The Press Often Gives Us Fake News About Brains

A significant fraction of the neuroscience news these days contains exaggerations, extremely dubious interpretations or downright falsehoods. Sometimes these falsehoods are so brazen that they must be branded as fake news. An outrageous example of fake news was a recent story in the British new source The Independent, a story with the phony headline, "Brain scan reveals patient’s ‘last thoughts’ just before they died in landmark study." Below are some of the reasons the headline and the story are as phony as a three-dollar bill: 

• The scientific study made no claim to have revealed the thoughts of the dying 87-year-old patient, nor did it even make any guess about such a thing. 
• No one is quoted in the article referring to last thoughts.
• The headline uses the phrase "just before they died," suggesting there were multiple patients involved in the new study; but there was only one patient. 
• The patient did not actually have his brain scanned as he died. Brain scans are done with MRI machines, and the patient was not being scanned in an MRI machine or any similar machine when he died.  Instead, there was a merely a reading of electrical activity by means of EEG electrodes. 
• There was nothing "landmark" about the study, as there have been electrode readings of the brain activity of numerous previous patients as they died.  The subtitle of the story makes the untrue claim that there were "first-of-a-kind brain scans," when nothing "first-of-a-kind" was done, and no brain scan was done.  
• As discussed below, there are very strong reasons for assuming that the patient in question was unconscious in the moments before death, and that he therefore was not thinking about anything just before dying. 

We don't need to read very far to find out how phony the story is. The headline claims "brain scan reveals patients 'last thoughts,'" but the subtitle states this: "First-of-a-kind brain scans of dying person indicate they may have been making ‘last recall of life’, scientists say." So the headline and the subtitle contradict each other. If scientists were merely speculating that the patient may have been recalling his life, then nothing has been actually revealed about what the patient was thinking.  Of course, the idea that you can figure out  someone's thoughts by looking at EEG readings is as nonsensical as the claim that you can find out someone's future life events by reading lines on his palms.  EEG readings are mere squiggly lines without any semantic content. 

The untrue "first-of-a-kind" claim is partially the fault of the Frontiers press release, which made this untrue claim: "This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever." You can very easily find out how untrue this claim is by using a Google search phrase of "EEG reading of dying patient," and using the Tools option to restrict the search results to be from 1/1/1990 to 1/1/2021.  In your search results you will get papers such as the 2017 paper "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death," and this 2017 press article about the study (which shows some of the EEG readings from four dying patients). 

Besides making the untrue claim above, the Frontiers press release is guilty of getting the ball rolling on this fake news story, by suggesting the utterly groundless idea that the EEG readings from a seizure-wracked dying patient in a coma did something to suggest the patient was recalling events in his life.  Here is a quote from the press release:

" 'We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,' said Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US, who organised the study. 'Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.' Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks. 'Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,'  Zemmar speculated. "

Notice the nonsense reasoning here. It's basically this:

(1) People have different types of brain waves, which occur when they do various things like thinking, recalling, meditating (which does not involve recall), and perceiving. 

(2) Some brain waves were measured in a person who died. 

(3) So maybe he was recalling important life events. 

This is nonsensical logic. The study has not provided the slightest reason for thinking that the dying person was remembering past events in his life. To the contrary, we can think of the strongest reason why a person would not be recalling important life events after having a sudden heart attack. The sudden heart attack would produce great pain and great distress, and under such conditions if you were conscious you would be no more likely to be recalling past life events than you would be if someone suddenly stabbed you in the chest. In fact, sudden fatal heart attacks instantly produce unconsciousness which should prevent anyone from engaging in thinking about past events.  

The scientific paper describes the patient's condition before death, and we learn of a state so dire that any speculation about the patient reliving past memories seems supremely absurd. We are told the patient was a 87-year-old who had suffered a fall, and who was in a coma (rating 10 on the Glascow Coma Scale, meaning a moderate coma). Here is how the paper describes the patient's death. 

"An electroencephalography (EEG) was obtained, which showed non-convulsive status epilepticus in the left hemisphere. There were at least 12 identified electrographic seizures, after which a burst suppression pattern spontaneously developed over the left hemisphere (Figure 2A).  Shortly thereafter, electrographic activity over both hemispheres demonstrated a burst suppression pattern, which was followed by development of ventricular tachycardia with apneustic respirations and clinical cardiorespiratory arrest. After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the 'Do-Not-Resiscitate (DNR)' status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."

Given such a patient state, it is obvious folly to be speculating  that such a patient was reliving past memories just before death. Status epilepticus is a life-threatening seizure of particularly long length. Apneustic respirations are a kind of gasping suggesting death is very near.  Twelve seizures would have produced a "witch's brew" of brain signals showing up on EEG readings, and from such a thunderstorm of brain signals nothing reliable can be inferred about what a patient was thinking or recalling. Since the patient was in a coma and plagued by a dozen seizures that disrupt mental processes such as recollection if it is occurring, it makes no sense at all to speculate that the patient was thinking about or recollecting anything.

Giving us a headline as phony as the headline quoted above from the Independent, the Daily Mail gives us this fake news headline about this patient: "Our lives really DO flash before us: Scientists record the brain activity of an 87-year-old man at the moment he died, revealing a rapid 'memory retrieval' process."  This headline is as phony as a three-dollar bill.  Zero evidence has been provided in the scientific paper of any memory retrieval around the time of death,  and the patient's condition gives the strongest reason for disbelieving that any such thing was occurring. A similar fake news headline occurs on www.bbc.com, showing that once an expert lights a fake news match, the fake news fire will spread even to sources the average person regards as having high journalistic standards. 

There is an abundance of reliable evidence that people have extraordinary near-death experiences after their hearts have stopped.  Such experiences often include what are called life-review experiences, in which a person may recall important moments from his life.  Neuroscience has done nothing to explain such near-death experiences. 

The fact of such experiences is a major reason for rejecting all claims that human consciousness is a product of the brain, and that memories are stored in brains.  According to such claims, no one should have any mental experiences at all  other than unconsciousness after his heart stops. Within a few seconds after a heart stops, a brain shuts down its electrical activity. This was shown by the 2017 paper I previously mentioned, "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death," Figure 1 of that paper shows EEG readings of four patients for thirty minutes after their hearts stopped.  The readings are flat lines, except for three or four little blips that can be compared to momentary muscle twitches of a corpse a few minutes after death.  The Zemmar study does nothing to challenge ideas that brains promptly shut down as soon as a heart stops. 

On the same day that we had the fake news headlines quoted above,  we had another fake news headline, one that declared, "New project creates digital clones of human brains to help treat neurological disorders." No one has created any such thing as a digital clone of the human brain. We can also be quite confident that no one ever will do such a thing, because the act of measuring all of the synapse states and neuron states of a brain would inevitably kill a person, or require the cutting away of so much tissue that you would never be left with a clone of the person's original brain state.  In the text of the story we read that the work being done is merely the creation of some "virtual model," something not at all a clone of the brain. 

Postscript: Vice.com tries to squeeze some more juice out of the fake news story about the dying 87-year-old. It gives us an article with the misleading title "The Search for Meaning in a Mysterious Brain Signal at Death." There was nothing mysterious about the brains signals recorded.  There are some good aspects of the Vice.com story. The story quotes a doctor named Chalwa:

“ 'They have no idea what that guy is experiencing,' Chawla said. It’d be different if the man survived, and reported that he experienced a recall of memories. But since he died, we have no idea what happened. To say otherwise, 'is frankly appalling,' Chawla said."

