One idea advanced by some futurologists is the idea of a post-scarcity economy. The concept is that technological progress will produce a future in which there is plenty for everybody, and goods and services are perhaps even free or almost free.
Is this a credible concept, or is merely wishful thinking? Let us look at arguments for future abundance, pro and con.
Energy Abundance, Pro: Our supplies of crude oil may not last for many more decades, but there's a huge amount of other types of oil such as shale oil and tar sands oil, enough to last for centuries. Soon we will be able to start building cars that run on hydrogen, and we have an unlimited supply of hydrogen available (since each water molecule is two thirds hydrogen). There are more and more solar and wind installations, which will provide clean energy indefinitely. There are centuries of coal available. In addition, before long we will develop fusion power, which will give unlimited clean energy.
Energy Abundance, Con: Our future energy situation is grim. We have only decades left of crude oil, and the other types of available oil (such as shale oil and tar sands) are much harder to extract than crude oil. The EROI (Energy Return on Investment) for oil sands and shale oil is only about 5, which is only about 25% or less of the EROI from crude oil. So severe future oil shortages are likely. The “we have centuries of coal” claim has been made for decades, but is not accurate. Recent studies suggest coal production will peak in a few decades, and then sharply decline. In regard to hydrogen vehicles, hydrogen is an efficient way of storing energy produced from other sources, but hydrogen does not by itself provide energy. So a hydrogen vehicle infrastructure can't really be a replacement for our present oil vehicle infrastructure. Solar and wind power are growing rapidly, but still only provide such a small fraction of the world's power that even if their present growth rate continues, we won't have enough renewable energy to make up for fossil fuel shortfalls. As for nuclear fusion, it would solve many problems if we were to figure out how to make it practical. But people have been trying for sixty years to create nuclear fusion reactors, without success, so we shouldn't assume it will be available in our lifetimes.
Metals and Materials Abundance, Pro: Ever more efficient automated technology for mining should mean that we will have enough metals and minerals to meet any needs we may have in the future. More powerful and efficient sensor technology should allow us to find more and more metal deposits. There is a huge untapped potential for undersea mining, which should become feasible once robots are sufficiently advanced. Eventually we will master asteroid mining, and once that gets rolling we will have a basically endless supply of metals and minerals.
Metals and Materials Abundance, Con: Experts estimate that based on current reserves we have only ten to twenty years left of new production of some important metals, including strontium, argon, antimony, gold, zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, lead, cadmium, and barium. The outlook is only slightly better for metals such as mercury, tungsten, copper, thallium, and manganese. The graph below (and this article) highlight the situation.
Food Abundance, Pro: The Green Revolution produced a huge increase in global food production, and this trend will likely continue. Genetic engineering and gene splicing will create new types of super crops that will allow for more abundant crop yields. Ever more efficient robots will make farms super-productive. We may even be able to produce food from its constituent elements by using 3D printers that are optimized for producing food.
Food Abundance, Con: The prospects of being able to feed all the world's growing population are grim. Global warming will lead to an increase in droughts that will hamper food production. Soil depletion is a gigantic little-discussed problem that threatens future food production. Our water resources and aquifers are being strained and stressed in many places, and we probably won't be able to supply adequate irrigation to insure adequate food production. In addition, our food production and food delivery system is largely based on oil (used in transporting and packaging food and producing fertilizers). But Peak Oil will probably cause shortages of oil that will limit food production.
Manufacturing Abundance, Con: 3D printers are great at printing out little plastic trinkets that people don't really need, but they can't print out things made of metal or wood or stone. So 3D printers won't result in some abundance of goods that will make much of a difference in people's lives. As for atomic manufacturing, the rosy forecasts of visionaries such as Eric Drexler have been disputed by other experts. Nobel Prize winner Richard E. Smalley disputes Drexler's claims, saying that there are physical reasons why we will never be able to create machines that can assemble things atom by atom. Smalley cites a “fat fingers” problem, which is that no matter how small we make tools to assemble matter, our tools will be too large, and we will be like a person trying to stack grains of sand with his fingers. As for industrial robots, some are very good at manufacturing, but they are very expensive, which means they won't allow for a cheap surplus of goods.
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So there you have the case for and the case against a super-abundant future. My own opinion is that there is a chance of both a future of abundance and a future of scarcity. So how should the average man behave? The prudent morality is to conserve, and limit consumption.
