An Interview Leaves You With a "Neuroscientists Gone Wrong" Impression

 At a neuroscience web site with many a misleading article (www.thetransmitter.org), I see an interview with a neuroscientist who boasts that he will correct our misconceptions about the brain. But the neuroscientist starts making some false statements immediately. The interview is entitled "Romain Brette reveals fundamental flaws in commonly assumed neuroscience concepts."

Neuroscientist Romain Brette goes wrong immediately by claiming "Neurons are not components; they are living units, and this is how they should be treated."  Neurons are actually components. The dictionary defines a component as "a part or element of a larger whole." Neurons are components of the brain and components of the human body. 

Brette then soon commits another serious error by stating, "If you look inside a neuron, you will never find some stuff called information." That is dead wrong. Neurons do not have any memory information that anyone has been able to discover. The microscopic examination of brains has never yielded a single speck of information that anyone ever learned -- not a single word or even a single letter or number. But a neuron does have a very large body of information: the genetic information stored in DNA. Such DNA absolutely does have information, specifically information about which amino acids make up particular proteins used by your body. 

It is true that all kinds of false claims have been made about what is in DNA, such as the false claims that DNA stores a recipe, program or blueprint for building a human body But such false claims (debunked here) should not make us go to the erring extreme of denying that the DNA in cells has information. DNA emphatically does have very much information: low-level chemical information. 

Most absurdly, Brette claims that it is "impossible" that a neuron could contain information, which is as erroneous as claiming that it is impossible that a book could store information. 

An interviewer named Paul Middlebrooks then gives us the suggestion that we are being seriously misled by neuroscientists calling the brain a prediction machine. Middlebrooks says this:

"Brains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, no, and no. That's what Romain Brette says. That's his response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works." 

Later on in the interview, Brette makes this extremely false claim: "Nothing can contain information." 

But Brette does make some good points. He says that comparisons between computers and brains are invalid, for various reasons. For example, he says this:

"If you just look at a voltage trace of a neuron, it's fluctuating. It is not stable. People then talk about firing rates because they want to have stable quantities, but it's a cheat. Of course, if you measure anything, you get a number, but whatever it refers to is actually fluctuating. The next second, you get a different number. Intrinsically, it's a fluctuating system. It's not like a bit that you can write and then later on read several times."

Later Brette criticizes the talk of neuroscientists who confuse cognition with computation. He says this:

"Logical propositions are coded in the activity of the neuron. That was the assumption that, deep down, it's computation with smaller operations, small logical operations, and every kind of behavior is something like that. It's a theory, right? It just didn't turn out to be correct. It is basically a theory that cognition is made of computation."

Brette is referring here to the theory of computationalism, debunked in my four posts here. The theory commits two huge errors. The first is describing the brain as if it was something like a computer. The brain lacks almost all of the characteristics of a computer, as shown in the diagram below. The second error of computationalism is conflating computation with cognition. Cognition requires an understanding and conscious mind, and no computer is a mind. 

Later Brette makes this statement, which seems to complain of misleading language by his neuroscientist colleagues:

"It's kind of a mashup of different ideas that you find in the neuroscience literature. You have a mashup of classical computationalism when you say that you have mental representations that the brain computes and so on. You have connectionism where, in fact, not everything is symbols. Are there neural representations? Yes, sometimes, but sometimes they are not. I don't know. It's intermediate variables which don't necessarily represent something in particular. Then, you also have dynamical talk in neuroscience, but that is referred to in terms of computation. It's completely confusing."

The interview is promoting Brette's new book "The Brain, in Theory." Looking that book up on Amazon, I read this in the description of the book: "He [Brette] proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components." The brain as a community? That sounds as misguided as "the brain as a computer." 

If you look up the book on Amazon, you can read its beginning. I did that, and I was not very impressed by its first pages. Brette starts out (pages 2-3) by arguing that the brain cannot be like a computer, because computers are engineering, and Darwin said that organisms are just products of unguided natural processes, not results of deliberate purpose. How silly to be starting out your book on brains by saying that we must follow Darwin rather than starting out by appealing to the relevant physical facts about brains. You can debunk "the brain is a computer" idea easily enough without appealing to authority, by discussing the lack of similarity between brains and computers. 