Correct  -- the behavior of so many people in this matter is truly appalling and unprofessional.  

Beware of Neuroscientists Using Cell Nicknames

Today is a typical day in the science news, because we see what we so  often see: a press report claiming that neuroscientists have discovered something they have not actually discovered.  The  report is a press release from the University of Bonn with this headline: "'Math neurons' identified in the brain."  Below this we have a subtitle reading, "When performing calculations, some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting."  While we know that humans can perform math calculations, there is no evidence that either brains or neurons perform math calculations.  Guilty of serious methodological flaws, the scientific study in question has not found any good evidence that some neurons are more active than other neurons during math calculations. 

The study (entitled "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain") can be read in full here.  Nine epilepsy patients had electrodes attached to areas of their brains for medical reasons to determine the source of seizures they were having. Using such subjects, scientists attempted to find signs of greater activity in certain areas of the brain while the subjects performed a math task. Such a sample size of nine subjects was too small for a robust result.  Fifteen subjects per study group is the minimum for a moderately persuasive result. When you use fewer than 15 subjects in a study group, there is a too high a chance of a false alarm. 

The scientists recorded the electrical activity of about 600 neurons in each subject.  They claim that a small percentage (about 5%) fired at a greater rate during addition or subtraction.  But we would expect to get such a result by chance.  Similarly, if I track for twenty minutes the minute-to-minute ups and downs of 600 stocks being traded on the New York Stock Exchange,  and look for stocks that rise in price while I am thinking about cute puppies, I will probably be able to find that about 5% of the stocks seemed to have higher prices when I am thinking about cute puppies.  This does nothing whatsoever to show that my thoughts about cute puppies have any influence on stock prices.  I would in such a case have merely found a chance correlation that I would expect to get when comparing two unrelated things that fluctuate (stock prices and the objects of my attention).  In all likelihood this is all that has turned up in the new "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain" study.  The authors have merely found the type of chance correlation in electrical activity that we would expect to see in some small percentage of neurons (maybe 5% or so) when comparing the ups and downs of that electrical activity to something else that does not affect such electrical activity.  No robust evidence has been provided of any causal effect. 

Figure 2 of the paper is a line graph showing the ups and downs of the firing rate of four neurons, with two of the neurons showing increased activity during math calculation. The caption of the graph says it is showing activity for "four example neurons." When we remember that the electrical activity of about 600 neurons was tracked, we should not regard Figure 2 as being evidence for any causal effect. The authors probably cherry-picked some neurons out of their set of about 600, looking for a few with an electrical activity that seemed to rise during math calculation. 

Similarly, if I did my experiment tracking the minute-to-minute price fluctuations of 600 stocks, while I was thinking about cute puppies, I could cherry-pick one stock with the strongest chance correlation, and produce a graph like the one below, similar to the graphs in Figure 2 of the paper. 

How is it that we can judge whether a study like this has given robust evidence of anything (as opposed to showing only variations we would expect to get by chance)?  We can look for 4 different things:

(1) Pre-registration.  When pre-registration is used, scientists publicly pledge beforehand how data will be gathered and analyzed, reducing the chance the authors will be doing a kind of a "fishing expedition" in which they feel free to keep "slicing and dicing" the data dozens of ways until it seems to show the desired result: an approach that may be described as "keep torturing the data until it confesses." 

(2) A blinding protocol.  A blinding protocol is used to reduce the chance of experimental bias, an effect in which experimenters tend to see or find whatever result they hope to see. 

(3) Control groups. When control groups are used, there are a group of subjects who do not receive the stimulus being applied to the main experimental group.  The reaction of the group receiving the stimulus can be compared to a group that did not receive the stimulus. 

(4) Adequate sample sizes. An experiment should include a sample size calculation to determine the minimum number of subjects needed to provide robust evidence of a real effect.  If such a calculation is not done, we should expect 15 subjects per study group as a minimum. 

The new "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain" study fails on all these quality measures.  The study was not a pre-registered study. The study failed to use any blinding protocol, and the paper does not use the word "blind" or "blinding."  The sample size used (nine) is smaller than the minimum of 15 needed for a robust experimental result, and no mention is made of a sample size calculation.  Although the paper uses the word "control" multiple times, the study did not use control groups.  The use of a control group would have clarified that the main result reported is meaningless.  In the control group we would have seen about 5% of neurons with increased activity when the subjects were not asked to do any math work.  This would have helped make clear that the reported variations are merely chance variations, not actually evidence of "math neurons."

Being guilty of several methodological defects, the  new "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain" study fails to provide any good evidence that there are "math neurons" in the brain, and fails to provide any good evidence of any such thing as "neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing."  Similar problems will be found in studies claiming to provide evidence for "time cells" and "place cells" in the brain, as discussed here and here.  

The same type of methodological defects are found in another memory study released this week. Its press release groundlessly claims, "In a scientific first, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered fundamental mechanisms by which the hippocampus region of the brain organizes memories into sequences and how this can be used to plan future behavior." A look at the Nature paper shows that a way-too-small sample size was used (only five rats),  that no blinding protocol was used, that no control group was used, and that the scientists used some incredibly complicated "keep torturing the data until it confesses" approach that they presumably  made up as they went along (since the paper makes no mention of pre-registering an exact hypothesis and pre-registering data collection and analytic methods). 

A brain scan study looked for neural correlates of math calculation in adults and children, using a much better sample size of 20 adults and 80 children. As shown in Figure 2, the study found brain activity variations of only about 1 part in 200 or smaller, which is about what we would expect to have got purely by chance, even if the brain is not involved in calculating. The bar chart below puts such results in perspective. 

New Study Confesses "Relationship Between Brain Structure and Function and Cognitive Function Is Still Largely Underexplored"

For decades neuroscientists have taught or attempted to suggest the unwarranted claim that brain scans suggest the human brain is the source of human cognition. Given the great numbers of such claims that have been made over the past several decades, a reader may be surprised to read that a new scientific paper states, "We report the first systematic review that assesses how information from structural and functional neuroimaging methods can be integrated to investigate the brain substrates of cognition." This should raise our suspicions that brain imaging can help establish that cognition is produced by brains. If such a claim is true, why is it only now (in the year 2022) that we would be seeing "the first systematic review that assesses how information from structural and functional neuroimaging methods can be integrated to investigate the brain substrates of cognition"? Such reviews should have been done before any claims were made that brain imaging helps show the brain is the source of human cognition, not after such claims had been made for decades. 

We seem to have here in such "jumping the gun" behavior another example of what biologists have very long been guilty of: claiming some triumph has been achieved before they have achieved necessary prerequisites of such a claim, like some mother claiming that her small baby can run before the baby has even learned how to crawl or walk.  Something similar went on in discussing human origins, with biologists boasting for many decades that they had successfully explained the origin of the human race, when they had not achieved some of the most important prerequisites that should have been achieved before making such a claim (such as understanding the molecular nature and organization of protein molecules, the structural organization of cells, and the still not-understood riddles of the origin of language and the morphogenesis origin of an immensely organized adult human body from the million-times simpler simplicity of a single fertilized ovum). 

After its abstract the new paper ("Relating cognition to both brain structure and function: A systematic review of methods") starts out by giving us a classic example of what occurs so very often in neuroscience papers: an invalid citation in which some dubious claim is followed by a reference to a paper that did not establish such a claim.  We read, "Cognitive function and adaptive behaviour rely on structure and dynamics of largescale neural networks (Friston, 2002)."  The citation is to a paper that merely states, "We try to show that learning can be implemented in a biologically plausible way." 

