Scientists Have No Duty to Study All Theories, But Do Have a Duty to Study Important-Sounding Observation Reports Conflicting With Claims They Make

 A recent Forbes magazine article about scientific theories has two major examples of dead-wrong generalizations about some types of professionals. We have this very laughable claim about the work requirements of being a reporter: " Reporters are required to independently verify claims, and understand the reasoning behind expert opinion." No, there is no such requirement for being a science journalist, and no such thing is done by science journalists the vast majority of times they write about science research. Every day our science news sites are filled with articles by science journalists who did nothing to independently verify the claims in some university press release, but simply parroted the claims in such a press release, without subjecting them to any independent scrutiny.  And such science journalists usually do not understand the reasoning behind expert opinion, which is often bad reasoning based mainly on long-standing belief customs in the belief communities experts belong to. Since the science research press releases issued by universities these days are notorious for their abundant examples of hype, unfounded claims and groundless boasts, the failure of reporters to independently verify such claims (by doing work such as subjecting the relevant scientific paper to critical scrutiny) is a huge problem.

Another very laughable claim in the Forbes article comes when we read a scientist make the claim that "scientists are conditioned to keep an open mind."  No such conditioning occurs. Instead scientists are conditioned to keep a closed mind about many open questions. Scientists are conditioned to believe the long-standing belief traditions of scientist belief communities. They are conditioned to stubbornly believe in dogmas such as the dogma that biological origins are well-explained by Darwinist ideas, the dogma that minds are produced by the human brain, the dogma that life originated accidentally, and the dogma that there are no such things as spirits invisible to human eyes or paranormal human powers. Expressing an open mind about such matters will get you in great trouble if you are trying to climb up the career ladder of the modern scientist. 

The article contains several misstatements:

(1) No, Adam Riess did not make anything like a one-man discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating; he was merely one of three awarded people that were part of a large team of scientists that claimed to have discovered such a thing. And such a claimed discovery did not provide evidence for dark energy (something never observed), but merely documented an effect that might be explained by dark energy.

(2) No, the US Space Command did not confirm Avi Loeb's claim that a meteor was of interstellar origin. Instead someone at that command merely mentioned that Loeb had made such a claim.

(3) No, after dredging up some tiny spherules in the ocean, Loeb did not determine that "a small percentage of the materials recovered are neither human-made, nor materials known to be from our solar system." Instead only materials with a "nothing very special" composition were found. 

The main focus of the article seems to be whether scientists have any obligation to evaluate all the offbeat theories that are floating about. The article seems to suggest that they do not. We have an example of a scientist who gets lots of emails trying to sell strange theories. The scientist rather seems to tell us: I don't have time to analyze all these strange theories I am being told about. 

It is true that no scientist has a duty to study every science-related theory.  Theories of mind and matter and life and the universe arise in numbers too high for anyone to keep up with them all. Such theories are produced in very high numbers by people such as philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, laymen and evolutionary biologists. One reason why no one could ever keep up with the majority of such theories is that nowadays theories are stated in long documents filled with very specialized jargon that few people understand. 

Another reason why no one could ever keep up with the majority of such theories is that nowadays scientific theories are often stated using the most abstruse and hard-to-follow mathematics. Many theoretical physicists and theoretical biologists like to use a technique I call "math spraying." The technique involves adorning speculations with hard-to-follow mathematics, to make the speculations look more weighty.  Many a theorist lacking evidence for his theory will try to pad his paper with obscure equations, to make it look like his "castles in the air" speculations are something intellectually weighty.  No one could ever follow all the obscure math being grinded out in such speculative papers. 

It is true that no scientist has a duty to study every theory relevant to claims he may make, nor does a scientist have a duty to even study most such theories, which exist in such huge numbers. But a scientist does have a duty to study observations, particularly observation reports that conflict with claims the scientist may often make. An intelligent rule is: the more observation reports there are that conflict with some claim a scientist makes, the greater the duty the scientist has to study such reports. 

To give an example of such a principle in action, suppose you are a scientist claiming that some medical treatment is safe. You may hear some report that seems to defy your claim. For example, someone may report his wife died on the day she had such a medical treatment. If such reports are very few, you may have no obligation to study them. But the greater the number of such reports, the greater your duty is to seriously study such reports.  If, for example, you are claiming that medicine XYZ is safe, and it is not merely a handful of people but hundreds or thousands of people who reported that their relative died on the day they used medicine XYZ, then you have the most solemn duty to study such reports.  

The principle is: a scientist has a duty to study important-sounding reports conflicting with any claims he makes; and the greater the number of such reports, the greater such an obligation is. In this regard today's scientists are guilty of the most appalling dereliction of duty.  This is because there occurs the most massive number of reports defying the claims that such scientists make; but most scientists refuse to seriously study such reports. 

Below is just a small fraction of the reports of this type that have been documented:

• The accounts of very many thousands of reliable witnesses who had near-death experiences, often reporting the most vivid and life-changing experiences at a time when their heart had stopped and their brain waves had shut down, something that should have prevented any experience according to "brains make minds" dogmas. 
• The accounts of very many people reporting out-of-body experiences in which they observed their own bodies from a position meters away (discussed here, here, and here). 
• The many cases in which medical personnel who did not have such experiences verified the medical resuscitation details recalled by people who had near-death experiences, who recalled medical details that occurred when such people should have been completely unconscious because their hearts had stopped.
• Abundant cases of dying people who reported seeing dead relatives.
• Very many cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, with the witness soon learning the person did die at about the time the apparition was seen (discussed in the 18 posts here). 
• Very many cases when multiple witnesses reported seeing the same apparition (discussed in my series of posts here). 
• A great abundance of reports in the nineteenth century of spiritual manifestations such as mysterious raps that spelled out messages, tables moving when no one touched them, tables half-levitating when no one touched them, and tables fully levitating when no  one touched them (discussed in the series of posts here).  
• Spectacular cases in the history of mediums, with paranormal phenomena often being carefully documented by observing scientists, as in the cases of Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Leonora Piper, and Indridi Indridason.