Brette has a blog, and on that blog he states this: "A striking fact about mainstream theories of the brain is that they take their inspiration mostly from theoretical computer science and engineering theory ('codes', 'computation', 'algorithms', 'information' (in bits), etc.), while being largely ignorant of theoretical biology (e.g. theories of life, organisms and evolution), and even dismissive of biology (just 'implementation')." It seems that those outside of the neuroscience field are not the only ones saying much is amiss with neuroscientist theories of the brain. 

On the page here of his blog, Brette addresses the issue of reproduction, one which biologists have failed to credibly explain. Brette states this:

"One fundamental question is: how can a system produce a copy of itself? This question was famously addressed by von Neumann, who argued that the system must build a new copy from instructions, i.e., the genome is a representation of the organism. I have shown that this does not apply to living organisms and proposed an alternative (11). The alternative is that the parent system simply produces a new system that depends on the parent’s structure, but not necessarily a copy. Production becomes self-reproduction as iterated systems converge to a fixed point, in the absence of building instructions. The genome then acts as a transmissible constraint shaping development, not building instructions. In other words, biological reproduction is an emergent property."

Brette seems to realize that genomes have no instructions for building a body. Correct -- genomes do not even have instructions for how to build a cell or any of its organelles or any instructions on how to build protein complexes.  This is a gigantic clue about the fundamental nature of reality, one of two reasons why the origin of every human is a miracle beyond the explanation of today's science. Scientists cannot explain morphogenesis because DNA lacks any specification for how to build a body or any of its organs or cells. So scientists lack a credible account of how you physically arose. And they also lack an explanation for how you mentally arose, because of endless reasons (discussed at length at this site) why brains fail to explain minds and memory. 

A materialist does not escape that problem by making the nonsensical claim that "biological reproduction is an emergent property." A property is a simple characteristic of something, such as height, weight, mass, volume and so forth. For humans, biological reproduction is a nine-month process of the most enormous complexity. Calling that a "property" is as absurd as calling your life a property.

In one post of his blog, the neuroscientist  Brette confesses that "there is currently no convincing theory of consciousness." 

I watched on television recently a four-part series on the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. The story of Chernobyl is a story of how overconfidence in experts led to massive numbers of people being poisoned by radioactivity. The Soviet Union haughtily thought of its nuclear scientists as being the greatest in the world. But the Chernobyl reactor had a terrible design flaw. Because of the flaw, when someone pressed a button that was supposed to shut down the reactor for a test, this caused the opposite result: a runaway increase in the nuclear reactions, causing a meltdown. 

Largely because of overconfidence in technoscientific experts, very many got poisoned by the meltdown at Chernobyl. And largely because of overconfidence in biology experts, the thinking of very many got poisoned, when they uncritically accepted unbelievable dogmas being peddled by brain specialists whose bungling has been as bad as those who designed the reactors of Chernobyl. We have a strong reason for suspecting that another case of bungling by technoscientific experts in Eurasia caused a disaster worse than Chernobyl. But amazingly, people keep bending their knees to authorities, and keep following the bad speech customs fostered by neuroscientists. And so, rather than making unobjectionable and indisputable claims such as "I had trouble remembering" or "I was thinking a little slowly," people make silly dogma-dripping statements  such as "my brain had trouble remembering" and "my brain was thinking slowly." 

How We Got Misinformed About "Grandmother Cells"

Each neuron fires between about 1 and 200 times per second, with the firing rate being unpredictable. So neurons are a noisy, unpredictable signal source; and that kind of source provides opportunities for noise mining and pareidolia, the occasional finding of some desired pattern by people scanning noisy, variable data looking for such a pattern. Similarly, at a restaurant that makes 200 pieces of toast every day using different types of bread, there is an opportunity for noise mining, in which someone checking each piece of toast may eventually claim to see the face of Jesus in a slice of toast. 

Let us look at the history of claims of "grandmother cells." The term refer to some neuron that might allegedly respond only when a person sees some particular type of visual, such as a picture of the person's grandmother. The 2002 article "Genealogy of the 'Grandmother Cell'" by the late Charles G. Gross gives us some background on how the idea of such a cell got started. Gross tells us this:

"The term originated in a parable Jerry Lettvin told in 1967. A similar concept had been systematically developed a few years earlier by Jerzy Konorski who called such cells 'gnostic' units."