After getting 1923 papers from database searches, and removing 251 duplicates, the new study had 1673 papers. An assessment "for eligibility" reduced this total to only 159 papers, and a further application of quality criteria reduced this number to only 102.  Such extremely high rates of exclusion should raise our suspicions. Why did only 102 out of 1923 papers meet the study's eligibility and quality criteria standards? This is what we might expect if the vast majority of experimental neuroscience papers are using faulty methods or making invalid claims. 

It seems that the number of papers that should have been excluded would have much higher.  The new paper lists four reasons why it excluded papers. None of the reasons listed are one of the top problems with experimental neuroscience papers these days. Such reasons include the following:

(1) A failure to do a sample size calculation needed to determine the number of subjects needed for a robust result. 

(2) The use of too-small study group sizes, in which the number of subjects is less than the minimum (about 15) needed for a moderately persuasive result. 

(3) A failure to declare and implement a thorough blinding protocol to prevent experimental bias in which the experimenters tend to find whatever result they were hoping to find. 

(4) A failure to pre-register a detailed plan for gathering and analyzing data, leaving researchers with freedom to run a "fishing expedition" kind of study in which they can "slice and dice" data in countless different ways until they find a result they were hoping to get. 

How many of the 102 papers would have survived a quality check excluding papers with such methodology flaws? Probably very few, because the prevalence of poor methodology is epidemic in neuroscience these days, with most experimental studies being guility of two or more of these failures.  Then there is the fact that according to a pie chart in the new paper, only about one quarter of the 102 papers used "direct inference," with about half using some "indirect inference" method that is less reliable than direct inference. 

In the new paper's summary we have this confession, which should raise further doubt in anyone thinking brain scans have supported claims that brains make minds. We read this:

"First, it became apparent that fMRI protocols have taken clear dominance over other functional imaging techniques in this research field. As mentioned in the introduction of this review, fMRI method suffers from low temporal resolution and is not a direct measure of neural activity."

You should never expect to get in a neuroscience paper a really candid discussion of how the boasts of neuroscience do not match experimental results.  Neuroscientists are members of a conformist belief community, and within such a community there are taboos that cannot be violated and speech customs which scientists are pressured into following. But in the last paragraph of the new paper we do get a kind of watered-down confession about the shortfall of neuroscientists in proving their belief dogmas.  We read this: "This review demonstrated that the relationship between brain structure and function and cognitive function is still largely underexplored."  A more candid statement would have stated, "The relationship between brain structure and function and cognitive function has not yet been established."

The study here gives a rather interesting poll of neuroscientists. There are some surprising answers. Based on their standard claims about brains and minds, we would expect close to 100% of neuroscientists would agree with this statement: "If it were possible to transplant our brain to another body we would still be ourselves, albeit in a new body."  The actual percentage of polled neuroscientists who agreed with this statement was only 51%. Could this be because deep down inside a large fraction of our neuroscientists don't really believe some of the things they teach?  I don't know. 

Also interesting was the fact that only 6% of the polled neuroscientists agreed with the statement that "memory is stored in the brain much like in a computer, that is, each remembrance goes in a tiny piece of the brain."  82% of them disagreed, with 12% saying they did not know.  I can understand why so few neuroscientists would have agreed with such a statement. If a neuroscientist claims that each memory is stored in one tiny spot of the brain, this raises the problem of how a brain could be able to instantly read from just the right tiny spot when an instantaneous recollection occurs.  For example, if I suddenly hear the phrase "death of Abraham Lincoln" and instantly remember "assassination by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater, April 14, 1965," how was I able to find the exact tiny spot where that information was stored, in a brain without any coordinate system or indexing system or position notation system? 

Neuroscientists try to get around this problem by imagining that a memory is stored in not just one tiny spot in the brain but multiple spots in the brain. Unfortunately, this does not make things better for the theory that we retrieve memories from brains; it makes things worse. If, for example, my memory of how Abraham Lincoln died was scattered among several different tiny spots in the brain, then my instant retrieval of that memory from a brain without any coordinate system or addressing system or indexing system would be even more inexplicable than if I were to get the information all from a single spot. I would now have the additional difficulty of explaining how this spatially scattered information was all instantly retrieved from just the right places and also pieced together to make a single seamless integrated memory.  No neuroscientist has even given a credible explanation of instant memory recall, and the only credible explanation of such a thing would one abandoning the notion of a neural storage of memories. We do not recall at the speed of brains; we recall at the speed of souls. 

Why ESP Discredits the "Brains Make Minds" Claim

The evidence for ESP is overwhelming. You can read about some of that evidence by reading my posts below:

• The post here discusses abundant ESP evidence gathered by Soviet scientists, including evidence of "telepathic knockouts," in which a person could be made unconscious at the command of a distant person, who might be as much as a thousand miles away. 
• The post here discusses a New York Times article reporting how a court case was won by an amazing demonstration of telepathy by the person who had been arrested. 
• The post here discusses many impressive feats of telepathy, including several very dramatic cases witnessed and documented by a physician. 
• The post here discusses cases of people very noticeably feeling a strange worry or distress at the time of a distant disaster involving one of their friends or loved ones. 
• The post here discusses a phenomenon of eyeless sight abundantly documented by an early twentieth century observer (and corroborated by many subsequent observations). 
• The post here discusses many cases of dramatic ESP performed by hypnotized subjects. 
• The post here describes an extremely well-documented subject performing ESP, the blind or nearly-blind invalid Mollie Fancher who while blindfolded passed endless tests of paranormal perception, and who routinely would correctly describe unseen visitors arriving at her door, outside of her field of view. 
• The post here discusses abundant evidence of ESP gathered by a chemistry professor at a very prestigious university. 
• The post here discusses compelling evidence of ESP gathered by a doctor. 
• The post here discusses a summary of compelling experimental evidence for ESP, published on the mainstream Cornell physics paper server. For example, a summary of ESP tests using the ganzfeld protocol reveals that that over 46 years of tests, there were 4841 trials, producing 1520 successes, a hit rate of 31.5%, far over the expected-by-chance hit rate of 25%. 
• The post here describes astonishing ESP results produced by the blind or nearly-blind Loraina Brackett. 
• The post here describes extremely dramatic ESP results produced by a Mrs. Morel studied by Eugene Osty. 
• The post here discusses extremely dramatic ESP results listed in a government document. 
• The post here discusses some dramatic cases of clairvoyance. 
• The post here discusses the very well-documented case of Alexis Didier, who demonstrated clairvoyance countless times in public exhibitions.
• The post here discusses a six-year investigation of the French Royal Academy of medicine, one which resoundingly found in favor of the reality of clairvoyance. 
• The post here discusses dramatic evidence for spontaneous ESP gathered in abundance by Louisa Rhine.
• Similar accounts (including a very dramatic one from my own experience) are provided in this post and in this post. 
• Dramatic evidence for ESP from the nineteenth century is discussed in this post and this post this post. 
• Some dramatic experimental results in favor of ESP are discussed here, along with computer experiments shedding light on the vast improbability of their occurrence by chance. 
• Compelling experimental results in favor of ESP are discussed here. 
• The dramatic success of remote viewing experiments long funded by the US government is discussed here. 
• Some dramatic accounts of ESP that I can personally testify to are included in my account here. 
• An enormously successful remote ESP test (with two persons in different locations) is described in this post. Guessing 1850 cards selected by chance by a professor at a remote  location,  a woman guessed an average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, achieving a phenomenal 73% accuracy rate (instead of the expected accuracy rate of 20%). We would never expect to get a result this good by chance if every person on a billion trillion inhabited planets was to be given such a test. 
• The enormously convincing experimental results produced by Joseph Rhine (particularly when testing with Hubert Pearce) are discussed here. 
• Very powerful evidence for ESP in autistic subjects is discussed here. 
• 21st-century evidence for ESP is discussed here. 

