Contrarian Predictions Regarding Biology, the Brain and Technology

I will now offer some predictions regarding the future. I won't do much to explain the conceptual outlook that motivates these predictions. But anyone reading the posts on this blog and this blog can read about some of the evidence that motivates these predictions.

Prediction #1: No place in the brain outside of the cell nucleus will be found to have the stability needed to store memories for decades; and no evidence will be found that episodic memories or learned knowledge are stored in the cell nucleus.

Today's neuroscientists typically claim that memories are stored in the synapses of the brain. But there is a reason why we should reject this claim: we know that the proteins that make up synapses are very short-lived, having average lifetimes of only a few weeks. Such an average lifetime of a synapse protein is only a thousandth of the length of time that humans can remember things (many seniors having good memories of things that happened more than 50 years old). I predict that nothing will be discovered that resolves this discrepancy. I predict that our neuroscientists will never discover any place in the brain that is a suitable stable storage place for 50-year-old memories. No place in the brain will be found that is both stable and offers lots of storage room for all the memories humans have. DNA in the cell nucleus is stable, but its storage space is already used up by genomic information.

Prediction #2: There will not be discovered in the brain anything like a neural positioning system or a neural indexing system or anything else that would be useful in explaining how a brain could instantly retrieve memories.

Humans are able to retrieve memories instantly, even memories of knowledge they haven't thought about in years. But the human brain seems to have nothing that might explain this speed of recall. There are two things that can enable fast retrieval in a system: a positioning system and indexing. A simple book has both. The positioning system is the page numbering. The indexing appears at the back of the book. I predict that nothing like these things will be discovered in the brain, or anything else that might explain how instant memory recall could be accomplished by a brain. By a "neural positioning system" I refer not to some neural system for finding a human's position in the world, but to a system that might allow one part of the brain to quickly read from some precise tiny location far away in the brain. 

Prediction #3: No type of encoding scheme will ever be discovered by which learned knowledge or episodic memories could be stored as neural states.

A typical neuroscientist claims that memories are stored in the brain. But learned knowledge or episodic memories can't simply be poured into little spots of the brain like someone might pour tea into a tea cup. If the brain stores memories as neural states, there would need to be some type of encoding scheme by which information and sensory experience was translated into neural states. No such encoding scheme has ever been discovered, and I predict that it never will be discovered. The genetic code was discovered about 1950, and we are many decades overdue for a discovery of a “neural code.” Such a code will not be discovered because it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because our memories and learned knowledge are not actually stored in our brains (a statement I make for the 30 reasons discussed here).

Prediction #4: Other than genetic and epigenetic information in the nucleus of neurons, no sign will ever be found of encoded information stored in the brain.

Even if you have no idea what encoding system was used to encode some information, you can still discover evidence that encoded information exists. Before Europeans were able to unravel how hieroglyphics worked, they knew that hieroglyphics contained encoded information. Such Europeans were able to see many repeated symbols, and these are the hallmarks of encoded information. 

Repeated symbols in hieroglyphics

In the case of the brain, we know there is one type of encoded information in it. That information is the DNA information found in all neurons and in all other cells. But other than this genetic information, no real sign of encoded information has ever been discovered in the brain. Synapses (the alleged storage place of memories) have been examined at very high resolutions using instruments such as electron microscopes, and no sign of encoded information has ever been found in synapses. I predict that scientists never will discover any sign of encoded information in the brain, other than the genetic and epigenetic information in the nucleus. There will never be some “Eureka” moment when scientists discover tiny little repeated symbols in synapses.

Prediction #5: It will never be possible to enhance human memory by downloading information into a brain.

If you believe that memories are stored in the brain, you should believe in a technological possibility: that it will be possible to download knowledge into a brain, through some technology that writes information to your synapses. I predict that such a technology will never exist.

Prediction #6: It will never be possible to make computers with a general purpose intelligence.

Computers are getting more and more proficient, partially because computers are getting faster, and partially because more and more human logic, information and data is being transferred to computers. We have heard a lot of hype about artificial intelligence. But nothing like a general computer intelligence has ever appeared. I predict that such a thing never will appear. Computers do not actually understand anything, and have never had anything like human cognition or human self-hood. There is no imaginable technological path that might lead to a machine with actual consciousness, self-hood and understanding such as humans have. Because human understanding and intelligence is not actually caused by the brain, it will not be possible to make machines conscious or cognizant by leveraging any type of “mind from matter” principle discovered by studying the human brain.