• Two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance in which people could observe things far away or observe things when they were blindfolded or observe things in closed containers such as locked boxes. 
• Abundant photographic evidence for mysterious orbs, including 800 photos of mysterious striped orbs, orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns, and orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns while falling water was being photographed. 
• Abundant reports of mysterious orbs being seen with the naked eye, described in the 120+ posts here.
• A great abundance of anecdotal evidence for telepathy, with large fractions of the human population reporting telepathic experiences. 
• More than a century of solid laboratory evidence for telepathy, including cases discussed here, here, and here.  
• A great abundance of evidence for a phenomenon of materialization, involving the mysterious appearance of tangible human forms. 
• Extremely numerous cases in which living people report hard-to-explain events and synchronicity suggesting interaction with survivors of death.

 Reports such as these defy the claims that typical scientists make over and over again, such as claims that the origin of humans is well-understood, claims that the laws of nature are well-understood, claims that the human mind is merely the product of the brain (or the same thing as the brain), and claims that reality is well-understood by today's scientists. And reports such as these occur in the most massive numbers. For example:

In Arcangel's study of 827 people, 596 (72%)  responded that they had had an "afterlife encounter." We read, "69% of respondents listed some form of visual encounter (Question 4), 19% were Visual only, 13% were a combination of Visual/Auditory, 8% Visual/Sense of Presence and 8% Visual/Auditory/Sense of Presence."

Erlendur Haraldsson surveyed 902 people in Iceland in 1974, finding that 31% reported seeing an apparition or having an encounter with a dead person.  He did another survey in Iceland  in 2007 with a similar sample size, finding that 42% reported seeing an apparition or having an encounter with a dead person, with 21% reporting a "visual experience of a dead person,"  along with 21% reporting an out-of-body experience.  

According to the paper "Psychic Experiences in the Multinational Human Values Study: Who Reports Them?" here: "Three items on personal psychic experiences (telepathy, clairvoyance, contact with the dead) were included in a survey of human values that was conducted on large representative samples in 13 countries in Europe and in the U.S. (N = 18,607). In Europe, the percentage of persons reporting telepathy was 34%; clairvoyance was reported by 21%; and 25% reported contact with the dead. Percentages for the U.S. were considerably higher: 54%, 25% and 30% respectively.".  

A 1973 survey of 434 persons in Los Angeles, USA ("Phenomenological Reality and Post-Death  Contact" by Richard Kalish and David Reynolds) found that 44% reported encounters with the deceased, and that 25% of those 44% (in other words, 11% of the 434) said that a dead person "actually visited or was seen at a seance."

As reported in the 1894 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume X, Part XXVI), an 1890's "Census of Hallucinations" conducted by the Society for Psychical Research asked, "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"  As reported in Table 1 here (page 39), the number answering "Yes" was about 10%.  Because the question did not specifically refer to the dead, ghosts or apparitions, the wording of the question may have greatly reduced the number of "yes" answers from people experiencing what seemed to be an apparition of the dead or a sense of the presence of the dead. 

In the March-April 1948 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, page 187, there appeared the result of a survey asking the same question asked in 1894: "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"  According to page 191, 217 out of 1519 answered "Yes." This was a 14% "yes" rate higher than the rate of about 10% reported in 1894. 

A 1980 telephone survey of 368 participants found that 29% reported "post-death communication." 

The British Medical Journal published in 1971 a study by Rees that involved almost 300 subjects, one entitled "The Hallucinations of Widowhood."  Rees reported that 39% in his survey reported a sense of presence from a deceased person and 14% reported seeing the deceased, along with 13% hearing the deceased.

A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 18% of Americans said they've seen or been in the presence of a ghost, and that 29% said that they've felt in touch with someone who died. 

A survey of 1510 Germans found (page 12) that 15.8 reported experience with an apparition, and more than 36% reported experience with ESP. 

A Groupon survey of 2000 people found that more than 60% claim to have seen a ghost.

A 1976 survey of 1467 people in the US asked people if they had ever "felt as though you were really in touch with someone who had died?" 27% answered "Yes."  

On page 123 of the 1954 Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (Volume 48), which you can read here, we read of a poll done of 42 students who were asked: "Have you ever actually seen your physical body from a viewpoint completely outside that body, like standing beside the bed and looking at yourself lying in the bed, or like floating in the air near your body?” 33% answered "Yes." 

 A  study found that "Of the 30 interviewable survivors of cardiac arrest, 7 (23 percent) described experiences classified as NDEs by scoring 7 or more points on the NDE Scale." Of these reporting a near-death experience in this study (11), 90% reported out-of-body experiences. 

 A Dutch study found 18% of cardiac arrest survivors reporting a near-death experience, but with only a minority of these reporting an out-of-body experience. 

A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person."   

A study on after-death communication (ADC) states, "Results indicated that, regarding prevalence, 30-35% of people report at least one ADC sometime in their lives and, regarding incidence, 70-80% of bereaved people report one or more ADC experiences within months of a loved one's physical death."

A survey about near-death experiences in Australia said that nearly 9$ of Australians reported them.   

 A paper  "Out-of-Body Experiences" by Carlos S. Alvarado tells us that according to 5 surveys of the general population, 10% of the population report out-of-body experiences. A larger number of surveys of students show they report out-of-body experiences at a rate of about 25%.  

We read the following on a page of the Psi Encyclopedia:

"In 2017, Una MacConville carried out a study with Irish health care professionals. The carers reported that 45% of their patients spoke of visions of deceased relatives, often joyful experiences that bring a sense of peace and comfort."

So clearly there very massively occur reports defying the claims often made by typical scientists. Such scientists have a duty to study such reports. But acting like bad scientists, most scientists refuse to act in accordance with such a duty. 