I have had experiences like this

Let us consider the question: is it possible to explain ESP by any hypothesis preserving the idea that brains generate minds? One possibility sometimes mentioned is the idea that ESP occurs when some kind of unknown radiation or wave travels from one brain to another. 

In the book The Personality of Man by G. N. M. Tryrrell we have a good explanation of why such a hypothesis does not work.  To understand the explanation fully, you need to understand what is called the inverse square law. This is a law that applies to known types of radiation such as light and radio waves. According to this law the strength of any radiation decreases by a factor of 4 whenever the distance between two objects is doubled.  So, for example, if you are 10 million kilometers from the sun, your spaceship will get a certain amount of radiation energy from the sun; but if you move your spaceship so that it is 20 million kilometers from the sun, your spaceship will get one quarter of that radiation. 

Tyrrell states this:

"(1) In the first place, any such physical radiation would have to be generated by a material transmitter of some kind, which would presumably be located in the brain or body of the agent. Since telepathy is known to take place over long distances, such a transmitter would have to be powerful enough to send a message over some thousands of miles. It could scarcely, therefore, be of microscopic dimensions. No such transmitter has ever been found in any human brain or body. A corresponding receiver would also have to exist in the body of the percipient B. ; and that has never been discovered either. (2) All known physical radiation obeys the inverse square law connecting intensity with distance. There is no evidence that telepathy obeys this law. If it did, a person who could transmit a telepathic message across the ocean would produce an enormously more powerful effect across a table. This kind of thing has never been observed. (3) Physicists possess a variety of sensitive instruments for detecting different kinds of radiation; yet they have never detected telepathic radiation, which, if it were physical, would be unlikely to have escaped them. 

These are all very good objections that are rather perfectly stated. Item 4 on Tyrrell's list moves toward a very weighty objection, although he states it imperfectly. He states this:

(4) A much more serious objection, however, lies in the fact that in order to transmit ideas by any physical means whatever, use has to be made of a pre-arranged code. Unless such a code exists and is understood by both parties beforehand, no information can be transmitted by physical means. Spoken language is a code; written language is another. Unless the person spoken to or written to understands the language, he can receive no information. Even gestures and facial expressions are a code. Every code requires to be consciously applied and consciously interpreted; so that a physical theory of telepathy necessitates not only the existence of material transmitters and receivers but a conscious agent at each end to operate them and to code and decode the messages. Systems of dots and dashes, or audible words spoken into a microphone are, of course, the usual ways of encoding telegraphic, telephonic and radio messages. It would be utterly absurd to suppose that some unseen demon within us speaks words aloud into a telepathic transmitter situated in our brain or elsewhere in our body; yet without some such supposition a physical theory of telepathy will not work." 

The point that Tyrrell is getting at is a good one: that information can only be sent long distance through some biological process or physical process if the information is encoded according to some coding system, and the same system is used by the transmitter and the receiver.  For example, you can read information on the web only because both the publisher of the information (the web site you are on) and the receiver of the information (your web browser) are using exactly the same encoding protocols, which include things such as the ASCII protocol and the HTML protocol.  We now know  (contrary to what Tyrrell states) that there does not need to be "a conscious agent at each end," but there at least has to be at least a software or machinery or biology on both the transmitting and receiving ends, and both have to use the same protocol for successful communication to occur.   Such a requirement is just another reason why the idea of brain-to-brain ESP communication is untenable.  There would have to be some secret undiscovered brain biology by which thoughts were encoded for long-distance transmission, and also some secret undiscovered brain biology by which a brain could decode encoded thoughts that had been transmitted by some undiscovered form  of radiation.  

The overall requirements for brain-to-brain ESP would be something like this:

(1) Some undiscovered system in the brain capable of encoding thoughts for long-distance ESP transmission. 

(2) Some undiscovered antenna-like system in the brain capable of transmitting such encoded thoughts over vast distances.

(3) Some undiscovered form of radiation (never detected by physicists) by which thoughts can be transmitted long-distance from brain to brain, apparently without any inverse-square kind of signal diminution with distance (unlike light and radio signals). 

(4) Some undiscovered reception system in the brain capable of receiving such ESP thought signals (very hard to imagine, as a human body has nothing like an antenna for receiving signals). 

(5) Some undiscovered decoding system in the brain capable of decoding such encoded ESP thought signals, and causing them to produce corresponding ideas in the mind of the receiver. 

This list of requirements is so great and so far-fetched that it is clear that the idea of ESP being a brain-to-brain communication by means of radiation is one that must be rejected. 

There is a good reason why materialists tell us the lie that there is not good evidence for ESP.  They tell us this lie because it is one of quite a few lies that they very much need to tell. The existence of ESP is sufficient by itself to discredit all claims that human minds are merely the product of the brain. 

Just after describing an astonishingly exact account of telepathy (pages 23-25), Arthur W. Osborn states this in his very interesting book on precognition entitled The Future Is Now: 

"Many volumes have been filled with accounts of spontaneous telepathy and clairvoyance. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these facts destroy all mechanistic attempts to explain consciousness as being merely a product of neural functioning. If it is assumed that all our knowledge is derived only by means of the senses, then how can we know of events entirely beyond the reach of the senses?... Both spontaneous and experimental cases of paranormal cognition demonstrate that certain people do become aware of thoughts in other minds and of events at a distance under conditions of rigorous control which exclude the possibility of fraud and where it is impossible for any physical means of communication to operate....Clairvoyance and telepathy do indeed pose crucial problems for the classical theories of mind; and for those theories which postulate that consciousness is exclusively dependent on the physical organism they administer a coup de grace."

A coup de grace is a final blow given to a wounded person or animal to cause its death. 

In the quotes above, Tyrrell takes a wise approach. His approach is to start listing all of the things that would have to exist if brain-to-brain ESP was occurring. We should use the same approach when discussing other things attributed to the brain, such as memory formation and memory recall. 

Here is a list of the things that would have to exist in the brain for humans to be storing memories in the brain:

(1) Some system by which learned knowledge and human experiences are converted or encoded into neural states.  This is the most horrendous problem for anyone claiming brains store memories. You can't just "write learned knowledge" or "write experience" to a brain as effortlessly as one would pour water into a cup.  For knowledge or experience to be stored in a brain as neural states or synapse states, there would have to be some super-elaborate coding system capable of handling all of the countless different ways in which humans can acquire knowledge.  The coding system would have to be some "miracle of design" infinitely more complicated than the Morse Code, for it would have to store so many types of things: images, smells, sounds, music and text. We can't imagine any such system capable of storing English text arising before the year 1000 BC, because the English language and the English alphabet did not exist then.  So we would have to imagine this enormously elaborate encoding system arising in only the past few thousand years, contrary to the claims of Darwinists that evolution works slowly. 

(2) This encoding system would have to work enormously fast, to cover cases of instantaneous memory formation which routinely occur. 

(3) There would have to be some kind of write mechanism that would allow this encoded information to be stored in the brain as neural states or synapse states. 