So according to Gross, the concept of a "grandmother cell" arose independently of observations, without any empirical warrant.  But then Gross starts telling an unwarranted self-serving tale that evidence was found supportive of such an idea. He claims, "In the early 1970s, my colleagues and I working at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported visual neurons in the inferior temporal cortex of the monkey that fired selectively to hands and faces (Gross and others 1969, 1972; Gross 1998a)." Gross is here engaging in self-citation. Let us look at the papers Gross refers to, and see whether they actually gave any evidence to back up such a claim. 

• The 1969 paper "Visual Receptive Fields of Neurons in Inferotemporal Cortex of the Monkey" by Gross and others which you can read here. We have no specific data backing up any claim that anything had been found like a neuron that only responds to some particular image. We merely have this vague statement: "There were several units that responded most strongly to more complicated figures. For example, one unit that responded to dark rectangles responded much more strongly to a cutout of a monkey hand, and the more the stimulus looked like a hand, the more strongly the unit responded to it." The paper gives no data backing up such a claim. 
• The 1972 paper by Gross is the paper "Visual properties of neurons in inferotemporal cortex of the macaque." Only the first page of the paper is publicly available here. That page makes no claim backing up claims of anything like a grandmother cell. 
• The "Gross 1998a" citation is a citation of the book "Brain, Vision, Memory" by Gross, which you can read here.  On page 198 Gross claims that "he did not publish a full account of a face-selective neuron until 1982," which shows that the previous two citations were inappropriate. On the same page Gross misspoke by claiming that "soon thereafter, a flood of papers on such cells appeared." No such flood occurred. He mentions a 1982 paper by Perrett, Rolls and Cann ("Visual Neurones Responsive to Faces in the Monkey Temporal Cortex"), which you can read here. 

Nothing that is in any of these citations supports the claim that anything like a face-selective cell or a hand-selective cell was discovered. If we look at the 1982 paper by Perrett, Rolls and Cann ("Visual Neurones Responsive to Faces in the Monkey Temporal Cortex"), which you can read here, we also find nothing impressive. The paper claims that "Of the 497 cells recorded in the STS region there was a sub-population of at least 48 cells which gave responses to the sight of faces that were two to ten times as large as the responses to other stimuli tested." There is no claim that these cells fired only when other faces were shown, and Figure 3 (cherry-picked as the strongest evidence of a "face responsive cell") shows the cell firing many times when things other than faces were shown. The graphs in the diagram are examples of cherry-picking, showing results from a few cells that seemed to fire the most when the subject was shown faces. 

Some mathematical analysis will show how unimpressive the result discussed above. In the study there were five types of sensory stimuli: faces, gratings/geometric stimuli, complex 3D stimuli, somatosensory stimuli, and auditory stimuli. Let us imagine that we are recording how 497 cells respond when a subject is exposed to one of a small number of categories of stimulus, such as five.  Given a high random variability in how the cells respond, with the firing rates varying randomly between 1 and 200 times per second, and given a relatively small number of trials, and only a small number of types of stimulus (such as only five), we would expect that by chance there would be about 10% of these cells that would fire twice as often or more when a subject is exposed to one of the five types of stimulus. So the reported result that "there was a sub-population of at least 48 cells which gave responses to the sight of faces that were two to ten times as large as the responses to other stimuli tested" is not something unexpected, assuming purely chance results, and no actual "face sensitivity" or "face selectivity" going on in the cells. 

The claim by Gross to have discovered neurons that "fired selectively to faces and hands" was false. Neither he nor anyone else discovered any such thing. All that was going on was noise-mining.  Monkeys were being shown different visual stimuli, including faces and things that were not faces. The firing of hundreds of neurons were recorded, and researchers were drawing attention to the cells that happened to have the highest firing rate when faces were shown. No evidence was being presented of more neuron firing during face observation than we would expect to see from a random set of randomly firing cells that fired with a high variability. 