To give an analogy, imagine you are on a ship traveling across the Pacific, and the ship sinks. You and five others jump into a life boat, on which you have a limited number of supplies. Now in such a case you can be optimistic, and assume that your life boat will be picked by a big ship with lots of food for you. But given the large possibility that you will be facing a grave scarcity of food and water, the only moral way to act is to limit consumption. If your lifeboat had enough food to feed all 5 people for ten days at 1500 calories per day, it would be immoral for you to consume 3000 calories on one of those days, even if you had a hunch that before the tenth day you would be saved by the lucky arrival of a passing ship. Our whole planet is like the lifeboat in this analogy. There is a large chance that we will be suffering great scarcity within a few decades, as well as a significant chance that we will avoid such scarcity through technological wonders (the equivalent of the passing ship that saves the people in the lifeboat). The moral way to act is to conserve and limit consumption, to minimize the pain that will occur to others if the more pessimistic outcome occurs.
A video by Nate Hagens has the title "11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview." He says at the beginning that what he will discuss are "really fundamental learnings, that over time developed and shaped my worldview." The list of things that he gives is a rather poor list. It is below:
- "The Power, Finiteness and Externalities of Oil." He basically gives us the Peak Oil thesis, which may be important to man's future. But it is not something very relevant to a person's philosophy about the fundamental nature of things.
- "Energy Primacy." No real discovery is discussed.
- "The Wanting Is Stronger Than the Having." No real discovery is discussed, just a debatable generalization.
- "We Are All Made of Stars." This "discovery" is an incorrect claim. He claims incorrectly at the 13:42 mark to have realized that he is "recycled star matter," which is a misleading way to describe a human being, physically a state of the most enormous organization. At the 14:11 mark he most incorrectly states "we are all made of stars." At the 14:40 mark he most incorrectly describes a human as "self-aware stardust." A human being physically is actually a state of vast hierarchical organization and information richness that is the exact opposite of unorganized information-free dust. Physically, humans are made of cells, not stars.
- "Sexual/natural selection and evolutionary psychology." So-called natural selection is a dogma of scientists about a claimed survival-of-the-fittest effect that is not actually selection. Evolutionary psychology is one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason." We have that kind of unconvincing talk around the middle of Hagens' video.
- "The Importance of Net Energy." There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned.
- "Money is a CLAIM on Reality." There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned.
- "Technology is a 'Straw.' " There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned.
- "Competition and Cooperation." There's no real discovery mentioned after this phrase is mentioned, and after mentioning the phrase Hagens starts teaching the very dubious doctrine of group selection, which is rejected even by many evolutionary biologists. We have some talk about some chicken experiment, and we should chuckle when Hagen says this experiment "reshaped how I see human behavior and human systems."
- "Humanity Is the Ecosystem." There's a transition card that fails to have a title, but this claim is made at the 32:15 mark in the video. There's no real discovery mentioned.
- "Humans, Humanity and the Superorganism." He claims that over time people in large groups behave more like a "mindless, unthinking economic superorganism" (33:51 mark). There's no real discovery mentioned.
Below are some quotes by scientists relevant to the topic of cosmic fine-tuning:
- "Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one." -- Physicist Thomas Hertog (link).
- "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
- "From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of 12C [Carbon 12 isotope] to the 7.12 Mev level in 16O [Oxygen 16 isotope]. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." -- Astronomer Fred Hoyle, "The Universe -- Past and Present Reflections" (link).
- "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life." -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems."
- "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
- "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link).
- "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."
- "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64.
- "What is particularly striking is how sensitive the possibility of life in our universe is to a small change in these constants. For example, if the constant that controls the way the electromagnetic field behaves in a vacuum is changed by four percent, then fusion in stars could not produce carbon....Change the cosmological constant in the 123rd decimal place and suddenly it's impossible to have a habitable galaxy." -- Marcus Du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, "The Great Unknown," page 221.
- "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony” p. 235.
The reality of cosmic fine-tuning is one that should shape your worldview. You can let this reality sensibly influence your worldview, or stupidly influence your worldview. An example of letting cosmic fine-tuning stupidly influence your worldview would be if you believed that because of cosmic fine-tuning we should believe there is an infinity or near-infinity of universes. Such a belief about a multiverse actually does nothing to help explain why our universe is fine-tuned. mostly because you do not increase the chance of success on any one random trial by imagining a greater random number of random trials. Read here and here for why the multiverse concept fails to explain cosmic fine-tuning.
Item #3: The Vast Organization of Human Bodies
The table below explains the vast hierarchical organization of a human body.
HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS. | Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study. |
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS, THE MUSCULAR SYSTEM AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM. | The human skeletal system contains 206 bones. The human body has over 600 muscles. |
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES. | Examples of organ systems include the cardiovascular system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain. Other organ systems in the human body include the endocrine system, the digestive system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, the reproductive system, the endocrine system, the urinary system, the immune/lymphatic system and the integumentary system. |
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES. | |
TISSUE CONSISTS OF CELLS. | There are roughly 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization. |
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OF ORGANELLES. |
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ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES. | There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of protein molecules that work together to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex. |
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE. | Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function. |
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY. | Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed. |
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS. | A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons. |
There are several kinds of ways in which the vast organization of a human body should influence your worldview. The reality of the vast organization of the human body should make you more inclined to believe in a purposeful causal reality beyond material explanations, one that helped to produce fantastically organized biological states of matter (extremely abundant in interdependent fine-tuned very complex components) that materialist theories fail to credibly explain.