(4) There would have to be some capability allowing this written information to be preserved for decades, despite all of the rapid structural turnover and rapid molecular turnover that occurs in the brain.  Proteins in the brain have an average lifetime of less than two weeks, and dendritic spines and synapses do not last for years.

(5) There would have to be some capability allowing a memory to be instantly found. So, for example, if you hear the name "Richard Nixon' and then instantly remember "US president elected in 1968 who resigned in 1974," there would have to be some neural mechanism by which you could instantly find a brain's stored information about Richard Nixon upon you hearing his name. 

(6) There would have to be some read capability by which a memory was read from some location in the brain where it was stored. 

(7) There would have to be some decoding capability by which this encoded information existing as neural states or synapse states was translated into conceptual information allowing the mind to experience a recollection. 

Just as there exists no evidence of the things mentioned by Tyrrell that would have to exist for brains to be responsible for ESP, there exists no evidence of the things mentioned above that would have to exist for brains to be responsible for memory storage and memory retrieval.  Specifically:

(1) Scientists have found no evidence of any encoding system by which a brain can translate learned knowledge or episodic experience into stored knowledge existing as neural states or synapse states. If such a system existed, it would have to have a large footprint in the genome, involving very many proteins dedicated to achieving such encoding; but no good evidence for such a thing has been found. 

(2) There is no evidence of any write capability in a brain that can store encoded information.

(3) No one has found any mechanism allowing a preservation over decades of memories stored in synapses or dendritic spines with such a high level of structural turnover and molecular turnover. 

(4) No one has found any mechanism in a brain that can explain the instant retrieval of memories. The brain has nothing like the type of things that would be required for such instant retrieval to work, things such as indexing or a coordinate system or a position notation system. So finding a memory stored in a brain would as slow as finding someone's house in New York City (at an unknown location in the city) if New York City had no street names and no house numbers. 

(5) No one has found any read capability in a brain that could read encoded learned information. A computer hard disk has a movable read-write head to write and read information from some particular spot on the disk, but nothing like that exists in the brain. The brain has nothing like the cursor that exists in a word processor program, something that keeps track of the current reading or writing position. 

(6) The brain has nothing like some decoding system that would allow learned information or episodic experience encoded in neural states or synapse states to be translated into a recollection occurring in the mind. 

Just as we must say that the brain is totally unsuitable for the job of extrasensory perception, we must say that the brain is totally unsuitable for the common chores of memory storage and memory retrieval. 

List of Breakthrough Prize Winners in Life Sciences Hints at the Lack of Progress in Cognitive Neuroscience

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is a 3-million dollar prize given for advances in biology.  The prize was founded by 2013 after donations by high-tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg. Let's take a look at a list of all the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences that have been awarded since 2013, quoting from the wikipedia.org page that lists them:

• "for the genetics of neural circuits and behavior, and synaptic guidepost molecules"
• "for linkage mapping of Mendelian disease in humans using DNA polymorphisms"
• "for the discovery of PI 3-Kinase and its role in cancer metabolism"
• "for describing the role of Wnt signaling in tissue stem cells and cancer"
• "for research on telomeres, illuminating how they protect chromosome ends and their role in genome instability in cancer"
• "for discoveries in the mechanisms of angiogenesis that led to therapies for cancer and eye diseases"
• "for the discovery of general principles for identifying human disease genes, and enabling their application to medicine through the creation and analysis of genetic, physical and sequence maps of the human genome"
• "for cancer genes and targeted therapy"
• "for characterization of human cancer genes"
• "for induced pluripotent stem cells"
• "for cancer genomics and tumor suppressor genes"
• "for the discovery of T cell checkpoint blockade as effective cancer therapy"
• "for defining the interlocking circuits in the brain that malfunction in Parkinson’s disease – this scientific foundation underlies the circuit-based treatment of Parkinson’s disease by deep brain stimulation"
• "for the discovery of Target of Rapamycin (TOR) and its role in cell growth control"
• "for discoveries leading to the development of controlled drug-release systems and new biomaterials"
• "for the discovery of genes and biochemical mechanisms that cause hypertension"
• "for discovering critical molecular determinants and biological functions of intracellular protein degradation"
• "for the discovery and pioneering work on the development of high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson’s disease"
• "for the discovery of covalent modifications of histone proteins and their critical roles in the regulation of gene expression and chromatin organization, advancing the understanding of diseases ranging from birth defects to cancer"
• "for the discovery of a new world of genetic regulation by microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that inhibit translation or destabilize complementary mRNA targets"
• "for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine"
• "for the development and implementation of optogenetics – the programming of neurons to express light-activated ion channels and pumps, so that their electrical activity can be controlled by light"
• "for discovering mutations in the amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene that cause early onset Alzheimer’s disease, linking accumulation of APP-derived beta-amyloid peptide to Alzheimer’s pathogenesis and inspiring new strategies for disease prevention"
• "for the discovery of human genetic variants that alter the levels and distribution of cholesterol and other lipids, inspiring new approaches to the prevention of cardiovascular and liver disease"
• "for pioneering the sequencing of ancient DNA and ancient genomes, thereby illuminating the origins of modern humans, our relationships to extinct relatives such as Neanderthals, and the evolution of human populations and traits"
• "for elucidating how eukaryotic cells sense and respond to damage in their DNA and providing insights into the development and treatment of cancer"
• "for discovering the centrality of RNA in forming the active centers of the ribosome, the fundamental machinery of protein synthesis in all cells, thereby connecting modern biology to the origin of life and also explaining how many natural antibiotics disrupt protein synthesis"
• "for pioneering research on the Wnt pathway, one of the crucial intercellular signaling systems in development, cancer and stem cell biology"
• "for elucidating autophagy, the recycling system that cells use to generate nutrients from their own inessential or damaged components"
• "for discoveries of the genetic causes and biochemical mechanisms of spinocerebellar ataxia and Rett syndrome, findings that have provided insight into the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative and neurological diseases"
• "for discovering how plants optimize their growth, development, and cellular structure to transform sunlight into chemical energy"
• "for elucidating the unfolded protein response, a cellular quality-control system that detects disease-causing unfolded proteins and directs cells to take corrective measures"
• "for elucidating the sophisticated mechanism that mediates the perilous separation of duplicated chromosomes during cell division and thereby prevents genetic diseases such as cancer"
• "for elucidating the molecular pathogenesis of a type of inherited ALS, including the role of glia in neurodegeneration, and for establishing antisense oligonucleotide therapy in animal models of ALS and Huntington disease"
• "for the development of an effective antisense oligonucleotide therapy for children with the neurodegenerative disease spinal muscular atrophy"
• "for determining the consequences of aneuploidy, an abnormal chromosome number resulting from chromosome mis-segregation"
• for discovering hidden structures in cells by developing super-resolution imaging – a method that transcends the fundamental spatial resolution limit of light microscopy"
• "for elucidating how DNA triggers immune and autoimmune responses from the interior of a cell through the discovery of the DNA-sensing enzyme cGAS"
• "for the discovery of a new endocrine system through which adipose tissue signals the brain to regulate food intake"
• "for discovering functions of molecular chaperones in mediating protein folding and preventing protein aggregation"
• "for discovering molecules, cells, and mechanisms underlying pain sensation"
• "for discovering TDP43 protein aggregates in frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and revealing that different forms of alpha-synuclein, in different cell types, underlie Parkinson’s disease and Multiple System Atrophy"
• "for developing technology that allowed the design of proteins never seen before in nature, including novel proteins that have the potential for therapeutic intervention in human diseases"
• "for deconstructing the complex behavior of parenting to the level of cell-types and their wiring, and demonstrating that the neural circuits governing both male and female-specific parenting behaviors are present in both sexes"
• "for discovering that fetal DNA is present in maternal blood and can be used for the prenatal testing of trisomy 21 and other genetic disorders"
• "for elucidating a quality control pathway that clears damaged mitochondria and thereby protects against Parkinson’s Disease"
• "for elucidating the molecular basis of neurodegenerative and cardiac transthyretin diseases, and for developing tafamidis, a drug that slows their progression"
• "for engineering modified RNA technology which enabled rapid development of effective COVID-19 vaccines"
• "for the development of a robust and affordable method to determine DNA sequences on a massive scale, which has transformed the practice of science and medicine"