Later in the 2002 article "Genealogy of the 'Grandmother Cell'" by Charles G. Gross, Gross makes this claim: "Starting 10 years later, these finding were replicated and extended in a number of laboratories (e.g., Perrett and others 1982; Rolls 1984; Yamane and others 1988) and were often viewed as evidence for grandmother cells." The references do not actually refer to any papers providing evidence for grandmother cells. The 1982 Perrett paper is discussed above, and did not find any such evidence, but merely claimed "Of the 497 cells recorded in the STS region there was a sub-population of at least 48 cells which gave responses to the sight of faces that were two to ten times as large as the responses to other stimuli tested."  The Rolls 1984 paper is the paper "Neurons in the cortex of the temporal lobe and in the amygdala of the monkey with responses selective for faces."  It is merely another paper picking out some cells out of hundreds that fired more often when faces were shown, while also firing when things other than faces were shown. 

None of the papers that Gross has cited could intelligently be interpreted as evidence for grandmother cells, so Gross misleads us badly by claiming that such papers "were often viewed as evidence for grandmother cells." Later Gross confesses, "However, most of the reported face-selective cells do not really fit a very strict criteria of grandmother/ gnostic cells in representing a specific percept, that is, a cell narrowly selective for one face and only one face across transformations of size, orientation, and color (Desimone 1991; Gross 1992)." At the end of the paper, Gross deceives us by trying to make it sound like these alleged "face selective" cells may be something like "grandmother cells." But no evidence he has presented or cited has given any evidence for such "grandmother cells." 

The next big development on this topic occurred when scientists started reading the firings of neurons in individual humans. This is something that cannot be done by simply having a person wear an EEG cap on his head. The reading of firings of individual neurons in humans requires the implanting of electrodes into the brain.  Some people with drug-resistant epilepsy have electrodes implanted in their brains so that doctors can figure out where is the best place to do surgery to help cure their epilepsy. Neuroscientists have tried to leverage the implanting of such electrodes, to study the firing of individual neurons in the human brain. 

This has often been a morally objectionable type of activity by neuroscientists. The type of electrodes implanted in a brain to evaluate a patient for epilepsy are called macroelectrodes.  The type of electrodes implanted to record the firing of individual neurons are called microelectrodes. There is never any medical justification for implanting microelectrodes in addition to macroelectrodes. A scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)." In other words, there is no medical justification for implanting microelectrodes in the brains of epilepsy patients. Here is a quote from a scientific paper:

"The effects of penetrating microelectrode implantation on brain tissues according to the literature data...  are as follows:

1. Disruption of the blood–brain barrier (BBB);
2. Tissue deformation;
3. Scarring of the brain tissue around the implant, i.e., gliosis 
4. Chronic inflammation after microelectrode implantation;
5. Neuronal cells loss."

What is going on with attempts to find something like grandmother cells in humans is typically a morally objectionable affair in which very sick people are being put to unnecessary risks for the sake of scientists seeking fame and glory. Such affairs are so morally dubious that we should have a natural tendency to distrust the statements of scientists doing such research, just as we should have a natural tendency to distrust the statements of any person engaged in a reckless or shady activity. 

Similar to claims of a "grandmother cell" are claims of a "Jennifer Aniston neuron" that was activated only when a epileptic subject was shown a picture of Jennifer Aniston. The claim is unfounded, and does not match the data in the original paper. For a discussion of the shady business that went when claims like this were made, see the last seven  paragraphs of my post here. 

At the link here, a vision scientist describes some of what is going in studies like the studies mentioned above:

"Neuroscience, as it is practiced today, is a pseudoscience, largely because it relies on post hoc correlation-fishing....As previously detailed, practitioners simply record some neural activity within a particular time frame; describe some events going on in the lab during the same time frame; then fish around for correlations between the events and the 'data' collected. Correlations, of course, will always be found. Even if, instead of neural recordings and 'stimuli' or 'tasks' we simply used two sets of random numbers, we would find correlations, simply due to chance. What’s more, the bigger the dataset, the more chance correlations we’ll turn out (Calude & Longo (2016)). So this type of exercise will always yield 'results;' and since all we’re called on to do is count and correlate, there’s no way we can fail. Maybe some of our correlations are 'true,' i.e. represent reliable associations; but we have no way of knowing; and in the case of complex systems, it’s extremely unlikely. It’s akin to flipping a coin a number of times, recording the results, and making fancy algorithms linking e.g. the third throw with the sixth, and hundredth, or describing some involved pattern between odd and even throws, etc. The possible constructs, or 'models' we could concoct are endless. But if you repeat the flips, your results will certainly be different, and your algorithms invalid...As Konrad Kording has admitted, practitioners get around the non-replication problem simply by avoiding doing replications.” 