Prediction #7: It will never be possible to upload a human mind into a computer or a robot.

Darwinist materialism has always had many similarities to a religion, and we now see the philosophy of transhumanism supplying a kind of finishing touch to this stealth religion. That finishing touch is the eschatological idea that humans will be able to gain immortality by uploading their minds into computers or robots. I predict that such a thing will never occur. It is not possible because the brain does not actually store a human's memories, and is not actually the source or cause of human consciousness. If you are sad about not being able to upload your mind into a computer or a robot, do not be. The very reasons for thinking that such a thing is impossible are reasons for thinking that your consciousness will continue after your death. If you mind is not being generated by your brain (or an aspect of your brain), and your memories are not stored in your brain, there is every reason to suspect that your self-hood will continue after your brain stops functioning (as we seem to see occurring when people report near-death experiences).

Prediction #8: There will continue to be discovered cases in which people have good memories and good minds despite very large brain damage.

We already have very many cases of people with good memories and good minds, despite very large brain damage. These include hemispherectomy patients who had half of their brains removed, and people such as John Lorber's patients who lost most of their brains due to disease. Since such cases are caused by a very real aspect of reality (that neither intelligence nor memory is brain-caused),  additional cases of this type will continue to be discovered. 

Prediction #9: All attempts to reproduce the origin of life by mimicking chemical conditions in the early earth will fail, and scientists will not even be able to produce a single functional protein through any simulation of early earth conditions.

For more than a century scientists have been trying to reproduce the origin of life by doing laboratory experiments. They have basically accomplished nothing by all this work. The most they have ever produced is a few types of amino acids, only the simplest types. Contrary to the misleading hype that has been written, amino acids are not at all the building blocks of life. They are merely the building blocks of the building blocks of life. The actual building blocks of life are things such as proteins and nucleic acids. Even the simplest living thing requires 100+ types of proteins, but scientists have never produced even a single functional protein in any experiment simulating conditions on the early earth. I predict that they never will produce any functional protein in any experiment simulating conditions on the early earth, and will therefore have no success in trying to reproduce the origin of life by simulating early earth conditions.

Prediction #10: Good evidence for psychic phenomena and the paranormal will continue to accumulate, with new types of paranormal phenomena appearing; but the majority of scientists will long continue to ignore such evidence. 

The evidence for psychic phenomena (such as ESP, apparitions and near-death experiences) is vast, but it has been almost totally ignored by mainstream scientists.  I predict that the majority of scientists will continue for many years in their "heads in the sand" attitude towards very important paranormal phenomena.  Such an attitude is caused by an entrenched belief system (strongly resembling a religion) that has become popular among scientists.  When entrenched belief systems have been discredited by observations, such belief systems often continue to persist for a long, long time, because of a kind of ideological inertia, in which people think to themselves, "I will keep believing as I have believed for so long" or "I will keep believing as my teachers taught." I predict that novel and unprecedented forms of paranormal phenomena will be observed in the next few decades, as has actually occurred during recent years (as shown in the 1500+ photos here, here, and here).  

Prediction #11: It will not be possible to enhance the human mind by adding new neurons or neuron-equivalents, through technology or genetic engineering, although it may be possible to enhance the human mind by some technique that has the effect of turning off some brain activity or reducing brain activity. 

Since the human brain is not the source of the human mind, there will be no successful attempts to increase the human mind by adding more neurons or (electronic neuron-equivalents). But it could be that the brain acts like a valve or limitation device, limiting human consciousness. Because of the latter possibility, it may be possible to enhance the human mind through some method that limits brain activity or turns off some of the neurons in our brain. Such a thing might be accomplished genetically, electronically or chemically. 

A Note to Future "Accuracy Checkers"

Let's suppose you are a person in the future (maybe a year or two from now) checking my list of predictions, and trying to find one that failed.  You might have little difficulty in seeming to find such a failure if you fall "hook, line and sinker" for some of the enormous amount of hype, exaggeration and misinformation that appears in the science literature, particularly in science popularization web sites.  As discussed at length here, there is an epidemic of exaggeration and unwarranted claims in the science world nowadays, much of it coming from university press offices which churn out press release headlines that do not actually match what was shown in the scientific study being discussed. In addition, a large fraction of scientific papers make causal claims that are not actually justified by their data.  So before citing some scientific paper that you think discredits one of the predictions here, ask yourself: did the paper really prove what is claimed in its title or in the headline of its press release? 