Item #4: Brain Physical Shortfalls
The table below explains some of the main physical shortfalls of brains, and their implications.
BRAIN FACT | IMPLICA- TION, RELATED FACT OR OBSERVED CONSE- QUENCE | SHORT- FALL OF ALL BRAINS | IMPLICA- TION |
Neurons, synapses and dendrites are physically rooted in fixed spots in the brain, like trees rooted in one spot in a forest | There can be no physical sorting in the brain | ||
Neurons have no addresses and no neuron numbers | There can be no indexing in the brain, as indexes require addresses or position numbers | Brains have no sorting, indexing or addresses | Brains cannot explain instant detailed recall, when someone instantly recalls lots of relevant information when hearing a name or seeing a face. Instantly finding just the right information in a brain would require sorting, indexing or addressing in the brain; but the brain has no such things. |
Synapses and dendritic spines are made of proteins with short average lifetimes (< 2 weeks) | Synapses are attached to dendritic spines, observed to be unstable, lasting for less than years | Synapses are not a stable medium for storing human memories that can last reliably for 50+ years | The synaptic theory of brain memory storage is untenable |
There is no place in the brain capable of stable information storage for decades, except for the DNA in neurons | DNA has been exhaustively analyzed by big, well-funded projects, and no one has ever found any evidence of episodic memories or school -learned knowledge inside DNA. | Brains do not have any place where episodic memories or school-learned knowledge can be stored for decades | The school-learned knowledge and episodic memories held for 50 years by old people cannot be knowledge stored in brains |
There are no moving anatomical parts in the brain | There are no moving anatomical parts in the brain that can be called a writing mechanism or a reading mechanism | Brains have no mechanism for writing learned information or reading learned information | Learning of conceptual knowledge cannot be explained by brain mechanisms, nor can the recall of learned conceptual knowledge |
Transmission of signals between neurons requires passing through endless chemical synapses (typically hundreds of chemical synapses for every neuron) | An individual chemical synapse does not reliably transmit brain signals (action potentials), transmitting it successfully only 10% to 50% of the time. Brains have no structure supporting the storage of large learned sequences. | Large amounts of precise sequential information (such as large bodies of text) cannot be reliably transmitted across brain regions | A feat which many humans can perform (the exact retrieval of very large bodies of text such as hundreds of pages) cannot be achieved by a retrieval of stored information in a brain. |
Each time a nerve signal (action potential) passes over a chemical synapse, there is a delay of about 5 milliseconds, called a synaptic delay. | Signal transmission over every centimeter of brain tissue requires very many transmissions over many chemical synapses. The cumulative delay caused by very many transmissions across chemical synapses should result in a very significant delay in brain transmission speed. Moreover dendrites (making up 90% of brain tissue) transmit signals at only about 1 meter per second, or as little one tenth of a meter per second. | The average signal transmission speed in brain areas such as the cortex must be a speed very many times lower than the "100 meters per second" often quoted: a "snail's pace" speed of roughly 1 centimeter per second. | Brains cannot transmit signals at a speed great enough to explain instant human recall of much relevant information, such as when someone is asked to describe some historical figure, and the person instantly starts describing many details of that person's life. |
Every neuron in the brain is connected to many other neurons, by means of dendrites and synapses. For any neuron, there is no "next neuron," but instead multiple nearby connected neurons that are roughly equidistant. | Unlike DNA (which has a linear structure supporting a sequential retrieval of information), brains do not have any structure allowing a sequential retrieval of information | When humans retrieve very large bodes of memorized text in correct sequential order, this cannot be occurring because of a retrieval of information stored in a brain |
Item #5: The Lack of Any DNA Blueprint, Recipe or Program for Building a Human Body or Any Of Its Cells
This item is not a discovery, but a non-discovery. It is a non-discovery with the most enormous implications.
After DNA was discovered, scientists eagerly hoped that by analyzing it they might discover some kind of blueprint or program for making a human body. They thought this might help solve the great mystery of how their occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation) to the vastly more organized complexity of a full human body. The human genome was exhaustively analyzed by the Human Genome Project, a highly-funded multi-year project which finished in the year 2003. Nothing like any blueprint, recipe or program for building a human body was discovered. All that was found in DNA and its genes was low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins.
Before the Human Genome Project had completed, scientists were making groundless claims that a specification for making human bodies would be found in DNA. Once the project completed, without the discovery of any such thing, many scientists just kept on telling the lie that DNA had a body blueprint. But many other scientists confessed that DNA and its genes had no such thing. You can read quotes by 30+ such scientists in my post here.