Later in the same scientist's blog, we read this year 2023 comment: "Articles published during the past decade bemoaning the inability of mainstream neuroscience to generate replicable or even reproducible outcomes are too many to count."  In the same post the scientist states this:

"If we weren't living it, it would be hard to imagine how a research culture could have strayed so far from the path of rationality as has the culture of neuroscience. Fundamental problems in theory and method have long been flagged (e.g. Teller, 1984; Jonas & Kording, 2018; Brette, 2019), but critiques have left barely a trace on the hard-beaten track of routine, mainstream practice."

More Candid Confessions of the Neuroscientists

 In my post "Candid Confessions of the Cognition Experts" which you can read here, and another similar post, I quote some cognition experts and neuroscientists who make confessions about matters such as the sorry state of neuroscience research, and how little neuroscientists understand how minds arise. Below are some more quotes of this type. 

I'll start with some quotes mostly using the phrase "in its infancy." Whenever scientists confess that something is "in its infancy," they are effectively admitting they do not have good knowledge about such a topic.

• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 

By making such confessions, scientists are admitting that they do not actually understand how a brain could store or retrieve memories. The reason for such ignorance (despite billions of dollars on funding to try to answer such questions) is almost certainly that the brain does not actually store memories and is not the source of the human mind.  

A similar confession is found in the recent paper here, where scientists confess "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." The truth is that no one has ever found the slightest evidence of any such thing as prior knowledge being represented in the brain, and no one understands how learned knowledge could ever be represented in a brain. 

An interesting paper is the paper "On the omission of researchers' working conditions in the critique of science: Critique of neuroscience and the position of neuroscientists in economized academia" by Eileen Wengemuth.  Wengemuth interviewed 13 neuroscientists about critiques of neuroscientists, apparently agreeing to quote them anonymously. She got some revealing quotes. 

A neuroscientist identified only as NW12 states this: "We still don't understand how molecules contribute to consciousness or the mind.”  On page 85 a neuroscientist identified only as NW2 makes a confession, which has a kind of "we must publish a paper even when we know it's junk" sound to it. First Wengemuth tells us this:

"One interviewee recounts an incident in which a new colleague pointed out a flaw in an experimental setup, which limited the validity of the conclusions drawn from the experiment. However, since she needed to have a publication soon, the interviewee [NW2]  describes that it seemed not possible to change the experimental setup and to repeat the experiment."

Immediately after that description, we have a quote from NW2:

NW2:  "She had a very good point and we never thought about it in two years of doing this experiment. We have a problem. (Both laugh) And nevertheless, we have to publish, because... you know, it's two years of work! So we will discuss this, we will account for it, we will try our best, but we probably don't want to rerun the whole experiment saying 'Oh, what happens if we change this other thing.' Once we've reached our conclusions..." 

I: "You said: 'But we still have to publish.' Did you mean, for example, that you got some grants and now you have to show, ok, we did something with that money?"

NW2: "Not so much based on grant money, but in terms of career. (...) I need papers to get my next job."

Get the idea? "The show must go on" as they say in the theater business. And apparently scientific papers must be published, to advance the career goals of neuroscientists,  even after it has become clear that bad methods were used (which seems like the majority of the time in contemporary neuroscience research). Discussing the quote above, Wengemuth says, "In this interview clip, it becomes clear that the interviewee perceives her working and research conditions as not allowing her to work in a way that would meet her own standards of good science."

On page 85 a neuroscientist identified only as NW9 seems to suggest that guys like him are playing fast-and-loose in their interpretations of what their experiments show, in order to get interesting-sounding claims that may increase the chance of publication in "high-impact" journals:

NW9: "We are working in a structure in which an increasing number of people are on third-party-funded positions, which are temporary. And one important criterion that decides who stays and who doesn't, is: who has published where? So journal impact factors. And publishing high impact often means: generalizing as much as possible in the interpretations and throwing as many limitations as possible overboard. "

Wengemuth describes what is occurring in that quote: "He argues here that the broad claims for which neuroscientists have been criticized also have to be understood as a way of getting one's article published in a high impact journal and thus increasing one's chances for a next job." Get the idea? Our neuroscientists are prioritizing career advancement over accuracy of statements.  It sounds like they are playing "fake it until you make it."