Postscript: As of early 2025, these predictions are all holding up just fine. Don't be fooled by claims that artificial general intelligence is near. Progress by systems such as ChatGPT is almost entirely not any real artificial intelligence progress, but instead an affair in which phrases and sentences are being stolen from human writers, and repackaged and transfigured in various ways that make it hard or impossible to trace exactly which humans had their words stolen. Systems such as ChatGPT appeared to get semi-smart mainly by traversing the internet and scooping up billions and billions of human-written sentences. 

There are various "smoke and mirrors" techniques that neuroscientists sometimes use to create impressions of having done things they have not done. One technique involves collecting brain waves or brain images by EEG or fMRI, and then combining that with other data streams, with a triumphal announcement that this or that thing was done by reading the brain or reading the mind. The trick is that the thing accomplished could typically have been done without any brain data at all, or with only brain data caused by eye muscle movements. So, for example, some system may pick up EEG brain readings, along with readings of eye movements, from a paralyzed person; and it may be proclaimed that some effect (such as movement in a video game) was read "from the brain," even though what is mainly being picked up is eye movements, or EEG traces or artifacts of eye movements. Or, some data backdoor such as photo annotations may be used, by which non-neural data is sneaked in, with an announcement made that something was done "by reading the brain," there being no mention of how that thing was mainly accomplished by use of the data backdoor. 

The BRAIN Initiative's Floundering Quest for a Mechanistic Account of Mind

The BRAIN Initiative is a multi-year big-science project launched during the Obama administration in 2013. It started off in 2014 with a budget of about $110 million, and its funding has increased in subsequent years, with some estimating that it may use up billions in funding before it is finished. One of its documents claims on page 121 that the BRAIN Initiative ”will require new and distinct funding of between 300-500 million per year." Too bad the program consists largely of not-terribly-useful research designed to try to prove an extremely dubious mechanistic ideology about the mind.

The assumptions behind the project are made clear in a document called Brain 2025: A Scientific Vision, which is offered at one of the project's two main web sites. The “scientific vision” laid out in the document is largely an ideological vision, based on the far-fetched idea that the human mind is merely the product of the brain. The dubious ideology of the authors is made clear in the very first sentence of the document, in which the authors state, “The human brain is the source of our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, actions, and memories; it confers on us the abilities that make us human, while simultaneously making each of us unique.” It has certainly not been proven that any brain has ever generated a thought or stored a memory.

In fact, later in the document the authors confess, “We do not yet have a systematic theory of how information is encoded in the chemical and electrical activity of neurons, how it is fused to determine behavior on short time scales, and how it is used to adapt, refine, and learn behaviors on longer time scales.” This is certainly true. No one has anything like a systematic theory of how a brain could store memories as neural states, nor has anyone come up with anything like a systematic theory of how a brain could generate a thought. So why, then, does the document start out by stating that “the human brain is the source of our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, actions, and memories”? No one has any business making such a claim unless he first has “ a systematic theory of how information is encoded in the chemical and electrical activity of neurons,” but the document admits that no such theory exists.

The document makes clear that the main purpose of the BRAIN Initiative will be to shore up mechanistic ideas about the human mind. The document states, “The most important outcome of the BRAIN Initiative will be a comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function that emerges from synergistic application of the new technologies and conceptual structures developed under the BRAIN Initiative.” That makes it pretty clear that the project is ideology-driven. The idea that mental function can be explained mechanistically is a very doubtful piece of ideology inconsistent with many forms of evidence. One of these forms of evidence involves the many cases of minds that worked well after half or more of the brain was lost to injury, disease or surgery. Another such form of evidence is that scientists cannot find any plausible storage place in the brain where memories could be stored for 50 years, synapses (subject to very rapid molecular turnover) being no such thing.

What are some of the things that this BRAIN Initiative will be spending money on? Most of the project's money will apparently be spent as follows:

1. Trying to develop new tools to study the brain.
2. Creating circuit maps of the brain.
3. Identifying various types of brain cells.
4. Playing around with zapping people's brains in various different ways.

There is no reason to believe that any of this activity will actually result in the project's goal of a “comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function” or even something much smaller, a fragmentary mechanistic understanding of mental function. There is no “circuit map” that we can possibly imagine that would allow us to understand how neurons might produce thoughts, how neural activity could result in such a thing as selfhood, or how human episodic memories could ever be stored as neural states. No real insight into such things has been produced by previous efforts to identify different types of brain cells or map out the connections of the brain. So why should we believe that any further insight on these matters will come from further activity along these lines?