In the list above there is a lack of any breakthroughs from the area of cognitive neuroscience, with the possible exception of the one line referring to parenting behaviors. We hear no mention of the words "memory" or "consciousness" or "cognition" or "learning" or "understanding" or "thinking." 

Let's look at the only line above referring to something from cognitive neuroscience: the line that makes a misleadingly broad reference to someone "demonstrating that the neural circuits governing both male and female-specific parenting behaviors are present in both sexes." No one has actually shown that neural circuits govern any type of behavior in any organism.  The line is referring to a 2021 award to Catherine Dulac.  If we look at the corresponding paper she co-authored ("Galanin neurons in the medial preoptic area govern parental behavior"), we will find  nothing very impressive. It is an experimental paper merely dealing with an extremely narrow topic: mice and their behavior when presented with never-before-seen baby mice (called mice pups).  The paper claims to have altered behavior of mice when presented with unfamiliar mice pups, by altering the brains of the mice.  

Unfortunately, the paper fails to be a robust demonstration, because it often uses study group sizes smaller than 15, as small as only 8.  15 subjects per study group is the minimum needed for a robust experimental demonstration. Also the paper fails to discuss how a serious blinding protocol was implemented, merely mentioning two cases in which an observer was blind to something, rather than mentioning in detail how a thorough blinding protocol was implemented.  In the "Statistics" part of the paper the authors confess their failure to do a sample size calculation, which is a calculation done to make sure that adequate sample sizes were used. They state, "The sample sizes in our study were chosen based on common practice in animal behavior experiments."  That is the kind of thing that people state when they failed to calculate the sample sizes needed for a robust result.  It is well known that these days neuroscience experimenters are habitually failing to use adequate sample sizes, with such a failure being more the rule than the exception, as discussed in the widely cited paper "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience."  So when a paper says "the sample sizes in our study were chosen based on common practice in animal behavior experiments," we should treat that as a confession that a poor practice was followed. 

So the only claimed  "breakthrough" in the field of cognitive neuroscience turns out to be a "small potatoes" affair, something that did not follow experimental best practices, and does not qualify at all as a breakthrough.  

The list above is a kind of Exhibit A that I can cite to back up my claim that no progress has been made in supporting neruoscientist dogmas that brains store memories or that brains are the source of human minds.  In the past decade hundreds of millions of dollars have been doled out to our cognitive neuroscientists, but they have had no success in substantiating the claims they keep making about brains storing memories and brains producing minds. 

The list above also suggests two other things:

• No major progress is being made by biologists in understanding the origin of life. The only reference to the origin of life in the list above is a superfluous and unwarranted claim that a discovery about "the centrality of RNA in forming the active centers of the ribosome" has accomplished some feat of "connecting modern biology to the origin of life," a vague and vacuous phrase that does not really mean much of anything. 
• No major progress is being made by scientists in understanding  morphogenesis, how the enormously organized state of a full human body is able to gradually arise from the million-times-simpler state of a speck-sized egg. The list above mentions no progress in the field of developmental biology. 

A lack of progress in cognitive neuroscience is suggested by the quote below from a recent neuroscience paper: 

"Neuroscience is at the stage biology was at before Darwin. It has a myriad of detailed observations but no single theory explaining the connections between all of those observations. We do not even know if such a brain theory should be at the molecular level or at the level of brain regions, or at any scale between." 

Postscript: Here are the latest descriptions added to the wikipedia.org page I quoted from above, which describe the prizes awarded in 2023, 2024 and 2025:

• "For discovering a fundamental mechanism of cellular organization mediated by phase separation of proteins and RNA into membraneless liquid droplets."
• "For developing a deep learning AI method that rapidly and accurately predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence."
• "For discovering that narcolepsy is caused by the loss of a small population of brain cells that make a wake-promoting substance, paving the way for the development of new treatments for sleep disorders."
• "For the development of chimeric antigen receptor T cell immunotherapy whereby the patient's T cells are modified to target and kill cancer cells."
• "For developing life-transforming drug combinations that repair the defective chloride channel protein in patients with cystic fibrosis."
• "For identifying GBA1 and LRRK2 as risk genes for Parkinson's disease, implicating autophagy and lysosomal biology as critical contributors to the pathogenesis of the disease."
• "For the discovery and characterization of GLP-1 and revealing its physiology and potential in treating diabetes and obesity."
• "For establishing the role of B cells in multiple sclerosis and developing B-cell based treatments, and for revealing that Epstein-Barr virus infection is the leading risk for multiple sclerosis."
• "For developing base editing and prime editing, technologies that edit the DNA of living systems without cutting the DNA double helix, and rewrite segments of genes at their native locations, enabling the correction or replacement of virtually any mutation."

None of these prizes are for work in cognitive neuroscience. Judging from these awards between 2023 and 2025, it seems that scientists are getting nowhere trying to prove their claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories. 

Integrated Information Theory's Tangled Metaphysics Does Nothing to Explain Consciousness

A theory called "integrated information theory" purports to be a theory of consciousness. We should always be suspicious of any theory claiming to be a "theory of consciousness."  "Consciousness" is the most reductive term you could use to describe human minds and human mental experience.  A person trying to explain  a human mind by advancing what he calls a "theory of consciousness" is rather like a person trying to explain planet Earth by advancing what he calls a "theory of roundness." Just as roundness is only one aspect of planet Earth,  consciousness is only one aspect of the human mind and human mental experience. What we need is not a "theory of consciousness" but something very much harder to create: a theory of mentality that includes all of the main aspects of human mentality (including consciousness, comprehension, thinking, memory, imagination and creativity). 

When I go a website devoted to selling integrated information theory (www.integratedinformationtheory.org), I get a home page that has at its first link a link to a paper behind a paywall. But the second link is to a paper that anyone can read. Let's take a close look at that paper, entitled, "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0," and authored by Masafumi Oizumi, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi . 

The abstract of the paper should leave us very discouraged about integrated information theory:

"This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness 3.0, which incorporates several advances over previous formulations. IIT starts from phenomenological axioms: information says that each experience is specific – it is what it is by how it differs from alternative experiences; integration says that it is unified – irreducible to non-interdependent components; exclusion says that it has unique borders and a particular spatio-temporal grain. These axioms are formalized into postulates that prescribe how physical mechanisms, such as neurons or logic gates, must be configured to generate experience (phenomenology). The postulates are used to define intrinsic information as 'differences that make a difference' within a system, and integrated information as information specified by a whole that cannot be reduced to that specified by its parts. By applying the postulates both at the level of individual mechanisms and at the level of systems of mechanisms, IIT arrives at an identity: an experience is a maximally irreducible conceptual structure (MICS, a constellation of concepts in qualia space), and the set of elements that generates it constitutes a complex. According to IIT, a MICS specifies the quality of an experience and integrated information ΦMax its quantity. From the theory follow several results, including: a system of mechanisms may condense into a major complex and non-overlapping minor complexes; the concepts that specify the quality of an experience are always about the complex itself and relate only indirectly to the external environment; anatomical connectivity influences complexes and associated MICS; a complex can generate a MICS even if its elements are inactive; simple systems can be minimally conscious; complicated systems can be unconscious; there can be true 'zombies' – unconscious feed-forward systems that are functionally equivalent to conscious complexes."