On page 5 of the document here, which has very much evidence in support of some of the reports above, Dr. Paul Joire commented on the willful blindness of most scientists in regard to studying such reports:

"If a man should say : ' I only occupy myself with astronomy or botany, I have not the time to study psychical phenomena, I do not know anything about them and cannot adjudicate upon them';  there is nothing to be said against this : such an attitude is serious and correct-it does not depart from the scientific spirit. 

But it must be recognised that the language of the majority of men, and even of scientists, is quite different from this. They despise psychical phenomena, not because they cannot study them, but because they do not believe in their existence, and declare them impossible, without having studied or even seriously examined them. Now this negation, a priori, is altogether contrary to the scientific spirit."

Yes, very sadly, that is how the majority of the most well-known scientists act these days: in a matter very contrary to the scientific spirit. Our universities did not train them according to some principle of "let observations reign as king."  Our universities trained them to be warriors for an outdated belief system mostly put in place in the nineteenth century.  Our universities trained them according to a rule of "throw away all observations that offend your most cherished dogmas."

The Problem of Explaining Human Minds Is a Million Times Larger Than a Mere "Problem of Conscious Experience"

 There is a branch of physical science that has great relevance to the philosophy of mind: neuroscience. What has been learned about brains has very much relevance to questions such as whether the brain is the source of the human mind and whether the brain could be a storage place of human memories. The science of psychology also has great relevance to the philosophy of mind. But other sciences have much less relevance to the philosophy of mind.  The science of physics has no great direct relevance to the philosophy of mind, although it does have an indirect relevance I will mention near the end of this post. 

Because of a lack of any direct relevance of physics to the philosophy of mind, we should not tend to be overly impressed when physicists write on questions in the philosophy of mind, particularly when they sound like  dilettantes making rather brief trips into topics of oceanic depth that they have not deeply studied. A recent example of such a thing may be found in the paper "The mind-brain relationship and the perspective of meaning" by physicist Ranjan Mukhopadhyay.

Ranjan goes wrong in his first sentence by stating that the two chief problems are "how subjective conscious experience can arise from physical neurological processes and how conscious mental states can causally act upon the physical world."  We have here the same mistake that scientists so often make: the mistake of asking "how x causes y" when you don't know if x causes y. We do not actually know that human mental activity arises from physical neurological processes, and there are very many reasons (discussed in the posts of this blog) for thinking that the human brain cannot be the source of the mind. It is always a huge mistake to assume that x causes y without adequate warrant and to then limit your investigation into "how x causes y" rather than deeply diving into the question "is it true that x causes y?"  Nature never told us that brains cause minds.  When I retrieve an apple from a table, my senses give me two reasons for believing that my hand was involved in such a retrieval: the sight of my hand touching the apple, and the feel of my fingers touching the apple. But if I retrieve from my memories a memory of my youth, my body does nothing whatsoever to hint that my brain was the cause of such a retrieval. 

On page 2 of the paper we have a quote that shows how wrong Ranjan has gone. He states this:

" The brain consists of an intricate network of neurons that communicate with each other via a combination of electrical and chemical signals (Bear et al., 2006). It appears reasonable to assume that the brain is carrying out computations in the sense of processing information from the surroundings, the information being transmitted, for example, in the form of electrical impulses, processing this information, and sending out instructions about how the body should react to the environmental cues. Given the immense complexity of the brain, maybe it’s not surprising that we do not understand the details of how the brain accomplishes this. The true puzzle is how conscious experience fits into this picture. What rules govern how the brain will interpret certain patterns of neural firings as pain, or pleasure, or sorrow, or joy? How can we explain our sensations in physical terms, given that we do not even understand how to represent such subjective mental states in physical or mathematical ways?"

We have here the very great error of making a gigantic philosophical and scientific conclusion (that we act in some way because our brain is "sending out instructions about how the body should react to the environmental cues"),  a conclusion not reached by some reasoning process and pondering of evidence, but merely by making an assumption. No, it does not "appear reasonable to assume" that the brain is doing any such thing, particularly given a complete lack of any understanding of how a brain could ever make a decision on how someone should act.  Computers produce computation by virtue of such inventions as an operating system (e.g. Windows or UNIX), and things such  as application software. The brain has no such things, and has no unit comparable to a CPU (one that sequentially processes logical instructions). So it does not at all "appear reasonable to assume" that the brain is doing computations that lead it to "sending out instructions about how the body should react to the environmental cues." We also have in the statement above the very big nonsense of trying to speak as if there is only one puzzle in the philosophy of mind, by making the claim that  "the true puzzle is how conscious experience fits into this picture."  The philosophy of mind is filled with very many deep puzzles.

See here for why brains are not like computers. 

The problem is that humans have a huge variety of mental experiences and mental capabilities, normal and anomalous; and "the brain caused it" explanations fail all over the place. We don't have any credible neural explanations for how humans think, imagine, believe, learn, form memories and instantly recall.  Ranjan gives us a lame excuse for the failures to produce credible neural explanations for such things, saying, "Given the immense complexity of the brain, maybe it’s not surprising that we do not understand the details of how the brain accomplishes this."  If brains were responsible for things such as the creation of memories and the retrieval of learned information, there would be evidence of such a thing all over the place in the brain; but such evidence has not been found.  Saying "the brain is very complex" is a lame excuse for such an observational failure. The truth is that we haven't found "how the brain accomplishes this" (despite very many billions in funding for high-tech neuroscience research) because the brain does not accomplish any such thing. 

Ranjan sounds like he hasn't done his homework in studying human mental phenomena (a topic of oceanic depth) and that he hasn't done his homework by making a very deep study of the human brain and whether it actually has the characteristics we would expect it to have if it was the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories that can last for 60 years and can be instantly recalled.  On page 5 he claims that a deep analysis of quantum mechanics is important in dealing with these issues. It sounds like someone who hasn't done the studies he should have done trying to compensate by appealing to some esoteric topic that he does know well. It's kind of like someone who hasn't learned how to fly a plane claiming while trying to fly a plane that he does know well how to ride a motorcycle, and this will be sufficient.  