The claim that human bodies get built because cells read a body blueprint for building bodies was always a very childish lie, for the simple reason that blueprints do not build things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when intelligent agents such as construction workers read blueprints, and get ideas about how to build things.
The non-discovery in DNA of any blueprint, recipe or program for building a human body or any of its cells is a non-discovery with the most gigantic implications. What it implies (along with Item #3 in this list) is that every adult human body is a miracle of organization utterly beyond any mechanistic explanation, a wonder of organization that requires a transcendent explanation.
Item #6: The Discovery of Paranormal Phenomena
The discovery of paranormal phenomena has occurred steadily over the past two centuries. The observational evidence includes the items listed below, and very much more:
- 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).
- The very careful research of people like Ian Stevenson who documented countless cases of children who claimed to recalk past lives, and found that their accounts often checked out well, with the details of the “past lives” being corroborated, with the children often having birthmarks corresponding to the deaths they recalled, and with the children often recognizing people or places they should not have been able to recognize unless they had the reported past life.
- 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.
- 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.
Paranormal phenomena help to clarify the utter failure of "brains make minds" explanations, and help to clarify the reality that each of us is a soul beyond the explanation of physical science.
Item #7: The Non-Discovery of Learned Information by Microscopic Examination of Brain Tissue
The failure of scientists to find any memories by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is one of the strongest reasons for rejecting claims that the human brain stores memories. There is encoded genetic information in the nucleus of most cells, information which is pretty much the same in every cell, and is not memory information. That information was discovered around 1953. Since 1953 our technology has grown enormously. But there is still not a single case of anyone ever reading a memory from any brain (human or animal) outside of his own body. Scientists have never been able to read a memory by scanning with a microscope a living person's brain, or scanning some brain tissue. Do not be fooled by press accounts that sometimes grossly exaggerate scientific experiments, and give us headlines such as “Scientists invent mind-reading device.” Such experiments (typically trying to read neural correlates of visual perception) do not actually involve thought reading, and do not at all involve a reading of stored information in the brain.
When reminded of the non-existence of claims to have read memory information from human tissue by microscopic methods, someone might respond like this:
"Well, the problem is that scientists don't have time to study a brain after someone dies, because the body is buried or cremated. If scientists were able to spend lots of time studying the brains of people who had just died, they would probably be able to find memories in the brains of dead people."
But this claim is not correct. There actually exists an institute of scientists devoted to studying the brains of dead people. And they have had over 4000 brains to study, mostly cases of brains that were donated very soon after someone died, and quickly preserved.
The institute is called the Lieber Institute, and its web site is here. The site says that the Lieber Institute has 48,000 square feet of laboratory space at Johns Hopkins University. The Lieber Institute claims to have a repository of about 4000 brains. On another page of the institute, we are told, "Each brain is donated by a bereaved family just hours after the loss of their loved one."
But microscopic examination of these brains has failed to produce any sign of stored memories in human brains. Elsewhere in the world is an even bigger collection of brains, one that also has failed to substantially support claims of a brain basis for memory storage. The Japan Times tells us this:
" Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark's University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world's largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labeled with numbers, the collection was the life's work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren...The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark. Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission."
We hear not one word about any discovery that came from studying these brains. A web page of the University of Odense describes the collection of brains, but fails to mention any progress that has come from studying the brains. There is no link to any papers that were produced using such brains.
There is another brain collection called the Human Brain Collection Core (HBCC). The collection is described here. The collection seems to consist of about 1000 brains, 700 from people who were diagnosed with mental illness. 300 of the brains are from normal people. We seem to have the same kind of method as used by the Lieber Institute. The families of people who recently died are asked to donate the brain of a family members, with a time pressure element of "we must act fast."
Related to this collection is a "Selected Publications" page, apparently listing the best results obtained from studying these brains. None of the 46 papers reports anything like a discovery of memories by analyzing brain tissue. None of the papers has a title referring to either memory or engrams.
Despite microscopically studying more than 14,000 brains (a large fraction of which were cryogenically preserved within a day after death), scientists are unable to read any memory from any of these brains, and are also unable to find any evidence of some neural code that could be used to translate learned information into brain states. The brains are saying "storing memories is not something brains do," but our scientists refuse to listen to what the brains are telling them.
Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter).
Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:
Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.
Width of a synapse: about 20-30 nanometers, about 200-300 angstroms.
Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.
Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 10,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.
Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains. If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains. Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage.
The non-discovery of memories or any learned information by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is a non-discovery that should help shape your worldview, by giving you further evidence that you are a soul beyond any neural explanation. You need not worry about the loss of your memories when you die. Such memories never existed in your brain, and will not perish when your brain rots away.
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