We have heard in this abstract no sign that any compelling reasoning will appear in the paper. To the contrary, we have got two signals that the paper will be pushing nonsense. The first signal is the  absurd insinuation that logic gates (a low-level building block of a digital system) can be somehow configured to generate conscious experience.  The second signal is the claim that "simple systems can be minimally conscious."  There are minimally conscious organisms on our planet, but none of them are simple systems. When we consider all of the complexity of its cells, each as complex as a factory, we should realize that even the simplest maybe-barely-conscious ant is not at all a simple system. 

After the paper asks a bunch of questions, in the section entitled "Models" we read this: "The main tenets of IIT can be presented as a set of phenomenological axioms, ontological postulates, and identities." That sounds like metaphysics, not anything like a scientific theory. 

After the paper defines an "axiom" as a self-evident truth, we read some "axiom" defined by the paper.  One of these "axioms" is listed as follows:

"COMPOSITION: Consciousness is compositional (structured): each experience consists of multiple aspects in various combinations. Within the same experience, one can see, for example, left and right, red and blue, a triangle and a square, a red triangle on the left, a blue square on the right, and so on."

It is not true that "each experience consists of  multiple aspects in various combinations," although many experiences do consist of such a thing. A person can have a simple experience consisting of a single aspect. For example, you may lie on a beach looking up at a clear blue sky, while thinking of nothing. Such consciousness has only one aspect: your perception of the blueness above you.  Similarly, while waiting to fall asleep at night with your eyes closed, you may perceive nothing and be thinking of nothing.  Such an experience does not consist of  "multiple aspects in various combinations."

We then read this "axiom":

"INFORMATION: Consciousness is informative: each experience differs in its particular way from other possible experiences. Thus, an experience of pure darkness is what it is by differing, in its particular way, from an immense number of other possible experiences. A small subset of these possible experiences includes, for example, all the frames of all possible movies." 

No, it is not correct that "consciousness is informative." Something is informative if it supplies information.  Consciousness by itself does not supply information. A conscious person may or not be involved in supplying information.  

We then read this "axiom":

"INTEGRATION: Consciousness is integrated: each experience is (strongly) irreducible to non-interdependent components. Thus, experiencing the word 'SONO' written in the middle of a blank page is irreducible to an experience of the word 'SO' at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word 'NO' on the left border of another half page – the experience is whole. Similarly, seeing a red triangle is irreducible to seeing a triangle but no red color, plus a red patch but no triangle."

The word "integrated" means "with various parts or aspects linked or coordinated."  The human mind may be thought of as being integrated (for example, consciousness is linked with memory and understanding). But mere consciousness is not intrinsically integrated. At some moment I may be aware of the blue sky ahead of me, but such awareness does not consist of multiple parts.  An experience does not have to consist of multiple parts.  As for the logic about "SONO" written on a blank page, of course that is "irreducible to an experience of the word 'SO' at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word 'NO' on the left border of another half page," because that would give you "NOSO" not "SONO."  

So we have a very shaky foundation. We have three supposedly "self-evident axioms" that are not actually self-evident at all. Next we have a section called "Mechanisms" that suddenly starts dogmatizing about three characteristics that would be possessed by a "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  The results sounds like extremely dubious metaphysics.  No foundation has been laid establishing that there can be any such thing as a "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  

To the contrary, we can imagine no physical "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  Consciousness is an immaterial thing, and mechanisms are material things. We can get no plausible idea of how it can be that material things or material mechanisms could "contribute to consciousness."  If I have one neuron existing by itself, there is no reason why such a neuron should "contribute to consciousness." If I have 100 billion neurons that are all connected, there is no reason why such an arrangement should "contribute to consciousness."  If we think that connected neurons should somehow give rise to consciousness, that is only because we have been brainwashed into thinking such a thing by endless repetitions of such a groundless claim.  Similarly, if we had been endlessly told all our lives that consciousness was caused by electron collisions, then we might think that some glass jar with lots of colliding electrons would produce a conscious mind. 

We then have in the paper (under a title of "Systems of Mechanisms") three paragraphs making dogmatic claims such as the claim that "a set of elements can be conscious only if its mechanisms specify a conceptual structure that is irreducible to non-interdependent components (strong integration)." We are deeply mired now in arbitrary metaphysics, as we would be if we were reading a work of G.W. Hegel. Nothing has been done to show that "a set of elements can be conscious," so the writers have no business making such claims.  Organisms are not correctly described as "a set of elements." 

A little later in Box 1 of the paper we have a glossary, which defines more than thirty terms that will be used in the paper.  The glossary is very dense metaphysical gobbeldygook.  An example is the term "cause-effect repertoire" which is defined with this gibberish  definition: "The probability distribution of potential past and future states of a system as constrained by a mechanism in its current state." 

The paper then has a whole bunch of strange diagrams that have many circles, circles within circles, diagram, arrows pointing from one circle to another, and so forth. None of this does anything to clarify how humans have consciousness. 

Below (in italics) are some of the dubious metaphysical claims we read in the paper:

• "Recall that IIT's information postulate is based on the intuition that, for something to exist, it must make a difference. By extension, something exists all the more, the more of a difference it makes." No, it is not true that for something to exist, it must make a difference. Dust clouds in interstellar space exist, and rocks in the center of distant planets exist, without making any difference. And something does not exist "all the more" depending on the difference it makes. A person with no influence on the world exists just as much as some influential person. 
• "The integration postulate further requires that, for a whole to exist, it must make a difference above and beyond its partition, i.e. it must be irreducible." No, a whole does not have to be irreducible. A whole consisting of three people can be reduced to three individuals, and a molecule consisting of five atoms can be broken up and reduced to its individual atoms. 
• "Complexes cannot overlap and at each point in time, an element/mechanism can belong to one complex only." No, complexes can overlap; for example, the brain complex overlaps with the circulatory system in the body. And an element can belong to more than one complex. A blood vessel in the brain belongs to both the brain system and the circulatory system.  
• "The exclusion postulate at the level of systems of mechanisms says that only a conceptual structure that is maximally irreducible can give rise to consciousness – other constellations generated by overlapping elements are excluded."  Since humans have no understanding at all of how any structure can give rise to consciousness, it is unwarranted to be making some claim with the form "only X can give rise to consciousness."  Describing such a claim as a postulate (an assumption) indicates its weakness. 
•  "The exclusion postulate requires, first, that only one cause exists. This requirement represents a causal version of Occam's razor, saying in essence that 'causes should not be multiplied beyond necessity', i.e. that causal superposition is not allowed." Occam's razor is not the principle that something cannot have multiple causes. It is the principle that in general we should  prefer a simpler explanation that requires postulating fewer things in order to explain something.  Many things do have multiple causes, and it is dead wrong to claim that causal superposition (assuming multiple causes of a single effect) is not allowed. Very many things do have multiple causes. 
• "Simple systems can be conscious: a minimally conscious photodiode."  This is a followed by text claiming that a tiny unit called a photodiode is minimally conscious.  Since a modern digital camera contains very many such photodiodes (one for each pixel captured), integrated information theory would seem to predict that every digital camera is substantially conscious -- an idea that is extremely nonsensical.  