Yeah, right

A survey of Danish researchers found large fractions of them confessing to committing various types of shady or sleazy Questionable Research Practices.  A year 2024 follow-up study found a similar level of confession in other countries. The paper is entitled "Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? Cross-national evidence for widespread involvement but not systematic use of questionable research practices across all fields of research."  The title is inaccurate, because the confessions do reveal a systematic use of Questionable Research Practices.  Figure 2 of the paper reveals these confessions:

• About 60% of the polled researchers confessed to citing literature without reading it. 
• About 50% of the polled researchers confessed to reporting non-significant findings as evidence of no effect. 
• About 50% of the polled researchers confessed to granting "honorary authorship" to authors who did not participate in the study. 
• More than 50%  of the polled international researchers confessed to overselling results. 
• About 50% of the polled researchers confessed to HARKing, which is when some hypothesis is dreamed up to explain results in an experiment not designed to test such a hypothesis. 
• About 50% of the polled international researchers confessed to cherry-picking what data supports a hypothesis and what does not. 
• About 40% of the polled international researchers confessed to data dredging or p-hacking, a practice some times described as "keep torturing the data until it confesses."
• About 40% of the polled international researchers confessed to have refrained from reporting data that could weaken or contradict their findings. 
• About 30% of the polled international researchers confessed to gathering more data after the initially gathered data failed to show a significant effect. 

Postscript: In 2023 a vision scientist gave us this "doozy" of a quote  (link):

"Articles published during the past decade bemoaning the inability of mainstream neuroscience to generate replicable or even reproducible outcomes are too many to count.......If we weren't living it, it would be hard to imagine how a research culture could have strayed so far from the path of rationality as has the culture of neuroscience. Fundamental problems in theory and method have long been flagged (e.g. Teller, 1984; Jonas & Kording, 2018; Brette, 2019), but critiques have left barely a trace on the hard-beaten track of routine, mainstream practice." 

An Increase in Candid Confessions May Indicate an Ideological Regime Is Losing Support

 To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy,  we may use the term "ideological regime."  An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime.  For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:

(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;

(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;

(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;

(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.

In some countries,  there may be fewer ideological regimes: three, two, or rarely a single one. Looking at medieval or ancient history, we can probably find some cases in which religious beliefs were thoroughly entangled with political and economic beliefs, and in such countries there may have existed as few as only one ideological regime. 

An ideological regime consists of  both a system of belief and a social structure that supports such a system, making sure that it preserves its ascendancy, along with rules, traditions, customs or laws that help propagate the ideological regime. An ideological regime almost invariably has authorities that profess its belief doctrines. In some ideological regimes, such authorities may exist in a hierarchical order. In the Catholic Church there is a pope ruling over cardinals ruling over bishops ruling over priests.  In the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, there is not a very formal hierarchical structure of authorities. But informally there is such a hierarchy, consisting of four levels:

(1) Nobel Prize laureates at the top of the hierarchy;

(2) professors from the most prestigious universities on the second level;

(3) professors from less prestigious colleges or universities at the third level;

(4) mere PhD holders who are not yet professors at the lowest level of authority. 

The dogmas of an ideological regime are the debatable beliefs that the regime perpetuates. Under some ideological regimes, particularly openly religious ones, there may be a frank admission that articles of faith are being taught by the regime, and that an act of faith is required to accept such doctrines.  Under other ideological regimes,  there may be claims or pretentions that the dogmas of the regime are facts that any reasonable and well-educated person should accept. 

For example, under the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, various unproven claims about human origins or human brains may be sold as "facts of science," such as the dogma that the human mind is a product of the brain.  Under the ideological regime of Marxist-Leninism, various unproven dogmas about communism and class struggle were not described as dogmas or tenets, but were instead described as "facts of history" or "facts of economic science" that required belief from any reasonable scholar.  Under the ideological regime of money-centered consumerist capitalism, various assumptions may simply be taken for granted as rather obvious truths, such as the assumption that working 50 or 60 hour weeks at a job you don't like is well worth it if this allows you to buy some larger-than-you-need house that will cause your friends to be envious.  

