a single word anyone ever learned, with there also never being any discovery of a single image anyone ever saw or a single pixel of any such image. Later the author makes this statement conflicting with her previous boast: "It remains unclear which kind of structure—molecules, synapses, or neural ensembles—performs a representational role in any case."  The correct answer is: there is no evidence that any of these things play any such role in representing something someone learned; and the failure to find such evidence is a very strong for believing that no representations of learned information exist in the brain. 
• "Self-Consciousness and 'Split'  Brains: The Objection from Unified Behavior." We have very bad misrepresentation from a writer who states, "In yesterday’s post I argued that a split-brain subject is not unitary qua thinker but is actually composed of two thinkers." Split-brain subjects are those who have two separated hemispheres of the brain. You can have such subjects by two ways. On one hand, quite a few people are born without any of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain (a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum). Then there are those born with such fibers, who undergo operations in which such fibers are severed, to prevent very bad seizures that are resistant to drug treatment. Contrary to the prediction of the claim that brains make minds, which predicts that split-brain patients should have two minds, such split-brain subjects have a single unified mind. Attempts by materialists to claim otherwise are one of the worst examples of deception by materialists. 
• "What do out of body experiences tell us about self-consciousness; Or, Disorders of Self-Consciousness Part 5". In the 300+ posts at this blog supposedly dedicated to "the philosophy and science of mind," this is the only post mentioning out-of-body experiences in its title. We have no substantive discussion of the topic, but merely an attempt to gaslight the significant fraction of the population that has such experiences, by accusing them of "disorders of self-consciousness." The post has no evidence of any deep scholarship of this topic. The author makes a bad description of conditions under which out-of-body experiences occur, failing to mention that they occur during close encounters with death such as cardiac arrest. 
• "Introduction" and "CFP: Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice." These are the only two posts that come up when I search for "near-death experience" at the Brains Blog site. The second post has only a mere mention of "near-death experience" as a bullet list of topics that will be discussed in some journal that is being promoted. The first post says nothing of any substance about near-death experience, other than the promise that in some book it will be shown that near-death "experiences are contingent on the brain." That is not true, because such experiences often occur during cardiac arrest when the brain is electrically shut down, in the state called asystole in which brain waves appear as flat lines. 

The topic of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are two of the most important topics that should be covered by any blog dealing philosophically with the brain and the mind. But we get nothing of any substance on these topics in the 300+ posts on this blog. 

The physical design of the blog is poor.  You cannot conveniently navigate its posts, unless you wish to do endless clicking on titles that are only followed by a few lines from the corresponding post. None of the posts is tagged. So you cannot conveniently examine all posts on a particular topic, unless you are willing to laboriously type in topic names in a search bar. 

Using the blog's search tool, I search for topics that should be discussed by a blog of this type that has been published since 2005, without getting any results. Specifically:

• A search for "clairvoyance" gives 0 results. 
• A search for "telepathy" gives 0 results, as does a search for "Ganzfeld" (a word that would be used by anyone decently discussing ESP research), as does a search for "extrasensory perception." 
• A search for "HSAM" gives 0 results, as does a search for "hyperthymesia."
• A search for "autistic savants" gives 0 results, as does a search for the most famous autistic savant, Kim Peek.
• A search for "psychical research" gives only one result, the gaslighting article mentioned above. 
• A search for "eidetic memory" gives 0 results, as does a search for "photographic memory."
• A search for "hemispherectomy" gives only one badly misinforming article, which does not mention hemispherectomy cases.
• A search for "near-death experience" gives only two results, neither mentioning near-death experiences in the title, and neither discussing the topic in any depth.
• A search for "hydrocephalus" produces 0 results, as does a search for "French civil servant," meaning that the blog is failing to discuss cases of loss of most of the brain but good mental performance.
• A search for "morphogenesis" produces 0 results (see here and here for why the topic is very relevant to the topic of how minds arise).
• A search for "terminal lucidity" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "synaptic delay" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "dendritic spines" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "Questionable Research Practices" (an epidemic in today's neuroscience research) produces only 1 result, which fails to discuss the topic decently. 
• A search for "protein turnover" produces 0 results, as does a search for "protein half-life" and "protein lifetime."

These are all topics that are very relevant to "the philosophy and science of mind." It seems that the experts long writing at the Brains Blog are failing to adequately study the things that they should be studying in order to have an intelligent philosophy of mind consistent with observations. 

What are some of the things a philosopher of mind should be doing? They include these:

• He should be constantly testing the claims that brains make minds,  by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be enumerating all of the mental powers that humans have, and be asking whether there are credible neuroscience explanations for each such power, expressed in the form of detailed theories "hitting all the bases," rather than just vacuous hand-waving catchphrases. 
• He should be constantly testing the claim that brains store memories, by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim, and observation failures that may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be critically examining the research output of today's neuroscientists, always asking whether best-practices are being followed, and looking for cases in which low-quality research is being produced because of the use of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes and unreliable measuring techniques. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to cases of exceptional human mental performance, cases in which people seem to remember better and recall better and think faster and calculate better than a brain could ever do. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports and experiments suggesting psychic phenomena and paranormal human mind abilities, reports suggesting humans have mental abilities that a brain could never allow. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports of experiences such as out-of-body experiences, reports we would never expect to occur if the brain is the source of the mind. 
• He should  be giving the deepest study to medical case histories involving loss of brain tissue or loss or half or more of the brain, to see whether they produce results expected under "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" assumptions, or whether they produce results not expected under such assumptions. 
• He should be making a very deep study of human biology and morphogenesis, to see whether there is a "failure to explain the origin of a human body" that is of great relevance to the discussion of whether there is a failure to explain the origin of a human mind.

I don't see much of these activities going on at the Brains Blog site.