Quantum mechanics has no very big relevance to topics of the philosophy of mind. I could list 100 books you should read before writing a book about the nature of the mind, and a book on quantum mechanics would not be one of those books. 

Ranjan then spends several pages discussing quantum mechanics (not very clearly), and uses his discussion as some justification for some claim that there is some "underlying proto-consciousness" that might help to explain minds. We seem to get nothing of much value in the next pages, which wander around a large variety of topics, failing to offer much of anything in the way of insights or credible ideas. But then the author in his conclusion makes this triumphal proclamation: "In this paper, I have developed a framework which can successfully unsnarl the knot and provide a convenient starting-point for developing a systematic theory of the mind and consciousness, thus converting a seemingly unsolvable philosophical mystery to a problem that can then be addressed using the methods of neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience." No, it sounds more like author has just said a few things about quantum mechanics and "proto-consciousness," and fooled himself into thinking this was some great insight. 

Ranjan errs in claiming that his idea is a top-down theory of consciousness.  You have a top-down theory of the human mind when you postulate a human mind being produced by something greater than a human mind, and a bottom-up theory when you postulate a human mind being produced by something less than a human mind. The "proto-consciousness" Ranjan imagines is something less than a human mind, so his theory is a bottom-up theory. 

Alas, our physicist sounds like a dabbler and a dilettante making a quickie sojourn into the philosophy of mind, a topic far beyond his expertise. He shows no signs of having very deeply studied either brains or minds, and makes some statements sounding like he has not done either. Brains plus some vague quantum-mechanics-flavored "proto-consciousness" do not explain human minds, which have such a rich variety of characteristics and capabilities beyond any neural explanation. The topic of minds and human mental experiences is a topic of oceanic depth, and we should not expect much from those who just briefly wade around in such an ocean.

Part of the problem seems to be that in this paper and another similar paper Ranjan (like many others) seems to have fallen "hook, line and sinker" for the "one big thing left" myth promulgated by philosopher David Chalmers.  Chalmers has long taught the extremely misconceived idea that the problems in the philosophy of mind are all easy problems, except for one big problem he calls "the hard problem of consciousness," a problem of explaining subjective awareness.  Chalmers arguments for this idea have always been fallacious. He has repeatedly argued that the other problems in the philosophy of mind are easy because we can conceive of brain observations that might solve them. Chalmers failed to study all the reasons why what we have already observed rules out the brain as the explanation for quite a few mental things other than consciousness: things such as rapid thinking, life long memories and instant knowledge recall. You can imagine someone observing someone on some other planet, observing a brain very different from our brains, a brain that had indexes, addresses, a unit for writing memories, a unit for reading memories, blazing fast and low-noise transmission pathways, a vastly complicated encoding system for translating experiences and learned knowledge into brain states, and also a stable system for storing memories for 60 years.  A person observing such features might then be able to say, "I know how people on this planet use brains to recall instantly and accurately things they learned 60 years ago."  The problem is that neuroscientists have already exhaustively studied the brain, and they have found none of the features just mentioned.  So it's a huge fallacy to talk about hypothetical observations that could be made that might solve problems of explaining phenomena such as instant memory retrieval, blazing fast arithmetic calculation, and life-long memories, when we already can be confident that such observations will not ever occur in regard to human brains,  because the imagined units and components and tendencies would have been discovered long ago if they existed in the human brain. 

It is a gigantic fallacy to think there is merely some "problem of consciousness" when there is a billion  times bigger "problem of explaining human minds and human mental phenomena" that is almost infinitely more complicated.  Once you realize this, you may realize that imagining some quantum "proto-consciousness" does very little to solve the explanatory problems in the philosophy of mind, which are huge and "all over the place."  

The trick of posing a mere "problem of consciousness" is a ridiculous ruse. A human being is not merely "some consciousness." A human being is an enormously complex reality, and the mental reality is as complex as the physical reality.  You dehumanize and degrade human beings when you refer to their minds as mere "consciousness." The problem of human mentality is the problem of credibly explaining the thirty or forty most interesting types of human mental experiences, human mental characteristics and human mental capabilities.  Instead of just being  "some consciousness," human beings are minds that have a vast variety of mental capabilities and mental experiences such as these:

• imagination
• self-hood
• abstract idea creation
• appreciation
• memory formation
• moral thinking and moral behavior
• instantaneous memory recall
• instantaneous creation of permanent new memories
• memory persistence for as long as 50 years or more
• emotions
• desire
• speaking in a language
• understanding spoken language
• creativity
• insight
• beliefs
• pleasure
• pain
• reading ability
• writing ability
• mental illness of many different types
• ordinary awareness of surroundings
• visual perception
• recognition
• planning ability
• auditory perception
• attention
• fascination and interest
• the correct recall of large bodies of sequential information (such as when someone playing Hamlet recalls all his lines correctly)
• eyes-closed visualization
• extrasensory perception (ESP)
• dreaming
• pattern recognition
• social abilities
• spirituality
• philosophical reasoning
• mathematical ability
• volition
• trance phenomena
• exceptional memory such as hyperthymesia
• extraordinary calculation abilities such as in autistic savants
• out-of-body experiences
• apparition sightings 

It is always a silly, stupid trick when someone tries to reduce so complex a reality to try and make it sound like the faintest shadow of what it is, by speaking as if there is a mere "problem of consciousness," and talking as if humans are just "some consciousness" that needs to be explained.  Such a shabby, pathetic trick (which can be called consciousness shadow-speaking) is as silly as ignoring the vast complexity of the organization of the human body, and speaking as if explaining the origin of human bodies is just a task of explaining how there might occur "some carbon concentrations."  The person attempting so pathetic a trick is acting as silly as a person who stands at the seashore, fills a glass with seawater, and says, "Oceans are easy to explain -- they're just water."  Just as the ocean includes trillions of deep, baffling complexities such as all of the organization and biochemistry of sea creatures -- something infinitely more complex than mere water -- the human mind and human mental experiences involve trillions of complexities, and such a reality is something almost infinitely more complex than mere "consciousness."  The reductionist who engages in consciousness shadow-speaking is someone engaging in a trick as misleading as someone who says, "Mathematics is real simple -- it's just counting." 