The maintenance and preservation of an ideological regime requires the participation of many agents acting to perpetuate the regime.  The existence of esteemed regime authorities is not sufficient to achieve such an end. There usually must be various less prestigious  individuals who act to promulgate the teachings of the ideological regime, and possibly help punish and diminish any who dare to oppose its teachings. In the Catholic Church an example of such regime enforcers are nuns, deacons and Sunday school teachers, who lack the authority of priests, but do a great deal of the low-level indoctrination that helps to enforce the ideological regime. 

In the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, skeptics act as regime enforcers. The skeptics act to defame and disparage any of the very many people who report observations contrary to the reigning dogmas of Darwinist materialism, such as those who report inexplicable psychic experiences or apparition sightings or extrasensory perception.  In this regime other low-level regime enforcers or regime enablers are people such as high school biology teachers, who make sure that children are indoctrinated in the belief tenets of the ideological regime, and science journalists.

In the modern landscape of Darwinist materialism, science journalists tend to uncritically parrot whatever claims or speculations come down from professors in support of their belief dogmas, even when they are far-fetched claims such as monkeys rafting across the Atlantic ocean millions of years ago.  Such journalists are also careful to write articles that restate the belief doctrines of the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, and are careful to write little or nothing about observations in conflict with the teachings of such an ideological regime.  In the ideological regime of Marxist-Leninism, there were innumerable low-level enforcers, such as censors, local informers who snitched on dissident thinkers, and the gulag guards who helped to keep dissidents locked up in prison camps.  In the ideological regime of money-centered consumerist capitalism,  regime enablers include a host of pitchmen and social media sources that try to make you feel unworthy or second-class if you are are not consuming and purchasing as expensively as more high-spending people of a similar age. 

For an ideological regime to persist in a dominant manner, it is very important that information be carefully controlled. There are various techniques used to insure control. One technique is the publication of impressive-looking volumes or sets of volumes teaching no viewpoint other than the ideology and belief traditions of the ideological regime. For example, the ideological regime of Catholicism published the 15-volume Catholic Encyclopedia which was followed many years later by the 15-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia; and the ideological regime of Marxist-Leninism published an equally impressive-looking 65-volume set called the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. For decades the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism was promoted by the many volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the World Book encyclopedia, which would describe many unproven claims as if they were facts. Nowadays wikipedia.org has largely replaced such encyclopedias, and serves as the chief party organ of Darwinist materialism.  Similar to such encyclopedias are subject textbooks and journals in which you are indoctrinated in strict accordance to some ideological regime.  

In such encyclopedias and textbooks and journals there is almost always a rigorous filtration and control of information, so that the reader gets no information that might disturb his faith in the ideological regime served by the encyclopedia or textbook or journal.  So, for example, you will read nothing in the Catholic Encyclopedia that might shake your faith in Catholicism, and there was nothing in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that would shake your faith in Marxism-Leninism.  And on wikipedia.org, you will almost never read anything that shakes your faith in the belief doctrines of Darwinist materialism.  When such information sources discuss phenomena or viewpoints that conflict with the ideological regime they serve, any discussion will be carefully controlled so that mainly  negative information will be served up about the opposing viewpoint or the inconvenient phenomena.  

                                An indoctrination center of an ideological regime

When either a political regime or an ideological regime has complete information control, you will see it asserting its claims with the most dogmatic certainty. There will be no confessions of any major problems. For example, let us imagine an incompetent political regime led by a dictator, one in which 5% of the people are starving. If the regime has a perfect control over information, the newspapers may read something like this:

"Our glorious leader's success is shown in the wonderful happiness of our citizens.  All of them are so happy to be living in the paradise of prosperity that has resulted from the wise decisions of our brilliant leader."  

But if the regime has something less than perfect control over information, you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving:

"Our glorious leader is doing a wonderful job of preserving the health of our citizens.  You may have heard rumors that some people are starving. Do not believe such lies! They are spread by scoundrels trying to disrupt society."  

But if the stranglehold of the regime starts to weaken even further,  you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving: 

"It has become apparent that due to some temporary problem, many people are starving. But there is good news!  Our glorious leader is working hard on solving this problem. Because he is such a brilliant genius, no doubt the hunger problem will soon be solved."