In a section entitled “Manipulating circuit activity,” the Brain 2025 document tries to suggest that electrically zapping people's brains might tell us something about memory. It says, “In the 1950s, Penfield’s electrical stimulation experiments suggested that a memory or thought could be elicited by activating neurons in the underlying network.” But the document fails to tell us that a review of 80 years of electrical stimulation of the brain found that it was very rare for people to recall anything during electrical stimulation of the brain and that “Overall, only one patient reported what appeared to be a clearly detailed episodic memory for which he spontaneously specified that he had never thought about it.” But nonetheless the BRAIN Initiative fellows expressed great enthusiasm for monkeying with people's brains. After noting approvingly that “stimulating electrodes are being placed in human patients,” the BRAIN 2025 document says, “Entirely new tools could be developed based on magnetic stimulation, gases, infrared excitation, ultrasound, or organic or physical chemistry to allow access to neurons deep within the brain.” It sounds like their plan is kind of like this:

So far the BRAIN Initiative has been running for four or five years, and has accomplished nothing extremely noteworthy. Our understanding of the brain has not dramatically advanced during those four or five years, and all the old mysteries of mind and memory seem as mysterious as ever. At this “Achievements” link there is a discussion of what the BRAIN Initiative has accomplished so far. At the top of the text is a big bold headline saying “Transformative Advances,” but the BRAIN Initiative has produced no such transformative advances. Go beyond the flashy spin on the web site, the high-tech glitter, and the discussion of things in progress that haven't yet yielded much, and you have not a single major accomplishment relating to our understanding of the mind or memory. You see in this section a video entitled “The BRAIN Initiative – the First Five Years.” The video fails to list a single accomplishment of the BRAIN Initiative. Apparently all this work to mechanistically explain the mind is pretty much a flop and a failure so far.

About the only memorable thing mentioned in the BRAIN Initiative's list of accomplishments is a description of some “brain interface” by which a paralyzed person was able to use to raise a robot arm to bring a cup to his mouth. Such an interface doesn't seem very impressive when you consider that the same effect could have been achieved much less expensively and more simply by using a 1990's-style voice-based interface that would respond to a command such as “raise arm.”

I predict that even after spending billions, the BRAIN Initiative will by 2025 produce no big breakthrough in our understanding of mind, memory or consciousness. All attempts to understand such things through mechanistic methods (such as creating circuit diagrams or zapping brains) are doomed to failure. The reason is that mind, memory and consciousness are not mechanistic products of the brain, but are aspects of a human soul or spirit that cannot be understood by analyzing electricity, neurons and chemistry. If our minds were produced by brains and our memories were stored in brains, we would have already discovered by now “smoking guns” of such mechanistic effects; but no such things have been found.

We found in the 1950's that all cells have encoded information in the form of the genetic information in DNA. If our brain cells contained encoded memory information, we would have discovered abundant fingerprints of such a thing during the twentieth century. But even though it is 65 years after DNA was discovered, and even though our electron microscopes can see things 1000 times smaller than synapses, no one has discovered any proof of memories encoded in neurons. Such a mechanistic encoding would require thousands of dedicated genes, to accomplish the gigantic task of translating our experience and ideas into neuron states; but not one such gene has been found, even though the human genome has been thoroughly studied. There is one scientific study claiming to have found correlation evidence for such memory-encoding genes, but the study's methodology is quite goofy, for the reasons discussed at the end of this post. 

A better approach for gaining insight about the mind would be one that focused on extraordinary human experiences, and people having ordinary mind and memory function despite extraordinary brain states. This would involve studying all the people whose minds functioned well even after they lost vast parts of their brains due to surgery or disease, all the people with phenomenal memories despite having ordinary brains, and all the people having extraordinary experiences such as near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, often while their brains were shut down. Such a study approach would tend to shed light on how mechanistic neuroscientists are making the wrong assumptions about the brain. 

Postscript: A long 2019 article in the Atlantic discusses the poor results of the Human Brain Project (HBP). The author states, "the people I contacted struggled to name a major contribution that the HBP has made in the past decade."

In this 2018 post above I stated, "I predict that even after spending billions, the BRAIN Initiative will by 2025 produce no big breakthrough in our understanding of mind, memory or consciousness." It is now 2026, and it clear that this prediction was correct. No neuroscientist have ever produced any "big breakthrough in our understanding of mind, memory or consciousness." 