The vast majority of people who try to reduce the mountain-sized problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences in all their variety into the mouse-sized problem of explaining some mere dry abstraction of "consciousness"  are people who were too lazy to deeply study minds and brains, and who used this stupid trick of shadow-speaking to try to make their explanation job a million times easier.  People who lack credible explanations for very complex realities (whether physical or mental) love to use shabby word tricks in which they try to make the complex realities sound a million times simpler than they are. 

The dialog below illustrates the stupidity of trying to explain human minds by describing a human mind as mere "consciousness" and then trying to create a "theory of consciousness" that applies to everything conscious. 

James: John, I've made great progress in explaining how the human body arises during a mother's pregnancy. John: Great, tell me about it. James: I call my explanation a “theory of solidity.” John: A theory of solidity? James: Yes, because that's the essential nature of human bodies, that they are solid. So my theory attempts to explain how solidity arises. John: I think you've gone in the wrong direction, and made a big mistake. James: Why? John: Because a human body is something gigantically greater than mere “solidity.” A human body is a state of vast hierarchical organization, with a oceanic level of functional complexity. For example, in our bodies are 20,000 different protein inventions, most very special arrangements of many thousands of atoms. And we have 200 types of cells, each so complex they are compared to factories. You would do nothing to explain so impressive a reality of physical organization by merely explaining “solidity.” Your body is something gigantically more than mere “solidity.”

James: John, I've made great progress in explaining how the human mind arises. John: Great, tell me about it. James: I call my explanation a “theory of consciousness.” John: A theory of consciousness? James: Yes, because that's the essential nature of human minds, that they are conscious. So my theory attempts to explain how consciousness arises. John: I think you've gone in the wrong direction, and made a big mistake. James: Why? John: Because a human mind is something gigantically greater than mere “consciousness.” You and I are not merely “some consciousness.” We are thinking, believing, seeing, reading, hearing, loving imagining minds with insight, emotions, viewpoints, and a great variety of mental powers such as instant learning ability, the ability to hold memories for decades, and the ability to instantly recall knowledge when only hearing a word or seeing a face. Human minds and human mental experiences are a reality of oceanic depth, so much more than mere “consciousness.”

The same complaints I make above about Ranjan's sojourn into the philosophy of mind apply with equal force against a recent  article by cosmologist/physicist Ethan Siegel, one entitled "Can the known particles and interactions explain consciousness?" As far as I can guess from many years of  reading his articles that are too-frequently promoted by Google News, Siegel seems to have never lifted a finger to seriously study minds, brains or human mental experiences. So he spends almost all of his article telling us about what he does know about (physics), without doing anything to explain how what he is discussing has any relation to explaining minds. We hear nothing that is of any value in explaining how particles or physical interactions could give rise to human minds. We get what sounds like a "laziest effort" sojourn into the philosophy of mind. We get the silly claim, "We should, therefore, be able to take these fundamental constituents of matter — quarks, gluons, and electrons — and assemble them in various ways to explain everything that we encounter in everyday life."  Humans are no more capable of creating a living and thinking human adult body by assembling subatomic particles than fish are capable of building aircraft carriers; and every human body is a state of organization greater than any object humans have constructed. 

Consider the human body. The human body is a fantastically complex arrangement of matter. The very many types of complex molecules and cells in the human body contain various different elements, including hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium and iron. Now suppose someone were to try to analyze a human body by only analyzing the hydrogen in it, the simplest element in it. That would be folly. A body having molecules made of multiple different types of elements cannot be meaningfully or wisely analyzed by restricting yourself to an analysis of the simplest element in that body. Anyone trying to analyze a human body by some restricted "hydrogen analysis" has gone hopelessly astray.  Similarly, human minds and human mental experiences consist of a very great number of things rather than some mere primitive of "consciousness."  The person who tries to analyze human minds and human mental experiences by mainly analyzing what he calls "consciousness" is typically someone who has made as big a mistake as someone trying to analyze human bodies by mainly analyzing hydrogen in human bodies. No real insight can be gained by analyzing some very complex reality so that you center your analysis on the simplest thing or simplest aspect of that reality. People  who try to analyze minds by "consciousness analysis" are people as blundering as someone who might try to analyze a human body mainly by "hydrogen analysis."

The person trying to simplify the problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences by shrinking the problem a million-fold to become a mere problem of explaining some dry abstraction of "consciousness" is like some metaphysician who tries to simply the problem of explaining the universe a million-fold by reinventing the problem as a mere dry "problem of existence" rather than a problem of explaining a universe like the one we have. 

Physics does have an indirect relevance to the philosophy of mind, although it is something entirely different from what Ranjan has discussed. The fundamental constants of physics are enormously fine-tuned in a way that makes possible the existence of life, as I discuss here, here, here and here. We would not expect such fine tuning to exist in any of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 random universes. The fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental  constants and the fine-tuning of the universe's laws strongly suggest that our universe was produced by some enormous mind of vast power. Realizing how fine-tuned our universe is, and also studying biology which provides evidence of fine-tuning everywhere, it becomes more plausible to believe that our minds have as their source not brains but some transcendent mind vastly greatly than our own minds. 

Below we see some of the pillars of an advanced philosophy of mind and biology. The fine-tuning of the universe's physical laws and fundamental constants is one of the pillars of such a philosophy. For a discussion of how these things all fit together to be pillars of a single well-justified and evidence-based philosophy of mind and biology, read my long post here. 

The Brains of 60 Subjects Seemed to Look the Same During Eyes Closed Mental Rest, Recall and Math Activity

The EEG is a device that can detect electrical activity from parts of the brain. When an EEG device is used, electrodes are placed next to different parts of the skull. The device will pick up a dozen or more different lines that show electrical activity in different parts of the brain. 