And if the stranglehold of the regime starts to weaken even further,  you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving: 

"It has become apparent that many people in our country are starving.  Our leader is working hard on solving this problem. It is hoped that he will be very successful in fixing this very bad problem."

And if the stranglehold of the regime starts to weaken even further,  you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving: 

"Everyone is lamenting that so many people in our country are starving.  Our leader is working hard to try to solve this problem. Some are hopeful he will succeed. But others seem to be pessimistic about the actions he is attempting."

Once the newspapers of the regime start running stories as candid as the one above, the regime may be close to collapse. The examples above illustrate the idea that the more confessions we get in the press about the failures of a regime (whether political or ideological), and the more candid such confessions are, the closer such a regime may be to collapse or decline. 

In the early stages of the decline of an ideological regime, it will still be too dangerous in public discourse to flatly state that the regime is misguided or on the wrong track. But it may become permissible to make partial confessions that inform about some way in which the regime has failed. The weaker that the regime becomes, the more such confessions will appear, and the more candid such confessions will be. 

The ideological regime of Darwinist materialism still exerts a pernicious stranglehold over discussions of matters such as human minds and human origins. But there are signs such a stranglehold may be weakening. We are starting to see more and more confessions by scientists about explanatory failures of such an ideological regime. Such confessions are typically partial confessions in which someone will not say something very broad such as "we scientists are on the wrong track" or "some of our basic assumptions are false," but instead say some limited confession about some type of explanatory failure. Below are some examples:

• "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience.” -- Donald D. Hoffman Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California, "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem."
• "Little progress in solving the mystery of human cognition has been made to date." -- 2 neuroscientists, 2021 (link). 
• “To sum up, it can be said that when it comes to answering the question of how information is carried forward in time in the brain we remain largely clueless.” --  Cognitive scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory" (link). 
• " We don't know how a brain produces a thought." -- Neuroscientist Saskia De Vries (link). 
• "You realize that neither the term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing in the brain." -- neuroscentist Paul Ciskek (link). 
• "We know very little about the brain. We know about connections, but we don't know how information is processed." -- Neurobiologist Lu Chen. 
• "Computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not — never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" -- Senior research psychologist Robert Epstein.
• "The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost." -- Psychologist Arne Dietrich,  "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase."
• "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." -- nine scientists (link).
• "The central dogma of Neuormania is that persons are their brains....Basic features of human experience...elude neural explanation. Indeed, they are at odds with the materialist framework presupposed in Neuromania. Many other assumptions of Neuromania -- such as that the mind-brain is a computer -- wilt on close inspection. All of this notwithstanding, the mantra 'You are your brain' is endlessly repeated. This is not justified by what little we know of the brain, or more importantly, of the relationship between our brains and ourselves as conscious agents."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Aping Mankind," page xii (link). 
• "And so we are forced to a conclusion opposite to the one drawn earlier: that consciousness cannot be due to activity in the brain and that cerebral activity is an inadequate explanation of mental activity."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Brains and Minds: A Brief History of Neuromythology" (link). 
• "My own view of a secular universe, devoid of consciousness and intelligence 'beyond the brain' (Grof 1985) gave way little by little over several decades and now seems quite absurd." -- John Mack MD, Harvard professor of psychology (link). 
• "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were we able even to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, and follow all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges if such there be, and intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem,...The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable."  -- Physicist John Tyndall (link).
• "Many who work within the SMC [standard model of consciousness] assume that a nervous system is necessary and sufficient for an existential consciousness. While this is a common stance...we have yet to see a coherent defense of this proposition or a well-developed biomolecular argument for it. For most, it is simply a proclamation. Moreover, we have not seen any effort to identify what features of neural mechanisms 'create' consciousness while non-neural ones cannot. This too is simply a pronouncement." -- Four scientists, "The CBC theory and its entailments," (link).
• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "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."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "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." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 
• Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  
• The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "The past three decades have shown that psychiatry’s medical vision is neither scientifically credible nor morally sound." -- Justin Garson, professor of philosophy at Hunter College (link).
•  "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 

The quotes above are from the very large collection of similar quotes I have in my long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" you can read here. Many such confessions have been made, and they may be increasing in number and intensity.  The more such confessions appear, and the more severe the confessions are, the more we should tend to suspect that the stranglehold of Darwinist materialism is weakening, and that this ideological regime is "on the ropes."