No, this is not conscious

Later in the article we have an inaccurate appeal to one of the phoniest myths of neuroscientists: the claim that split brain patients have two different minds. We read this:

"Under special circumstances, such as after split brain surgery, the main complex may split into two main complexes, both having high ΦMax. There is solid evidence that in such cases consciousness itself splits in two individual consciousnesses that are unaware of each other."  

No such evidence exists. A similar bogus claim is made in another article on integrated information theory appearing on the www.integratedinformation.org site (one authored by Giulio Tononi, one of the three authors mentioned above): "It is well established that, after the complete section of the corpus callosum—the roughly 200 million fibers that connect the cortices of the two hemispheres—consciousness is split in two: there are two separate 'flows' of experience, one associated with the left hemisphere and one with the right hemispheres." That claim is untrue. To the contrary, in 2014 the wikipedia.org article on split-brain patients stated the following:

"In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults."

In the video here we see a split-brain patient who seems like a pretty normal person, not at all someone with “two minds." And at the beginning of the video here the same patient says that after such a split-brain operation “you don't notice it” and that you don't feel any different than you did before – hardly what someone would say if the operation had produced “two minds” in someone. And the video here about a person with a split brain from birth shows us what is clearly someone with one mind, not two. 

A  scientific study published in 2017 set the record straight on split-brain patients. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”

The press release states the following: “According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients.” The paper states, “These findings suggest that severing the cortical connections between hemispheres splits visual perception, but does not create two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.”  The recent article here in Psychology Today describes the bizarre experiment that was used to make the groundless claim that split-brain patients have two minds. It was some experiment based only on visual perception, using some strange experimental setup unlike anyone normally encounters. The article shreds to pieces claims that results from such an experiment show that split-brain patients have two minds:

"Not so fast. There are several reasons to question the conclusions Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others sought to draw. First, both split-brain patients and people closest to them report that no major changes in the person have occurred after the surgery. When you communicate with the patient, you never get the sense that the there are now different people living in the patient's head.

This would be very puzzling if the mind was really split. Currently, you are the only conscious person in your neocortex. You consciously perceive your entire visual field, and you control your whole body. However, if your mind splits, this would dramatically change. You would become two people: 'lefty' and 'righty.' 'Lefty' would only see what is in the right visual field and control the right side of the body while 'righty' would see what’s in the left visual field and control the left side of the body. Both 'lefty' and 'righty' would be half-blind and half-paralyzed. It would seem to each of them that another person is in charge of half of the body.

Yet, patients never indicate that it feels as though someone else is controlling half of the body. The patients’ loved ones don’t report noticing a dramatic change in the person after the surgery either. Could we all — patients themselves, their family members, and neutral observers — miss the signs that a single person has been replaced by two people? If you suddenly lost control of half of your body, could you fail to notice? Could you fail to notice if the two halves of your spouse’s or child’s body are controlled by two different minds?"

A 2020 paper states this about split-brain patientis: " Apart from a number of anecdotal incidents in the subacute phase following the surgery, these patients seem to behave in a socially ordinary manner and they report feeling unchanged after the operation (Bogen, Fisher, & Vogel, 1965; Pinto et al., 2017a; R. W. Sperry, 1968; R. Sperry, 1984)."  Misleading statements by neuroscientists are extremely common, and claims by some of them that normal-speaking and normal-acting split-brain patients have two minds (based merely on differing results produced in very weird artificial experimental setups not like real-world cases) is one of the most egregious examples of inaccurate speech by neuroscientists. 

What we have in the "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0" paper is mainly metaphysics following the opague oracular style of Hegel and Heidegger, often careless and poorly reasoned metaphysics. The claim often made that integrated information theory is a "scientific theory of consciousness" is untrue. Integrated information theory is a very errant metaphysical theory that includes a few appeals to scientific observations, to give a little scientific flavor to its gibberish gobbledygook.  The most important reference the theory makes to an alleged scientific observation is a bogus claim that splitting a brain by severing the corpus callosum produces two  minds, something that has never actually been observed, with the actual observations telling us that no such thing occurs. 

Besides inaccurately predicting that split-brain patients should have two minds, integrated information theory inaccurately predicts that "widespread lesions" of the cortex should cause unconsciousness. In the scholarpedia.org article on the theory, Giulio Tononi states this: 

"IT provides a principled and parsimonious way to account for why certain brain regions appear to be essential for our consciousness while others do not. For example, widespread lesions of the cerebral cortex lead to loss of consciousness, and local lesions or stimulations of various cortical areas and tracts can affect its content (for example, the experience of color)."

To the contrary, it is a fact that many epileptic patients with severe seizures underwent hemispherectomy operations in which half of the brain (including half of the cortex) was removed, without any major effect on either consciousness or intelligence.  Many of John's Lorber's patients with good intelligence and normal consciousness had lost most of their cortex.  A French person who held a job as a civil servant was found to have "little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue." In the paper here we read on page 1 of a case reported by Martel in 1823 of a boy who after age five lost all of his senses except hearing, and became bed-confined. Until death he 'seemed mentally unimpaired.'  But after he died, an autopsy was done which found that apart from “residues of meninges" there was "no trace of a brain" found inside the skull. This was good consciousness, with little or no cortex. In the same paper we read of a person who had a normal life despite having "very little cortex"  because of hydrocephalus in which brain tissue is replaced by fluid:

"A man was examined because of his headache, and to his physicians' surprise, he had an 'incredibly large' hydrocephalus. Villinger, the director of the Cognitive Neurology Department, stated that this man had 'almost no brain,' only 'a very thin layer of cortical tissue.' This man led an unremarkable life, and his hydrocephalus was only discovered by chance (Hasler, 2016, p. 18)"

Postscript:  Below is a quote from a scientific paper "The integrated information theory of

consciousness: A case of mistaken identity," a paper that refers to the theory's "failure to provide

a credible account of consciousness"::

"Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by

directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of

IIT’s measure of consciousness, phi (Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to

key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances.

Our analysis shows that IIT’s identification of consciousness with the causal efficacy with

which differentiated networks accomplish global information transfer (which is what Φ in

fact measures) is mistaken. This misidentification has the consequence of requiring the attribution of consciousness to a range of natural systems and artifacts that include, but are not

limited to, large-scale electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, some electronic circuit

boards, and social networks. Instead of treating this consequence of the theory as a disconfirmation, IIT embraces it. By regarding these systems as bearers of consciousness ex hypothesi,

IIT is led toward the orbit of panpsychist ideation. This departure from science as we know it

can be avoided by recognizing the functional misattribution at the heart of IIT’s identity

claim."

In the paper "On the axiomatic foundations of the integrated information theory of consciousness" a philosopher makes criticism similar to some of mine above, saying that the theory's "axioms" are invalid:

" I then examine the five axioms of IIT, asking: what each axiom means, whether it is indeed axiomatic and whether it could constrain a theory of consciousness. I argue that none of the five alleged axioms is able to play the role that is required of it, either because it fails to qualify as axiomatic or because it fails to impose a substantive constraint on a theory of consciousness."