Brains have a great deal of signal noise, and the abundance of such noise is one of several major reasons for disbelieving that the brain is the source of human thinking and recall which can occur with incredible accuracy, such as when people perfectly recall very large bodies of text and perfectly perform extremely difficult math calculations without using tools such as computers, pencils or paper. The analysis of brain waves obtained by EEG devices is an area of science where bad methods, pareidolia and junk analysis is very abundant.  There is an abundance of people trying to use fancy statistical methods to try to extract identifiable "signals" or "signs" from data that is very noisy and polluted. Muscle movements abundantly contaminate EEG readings. 

A widely used publicly available dataset of EEG data is available on a site called Physionet. On a page entitled "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" it is possible to download EEG data for 36 subjects. The data includes EEG readings taken during "rest activity" and EEG readings taken when the subjects were told to perform mathematical operations.  The paper here ("Electroencephalograms during Mental Arithmetic Task Performance") describes how the data was gathered.  The data set is sometimes called the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" or it may be called something like the "Physionet EEG mental arithmetic task dataset."

I don't recommend trying to download this data, because it uses some file format that your spreadsheet or text editor will not be able to understand.  But at the page here, we have some comments by a person who downloaded this data, and also downloaded a utility program that allows him to see the data represented as particular wavy lines. 

After showing us a picture showing one subject whose brain wave lines looked different when he was doing the math tasks, the writer states, "Other participants didn’t see much change at all while doing their tasks." By this he means that when he looks at the brain waves of such participants, they don't look different when the subjects were doing the math tasks (compared to when they were resting). The writer also states, "In fact, some data looked like the brain had more activity while doing nothing at all."  We see one visual with brain wave lines showing "baseline" activity for Subject 15, and another visual showing brain wave lines during that subject's performance of math tasks. The first visual shows wavy lines that are a lot wavier that the second visual, contrary to the idea that mental activity would involve more active brain waves. 

You can read some scientific papers written by scientists that create algorithms or models that analyze data sets such as this, algorithms or models trying to detect whether a particular set of EEG readings was or was not taken when a patient was engaging in heavy thinking. A typical paper of this type will discuss several different algorithms or models the scientists tested. We may be told that the most successful algorithm had something like a 75% success rate in predicting whether a set of EEG readings were produced rest activity or thinking.  

Such a thing is unimpressive when you consider that the data set being used for testing is usually small. In many cases half of the patient data will be used to "train" the model, and the other half will be used to test the model. So maybe the data for only 8 or 10 patients will be used to test the model.  The odds of accidental success on guessing whether the person's mind was active or not (even if the model is worthless) are something like this (I used the StatTrek binomial probability calculator to calculate some of the odds):

Eight patients:

Chance of 8 guesses all correct = 2 to 8th power = 1/256.

Chance of 7 out of 8 guesses correct = .035

Chance of 6 out of 8 guesses correct = .014

Ten patients:

Chance of 10 guesses all correct = 2 to 10th power = 1/1024

Chance of 9 out of 10 guesses correct = .01

Chance of 8 out of 10 guesses correct = .05

Chance of 7 out of 10 guesses correct = .17

Now, with odds like these it means very little if some scientific paper says that it tried several different predictive models, and found that one of the models had a 70% predictive accuracy. You might rather easily get that level of success by pure chance, even if the model is worthless or if the "mental activity" scans have no identifying characteristics.  We must also remember here factors such as what is called publication bias and what is called the file drawer effect. Publication bias is that scientific journals tend to reject negative results, and accept for publication only papers reporting positive results. The file drawer effect is that scientists are free to try different things without publishing their failures, and without submitting failed attempts for publication. So a scientist who produces a slightly successful predictive model analyzing EEG data may have in his file drawers 40 failed attempts involving unsuccessful predictive models. Getting maybe a "70% successful" predictive model on the 20th or 30th try does not mean that the EEG data actually shows a difference when people are thinking versus when their minds are resting. 

Then there is the fact that the gathering of EEG data must be done very carefully for any data set that compares intensive mental activity with rest activity. Visual activity, muscle activity and stress can produce traces in EEG data.  So, for example, it might be easy to detect the difference between rest activity and mental activity if the subject is motionless and closes his eyes during rest activity, and the subject uses a keyboard to type answers during the mental activity.  In that case the difference would come from the fact that during the rest activity there is no use of the eyes and muscles, and during the mental task there is use of the eyes and muscles. 

The paper here ("Electroencephalograms during Mental Arithmetic Task Performance") describes some poor methods of gathering rest data and mental arithmetic data used to create the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set that has been the basis of quite a few scientific papers.  We are told this:

"Mental arithmetic performance is considered as a standardized stress-inducing experimental protocol. Serial subtraction during 15 min is considered to be a psychosocial stress. In this way, our study design required intensive cognitive activity from the subjects. Intensive mental load is accompanied by a change in the emotional background when the subject makes additional effort to resolve tasks, so one can talk about evoked emotions in this case.. During EEG recording, the participants sat in a dark soundproof chamber, comfortably reclined in an armchair. Prior to the experiment, participants were instructed to try to relax during the rest state and were informed about the arithmetic task—participants were asked to count mentally without speaking or using finger movements, accurately and quickly, in the rhythm they had determined. After 3 min of adaptation to experimental conditions, EEG registration of the rest state with closed eyes was made (over the next 3 min). Then the participants performed a mental arithmetic task—serial subtraction—for 4 min."

We are also told that the scientists kept only a subset of the original data gathered, throwing out about half of the data:

"Based on EEG visual inspection by a qualified electroneurophysiologist, 30 of the 66 initial participants were excluded from the database due to poor EEG quality (excessive number of oculographic and myographic artifacts), so the final sample size is 36 subjects."