The Mediocre Predictive Record of Mainstream Science

In the philosophy of science there is something called the miracle argument, which argues that the “predictive success of science” implies that scientific theories must mainly be true, or else this “predictive success” would be a miracle. But is it correct to claim that mainstream science has done very well at predicting discoveries about life, mind, and nature?

How good is the "crystal ball" of mainstream science?

Things Mainstream Scientists Failed to Predict

First, let us look at some important discoveries about life, mind, and nature that mainstream scientists failed to predict. One such thing is the fact that we live in an expanding universe that apparently began in a Big Bang billions of years ago. I have never heard of any materialist scientist who predicted any such thing prior to 1920. Scientists around 1900 preferred to believe in a universe that had existed forever, an idea that removes any problem about how to explain a universe's origin. Even until 1931, Einstein believed that the universe was static. And in 1931 a leading cosmologist named Arthur Eddington stated, “The notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me.”

Another important discovery about the universe is that its laws and fundamental constants seem to be very fine-tuned, having a long set of “coincidences” necessary for the existence of intelligent life. Slowly emerging between the years 1970 and 2000, this discovery was not predicted by any scientist that I am aware of.

Another cosmic discovery was a set of observations showing that ordinary matter and the laws of nature as we understand them are insufficient to account for the behavior of galaxies. This discovery was not anticipated or predicted by any scientist that I know of. Playing “catch up ball,” scientists tried to account for this discovery by introducing the idea of dark matter, and the claim that about 25% of the universe's matter is this mysterious unobserved type of matter. But nobody seems to have predicted dark matter beforehand, and dark matter makes no appearance at all in the standard model of physics. A recent scientific paper has stated the following:

Nothing in the pre-existing model (ca. 1970) pointed toward the need for dark matter or dark energy; the observations that motivated these hypotheses came as a complete surprise. Nor was the mass discrepancy—acceleration relation anticipated before it was established observationally.

Then in the 1990's there came the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. This came as a total surprise to cosmologists, none of which (to my knowledge) had predicted any such thing. To account for this fact, cosmologists came up with the idea that most of the universe's mass-energy was some mysterious thing called dark energy. Such a thing had not been previously predicted by cosmologists. The only relevant prediction that had been made was the prediction of quantum field theory that the vacuum of space should be filled with something like dark energy, but more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 denser than what we observe in our universe. So there was a prediction of “denser-than-steel dark energy everywhere,” something radically different from what we observe, but not any prediction of dark energy like we seem to have.

Scientists did a poor job of predicting that airplanes would be invented. The famous scientist Lord Kelvin said in 1895 that heavier than air machines were impossible. Eight years later the Wright Brothers made their first flight. But even after the Wright Brothers had made quite a few successful test flights of airplanes, Scientific American published a report trying to provoke skepticism about whether the Wright Brothers were really flying. Scientists also did a pretty poor job of predicting space flight. Some mainstream scientists ridiculed the idea that men would one day travel in space, and before World War II very few scientists predicted that manned space travel would happen. 

Years before Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt suggesting that nuclear bombs might be created, he stated in the early 1930's that there was “not the slightest indication” that nuclear power would be obtainable. At about the same time the leading nuclear scientist Rutherford said, "Anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine."

Turning to the mind and life, we find some important things that mainstream science failed to predict. During the past 50 years many astonishing cases have been discovered in which minds somehow keep on functioning well despite enormous brain damage. Such cases (sometimes described as cases of brain plasticity or brain resiliency) were not predicted by mainstream scientists. The phenomenon of near-death experiences was not predicted by any mainstream scientist before it was reported.

Exciting discoveries have been made in recent years about the epigenome, suggesting that in rare cases certain acquired characteristics can be inherited through what is called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Far from predicting such a thing, mainstream scientists told us countless times in previous decades that the inheritance of acquired characteristics could never occur.

Things Mainstream Scientists Predicted That Didn't Happen

Now let's look at some things that mainstream scientists have long predicted, but which haven't come true.

It was predicted in the nineteenth century by scientists that innumerable transitional fossils would be discovered, showing the evolution of one species to another. The number of such fossils that have been discovered is a matter of debate, but it seems that there have been far fewer such fossils found than predicted – so few that it is often claimed that very few transitional fossils have been found. The same scientists predicted that we would find a tree of life showing a tree-like progression from the simplest forms to modern forms. But current attempts to map such a tree run into great difficulties, and the latest versions of attempts to create this “tree of life” show some weird shape that does not resemble a tree.