It is easy to see how that could have gone wrong. The desire to get a set of EEGs with mental activity brain scan data looking during different from rest state brain scan data might have come into play, creating a bias in so subjective a selection of which subjects to keep. 

There's much gone wrong here. We have no description of a rest state which is a clear description of a lack of mental activity. Were the subjects hearing something told them during the rest state? That isn't a rest state. Did any of the subjects move during the rest state? That isn't a rest state. Were the subjects counting during the rest state? We can't even tell from the wording above. Did the subjects have their eyes closed when they were doing the mental subtractions? We don't know. Were the subjects disqualified if they violated the instructions by softly speaking as they counted backwards? Apparently not. The subjects were told to follow a rhythm during counting, an instruction which might have tended to produce sounds or motions such as tapping. The subjects were not told to be motionless, but merely told not to use their fingers (an instruction that would not exclude arm movements or foot tapping movements or a rocking motion in their reclining armchair). Also, the subjects were asked about what was the final number after their mental subtractions. That might have created a possible element of anxiety, in which people would be worried about whether the final number (after their mental subtractions) would be a correct one. Such anxiety might have shown up in the EEG readings, which might have shown signs of anxiety that were not signs of mental effort.  Also, based on subjective whims of a human judge only about half of the data collected has been put in the public data set. The mental activity requested (serial subtraction) is a mental activity that almost seems designed to create distress and frustration in subjects, which may show up as EEG blips that are not signs of thinking. 

Data like this has no value unless there is a crystal-clear description of the exact procedure used during the rest state and the mental activity state. That description should include a precise detailing of whether the subjects had their eyes opened, an exact quotation of what they were told, an exact description of whether the subjects moved or spoke, a description of what (if any) methods were used to prevent the subjects from moving, and so forth.  Comparing mental rest states and mental activity states (from EEG data) cannot be done effectively unless the mental activity states occur under the exact sensory conditions and movement conditions of the rest state, and it would seem the only good method would be for patients to have eyes closed (without any sounds) both in the rest state and the mental activity state, without any possible source of mental anxiety in either state.  All papers based on the data set described (the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set) would seem to have little value because of the failure (in the paper describing how the data was gathered) to describe an effective, well-documented protocol for distinguishing between real rest activity and sightless, soundless, motionless mental activity without any element of potential anxiety. 

I can tell you how a valid data set of EEG data might be created for the comparison of rest data and mental activity data.  People would be blindfolded in a dark silent room. They would be told that when they first hear a first electronic beep, they should remain motionless for two minutes and think of absolutely nothing other than the blackness of outer space. They would be told that when they hear the second beep, they should remain motionless and start some arithmetic activity such as adding the number 7 continually, continuing for two minutes until they hear the third beep, at which point the EEG readings will stop. The people would also be told to remain motionless and without any expression throughout the whole four minutes of testing.  They would also be told that no one will ask them what the final number was in their minds, so that there is no reason for any anxiety. They would be told, "Don't worry at all if you think one of your numbers is wrong -- just keep adding 7 to whatever was your last number was." A variety of sensitive motion detectors could be used to exclude any subjects who moved significantly. The number of subjects in the final data set would be at least 60, requiring an original pool of test subjects much greater.  Exclusion of subjects would be based on an objective criteria such as motion detector activation, rather than some arbitrary exclusion based on subjective human exclusions. Heart rate data would be gathered, and any subjects showing signs of increased heart rate during the mental activity phase (a sign of stress) would be excluded from the data set. Sensitive sound detectors would also listen for people who softly counted the numbers, excluding such subjects. Ideally, the subjects would wear mouth devices preventing any soft counting. 

Papers based on an analysis of data gathered in such a way (with a sufficient study group size) would fail to show any analysis method correctly predicting whether the rest state or the mental activity state occurred, tending to confirm the idea that thinking is not actually produced by the brain.  The accuracy of any such method over multiple tests would never be some high percentage such as 80%. 

In neuroscience papers attempting to do EEG analysis to find neural correlates of mental activity,  we tend to see some of the same problems found in papers attempting to do fMRI analysis to find neural correlates of mental activity.  The biggest problem is insufficient study group sizes.  Claims are made such that if you analyze some EEG data in such-and-such a way, you will be able to tell (with such-and-such an accuracy) whether or not mental activity occurred.  The claims are made on the basis of tiny data sets such as 8 or 10 or 12 patients. Such claims should never convince unless they are done on large data sets involving more than 50 subjects, and unless the data sets are fully documented by a discussion of a sound procedure used to gather the data sets.  Almost always what is being picked up is not signs of mental activity but signs of muscle activity, speech, vision or emotional states. 

Here are some examples of papers that we should not be taking seriously because of defects I will mention. All of these are examples of "how not to do an EEG study looking for brain wave correlates of mental activity." 

• "What does delta band tell us about cognitive processes: A mental calculation study" (link). The study got data on only 18 subjects. The mental calculation activity required muscle movement, and the rest activity did not. So the EEG data was not gathered so that pure mental activity was compared to pure mind resting, and "neural correlates of thinking" claims are invalid. 
• "Real-Time Mental Arithmetic Task Recognition From EEG Signals"  (link).  Data was not gathered in a way to exclude physical differences between rest states and activity and  not gathered in a way to exclude emotional differences between rest states and mental activity.  We are told, "In the relax task, subjects were asked to open their eyes and try to be relaxed. There was no mental arithmetic task to fulfill in this session. Subjects were required to breathe deeply and focus on their breath."  Then we are told in the mental activity state "subjects were required to complete arithmetic calculations as quick as possible." Any differences detected may have been due purely to differences in stress, differences in muscle activity and differences in breathing.  
• "EEG activation patterns during the performance of tasks involving  different components of mental calculation" (link). We have no description of a data gathering method that excluded muscle activity or caused identical levels of muscle activity during the rest period and the mental calculation period.  Any differences detected may have been due purely to differences in muscle activity. 
• "EEG microstate features according to performance on a mental arithmetic task" (link). This paper has little value because it used the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set which is defective for reasons I have explained above. 
• "Automated Classification of Mental Arithmetic Tasks Using Recurrent Neural Network and Entropy Features Obtained from Multi-Channel EEG Signals" (link). This paper has little  value because it used the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set which is defective for reasons I have explained above. 
• "Impact of mental arithmetic task on the electrical activity of the human brain" (link). This paper has little value because it used the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set which is  defective for reasons I have explained above. 
• "Mental arithmetic task detection using geometric features extraction of EEG signal based on machine learning" (link). This paper has little value because it used the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set which is  defective for reasons I have explained above. 

• "Do specific EEG frequencies indicate different processes during mental calculation? (link). The EEG data was gathered from only ten subjects, and the "rest" state involved no real rest, but looking at a visual and saying, "Nothing." The math calculation involved hard problems such as "a complex arithmetic task, e.g. (24 + 39)/9 = , to which the subject had to give the solution verbally immediately after a warning response signal was presented,"  We have no description of a data gathering method that excluded muscle activity or caused identical levels of muscle activity during the rest period and the mental calculation period.  Any differences detected may have been due purely to differences in muscle activity or differences in stress between the easy task of saying nothing and the stressful task of having to answer the hard math problem "immediately." 
• "Mental Arithmetic Task Recognition Using Effective Connectivity and Hierarchical Feature Selection From EEG Signals" (link). EEG data was gathered from 29 subjects who we are told alternated between a short period of "mental arithmetic" and "rest." We have no indication of whether this "mental arithmetic" was silent or involved speech or muscular activity.  So we can't tell whether muscular activity was the same during the rest period and the mental activity period. 
• "Mental arithmetic task classification with convolutional neural network based on spectral-temporal features from EEG" (link). This study used a too-small dataset made from only 12 subjects.
• "Electroencephalographic Study of Real-Time Arithmetic Task Recognition" (link). There were only eight subjects, and a professional EEG equipment was not even used, but only a cheap consumer device.  There was also no rest state for comparison. 
• "EEG Based Mental Arithmetic Task Classification Using a Stacked Long Short Term Memory Network for Brain-Computer Interfacing" (link). This paper has little value because it used the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set which is defective for reasons I have explained above. 
• "A Modified Multivariable Complexity Measure Algorithm and Its Application for Identifying Mental Arithmetic Task" (link). This paper has little value because it used the "EEG During Mental Arithmetic Tasks" data set which is defective for reasons I have explained above. 

The paper "Investigating neural efficiency of elite karate athletes during a mental arithmetic task using EEG" discusses a relatively good protocol for gathering data during rest and mental activity. We are told that during the rest stage subjects were told to keep their eyes closed and do nothing, and during the activity stage subjects kept their eyes closed and silently counted backward from 600, subtracting 3 each time (e.g. 597, 594, 591, and so forth).  But there were only ten subjects, and the paper does not report any great success in distinguishing rest states and activity states, with the investigators concentrating on other things.  

A scientific paper ("A test-retest resting, and cognitive state EEG dataset during multiple subject-driven states" by Yulin Wang and others) laments, "Given the various advantages of EEG including non-invasive, high temporal resolution, easy-to-operate, and cheap as a neuroimaging technique, it is surprising that there exist relatively fewer high-quality, open-access, big EEG datasets when compared to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets to enable the investigation of the brain function." Correct. In general, neuroscientists involved in EEG analysis have not done their job correctly, and have failed to create large publicly available brain wave EEG data sets using very careful methods like those I describe above, which would minimize the confounding factors of signal artifacts created by muscle movement and emotional states. 

The paper tries to help this situation by creating an EEG public dataset. The effort has some good elements,  but some shortcomings.  Data was gathered for 60 subjects during an eyes open rest state, an eyes closed rest state, and some mental activity states. We read this:

"During resting-state EEG recording, participants were instructed to view a fixation point for five minutes (Eyes Open) and then close eyes for another five minutes (Eyes Closed). They needed to keep still, quiet, and relaxed as much as they can, and try to avoid blinking for Eyes Open (EO) session and stay awake for Eyes Closed (EC) session. EEG cognitive state:  The present experiment consisted of three subject-driven cognitive states: retrieval of recent episodic memories, serial subtractions, and (silent) singing of music lyrics."

Alas, we are not told whether there was any method to exclude subjects who did not follow the instructions to "keep still, quiet and relaxed as much as they can" (methods such as motion detectors), and we do not know whether subjects failing to follow such instructions were excluded. Also, we are not told that the same instructions to "keep still, quiet and relaxed as much as they can" were given to the subjects while they were performing the cognitive tasks. So we don't know whether the levels of motion were the same when the subjects rested and when they did the cognitive tasks. But on the plus side, the number of subjects used (60) is pretty good, and there is also a good "test/retest" feature in which each subject was tested on multiple days. 

Figure 6 of the paper gives us this very interesting visual showing something called the "averaged power spectrum" for all of the 60 subjects. We have five colored lines, two of which (light blue and yellow) represent the rest states, and the other representing the mental activity states. It is interesting that all of the lines are the same, except that for the "eyes open" rest state, part of the line looks a little different. Referring to an "eyes-closed" that was a state of mental inactivity, the paper tells us "the spectrum of the four states of eyes-closed, subtraction, music, and memory are particularly similar." 

This is what we would expect under a "your brain does not make your mind" assumption. There is no significant brain signal difference between someone resting his mind with his eyes closed, and someone doing mental activities.  We see something similar in Figure 7 of the paper, which shows us something called the "power distribution of alpha rhythm." The Eyes Closed rest state (EC, in which people's minds were supposed to be inactive) looks the same as when the people were doing mental activity and mental recall. The last four columns on this chart all look the same, and the second column is the Eyes Closed rest state (the last two columns being memory activity and math activity). 

I find the two visuals above to be quite consistent with the claim that your brain is not the source of your mind and not the storage place of your memories.