It was predicted by scientists that fruit fly experiments covering hundreds of generations would show evidence of a new species emerging, or at least evidence of some kind of evolutionary improvement. Despite all kinds of artificial help to increase the likelihood of something dramatic emerging, such experiments have not shown any new species emerging. One scientific study covered 600 fruit-fly generations, and reported nothing more dramatic than a 20% shorter gestation period, which isn't even an improvement. The study's abstract concludes by stating “unconditionally advantageous alleles rarely arise, are associated with small net fitness gains or cannot fix because selection coefficients change over time,” all of which is disappointing for someone hoping to find good evidence for Darwinian assumptions.

It was predicted repeatedly by biologists that most of human DNA would be found to be worthless “junk DNA.” But contrary to such a prediction, the ENCODE project found that at least 80% of human DNA has some functional purpose.

For decades astronomers made it sound as if radio communication with extraterrestrials would succeed by our time. In the 1960's and 1970's scientists such as Carl Sagan were making it sound as if we could expect that radio contact with extraterrestrials would occur within a few decades. It's now 2017, and no such radio contact has been made.

For at least 60 years, scientists have been speaking as if solving the problem of the origin of life was just around the corner. It's now 2017, and it now seems more difficult than ever to explain how life originated.

Mainstream physicists predicted that the Large Hadron Collider would produce evidence for the popular physics theory known as supersymmetry. But the results from the Large Hadron Collider have done no such thing. Mainstream physicists also predicted around 1980 that evidence for grand-unification theories (GUT theories) would be produced in a few decades. Such evidence has not turned up.

Mainstream scientists also repeatedly predicted that the Human Genome Project would produce a huge bonanza for medicine. As the project was going on in the 1990's, we were told countless times that the project would produce enormous progress in fighting diseases and cancer. Such a prediction followed from the reductionist assumption that DNA is not just one secret of life, but the secret of life, and that our biology can be almost entirely explained in terms of DNA. But such assumptions are wrong, and the predictions of a gigantic medical bonanza did not come true. The medical benefits from the Human Genome Project have been surprisingly slim.

Scientists predicted that the Human Genome Project would identify about 100,000 genes in the human genome. But the actual number of genes found was only about 20,000.

Another wrong prediction repeatedly made by mainstream scientists is the prediction that computers would become as smart as humans by about the year 2000 or 2020. Page 12 of the paper here gives a graph showing that 8 experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by about the year 2000, and that 8 other experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by the year 2020 (something incredibly unlikely to happen in the next few years).

These failed predictions are due to mistaken materialist assumptions about the mind-body relationship. If you mistakenly believe that the human mind is merely the product of chemistry and electricity, you may make absurdly overoptimistic claims that a mechanical system can reproduce something like human mentality. The paper cited above has an example of an absurdly wrong prediction made under such assumptions. A committee in 1956 predicted that 10 men working for 2 months could produce major progress in mechanically reproducing human mentality, something that the entire global community has made little progress on in the subsequent 70 years. Here was what the committee said:

We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

Conclusion

Mainstream science is good at making small-scope predictions, such as the prediction that a particular asteroid will pass a certain number of kilometers from Earth on a particular day, or the prediction that a certain biological or chemical reaction will occur if a person ingests a particular substance. Mainstream science is also fairly good at predicting future outcomes when there is a known trend such as global warming which can be simply extrapolated into the future. But when it comes to predicting what new discoveries about nature are down the road, it seems that mainstream science is not particularly good. The crystal ball of mainstream science seems very cloudy indeed.

In the philosophy of science there is something called the miracle argument, which argues that the “predictive success of science” implies that scientific theories must mainly be true, or else this “predictive success” would be a miracle. This argument is invalid, because the predictive success level of mainstream science isn't particularly good, and mainstream science has merely been mediocre in predicting novel phenomena.

Davies' Dubious Defense of a Double Standard

In my blog post several days ago I complained about what I called a double standard followed by many a modern physicist. The double standard is that theoretical physicists spend huge amounts of time speculating about strange, far-out concepts such as spacetime wormholes, time travel, parallel universes, string theory and multiverses (things for which there is no observational support), but the same individuals dismiss as nonsense many possibilities such as ESP for which there is a great deal of evidence (much of it accumulated by scientists and documented in scientific papers that have been published for decades). That evidence includes compelling ganzfeld studies that show a success rate of about 31% greatly in excess of the expected success rate of 25%. For example, this study says, “if one considered all the available published articles up to and including 1997 (i.e., Milton and Wiseman’s 30 studies, plus 10 new studies), 29 studies that used standard ganzfeld protocols yielded a cumulative hit rate that was significantly above chance (31%).”   An ESP study involving only artistically gifted people reported a success rate of 50%, twice the success rate expected by chance.

Schematic depiction of ESP

The very next day I read a book The Eerie Silence by physicist Paul Davies that contained a passage that almost seemed to have been written in response to my blog post. He discussed exactly the same discrepancy I discussed, using the same term that I used (“double standard”) to describe it; however Davies tried to defend this double standard.

Before trying to rebut this reasoning by Davies, let me make clear that I am a longtime Paul Davies fan. I have enjoyed many books he has written, and in 19 cases out of 20 I find his reasoning to be convincing. But in the example I will now discuss, I think Davies fails to come up with a convincing argument.

Davies starts out like this:

The point about modern physics is that weird entities like dark matter or neutrinos are not proposed as isolated speculations, but as part of a large body of detailed theory that predicts them. They are linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme. In other words, they have a place in well-understood theory. As a result, their prior probability is high.

Davies is on extremely dubious ground here. Neutrinos are predicted by the Standard Model of Physics, but dark matter is not at all predicted by that theory. There are no particles of dark matter mentioned in the Standard Model of Physics. Physicists believe in the likelihood of dark matter not for theoretical reasons but because of observational reasons, because they need dark matter to help explain certain observations. Exactly the same thing can be said about ESP.

Dark matter is not at all “linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme.” It is instead a completely mysterious alleged thing that we basically know nothing about. We have zero tested equations that describe dark matter, and also zero equations that describe ESP. That really leaves dark matter and ESP in the same ballpark.

In the case of a similar and equally important mysterious phenomenon – dark energy – we can say that there is a strong theoretical basis for believing that there is something like dark energy. However, the problem is that the theory (quantum field theory) tells us dark energy should be at least a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than it is. This is the widely discussed “vacuum catastrophe,” often referred to as the worst prediction in the history of science. Scientists continue to believe in dark energy, even though their theories are almost infinitely out of whack with our observations about how much dark energy exists. So is dark energy something that is “linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme”? No it isn't. You can't use such language when the theory gives an answer that is wrong by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So any claim of theoretical rectitude can't be used for dark energy – but scientists continue to believe in it.

In truth, neither dark matter nor dark energy is part of “well understood theory.” They are mysterious things that we do not have any well-established theory for (at best we have half-baked, super-speculative or “way off the mark” theories). The same thing can be said about multiverses, parallel universes, time travel and wormholes.

I may also note that Davies errs when he suggests that the “prior probability” of something is “high” when it can be “linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme.” With sufficient ingenuity, a physicist can create all kinds of bizarre, improbable theories that are linked in some way to existing physics. Inventive physicists have done that, creating a thousand and one conflicting theories of time, space, particles, and forces, including countless different varieties of string theory, inflation theory and quantum gravity. The fact that you can somehow link your theory in with existing physics does not show it has even one chance in 100 of being correct. As Davies himself says in another book, “It is easy to construct artificial universe models, albeit impoverished ones bearing only a superficial resemblance to the real thing, which are nevertheless mathematically and logically self-consistent” (Information and the Nature of Reality, page 68).

Regarding ESP, Davies says the following:

Telepathy is not obviously an absurd notion, but it would take a lot of evidence for me to believe in it because there is no properly worked out theory, and certainly no mathematical model to predict how it works or how strong it will be in different combinations. So I assign it a very low (but non-zero) prior probability. If someone came up with a plausible mechanism for telepathy backed up a proper mathematical model which linked it to the rest of physics, and if the theory predicted specific results – for example, that the 'telepathic power' would fall off in a well-defined way as the distance increases, and would be twice as strong between same-sex subjects as mixed-sex subjects – I would sit up and take notice. I would then be fairly easily convinced if the experimental evidence confirmed the predictions. Alas, no such theory is on the horizon, and I remain extremely skeptical about telepathy in spite of the many amazing stories I have read. 
 

Here Davies professes quite a demanding set of criteria before we can believe something: (1) that we should only believe something if it is predicted by some mathematical model; (2) that this model should be “linked to the rest of physics”; (3) that the model should make specific numerical predictions that can be confirmed. Does it make sense to advance such a set of criteria as a prerequisite for believing in something? It certainly does not.

One reason is that a very large fraction of all things that we do believe in (inside and outside of the sciences) do not satisfy such a set of criteria. But we accept such things nonetheless because we have observations that compel us to believe in them. I refer to things such as love, hate, psychological discomfort, newly discovered species, gamma ray bursts, and earthquakes. Consider, for example, when a biologist discovers a new species of animal in Brazil. It is not at all something predicted by some mathematical model, but it is accepted as a new scientific finding nonetheless. Even in the hard physical sciences we have things that are accepted even though they are not at all predicted by existing models. A recent example is the discovery of the acceleration of the universe's expansion, which left scientists stunned, having been predicted by no popular theory.

What Davies describes here is a model of verification that is sometimes followed (but often not followed) in the world and physics and astronomy, but such a model of verification is actually uncommon in many other sciences. Sciences such as psychology, geology, and biology make relatively little use of mathematical models and prediction. If you pick up a textbook on zoology you will see almost no equations or mathematical models anywhere. In such sciences there is no standard at all that some new scientific conclusion must be supported by some mathematical model.

As for Davies' idea that ESP would need to be supported by some theoretical model “linked... to the rest of physics,” such a prerequisite does not make any sense. It amounts to saying, “I refuse to believe in something unless it is similar to things I have already learned.” I may note that some of the greatest advances in physics and astronomy occurred when scientists started to postulate things that did not fit in with the previous framework of ideas. When quantum mechanics was introduced, it did not fit in at all with physics as it had been previously understood. When the Big Bang theory was introduced, it did not fit in at all with the previous cosmological ideas of scientists such as Einstein, who favored the idea of an eternal, static universe.

Davies suggests the idea that we should not take an observed phenomena seriously unless we have a theory of how it works, one that makes good predictions. That is a misbegotten principle that scientists themselves do not follow. When scientists observe a new type of phenomenon, they accumulate observations for the phenomenon, and at the same time start working on theories to explain the phenomenon. It may be decades or centuries later that a theory arrives that finally explains the phenomenon. An example is pandemics. The phenomenon was studied for centuries before scientists such as Pasteur finally came up with a decent theory to explain it.

It would have made no sense around 1600 to have said, “Don't believe in pandemics – we don't have a good theory to explain it.” Another example is lightning. Scientists observed it for a long time, but did not develop a decent model to explain it until the 18^th century. It would have made no sense around 1500 to have said, “Don't believe in lightning – we don't have a good model to explain it.”

What Davies' criteria amounts to is a kind of plea that he should be excused from taking something seriously whenever that thing does not have characteristics that allow him to study it in the way that he is most familiar and comfortable with studying things. That's a lame type of reasoning. We can imagine the same type of reasoning being used by a biologist: “I refuse to believe in galaxies or other reputed deep space-objects, because I cannot view them through my microscope, or place them in my test tubes, or study them in a cage or an aquarium.”

A wiser approach is that we should take a phenomenon seriously whenever we have repeated compelling evidence for its existence, regardless of whether we have familiar off-the-shelf methods for studying the phenomenon, and regardless of whether the phenomenon comfortably meshes with our preconceptions.

The Lesson From Arthur C. Clarke's Predictive Errors

The television show Prophets of Science Fiction liked to portray science fiction writers as latter-day visionaries with great predictive powers. One of the writers profiled on this show was the late Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was both a science fiction writer and a nonfiction writer who wrote about space exploration and the future. I greatly enjoyed his work, particularly when I was a teenager. Clarke first proposed communication satellites, and made some very prescient predictions about that technology.

Clarke's predictions about the immediate effects of space travel varied in accuracy. Clarke predicted that an age of manned space exploration would produce a new Renaissance, and judging from this argument the 1970's (directly following the 1969 moon landing) should have been a decade of immortal art. Anyone who remembers the music and television shows of the 1970's may chuckle at that concept.

But what about Clarke's record in making predictions about our century -- how accurate was he?

If fiction can be taken as a form of prediction, Clarke's record in regard to predicting our century was not very good. His most famous fictional work (co-authored with director Stanley Kubrick) was the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although it was a great artistic success (and one of my favorite movies), that movie predicted that the year 2001 would see a manned mission to Jupiter, a giant-sized lunar colony housing more than 100 residents, computers that could have conversations with a human and understand our language, and a giant space station with artificial gravity and very roomy interiors. None of those things actually occurred by 2001. It is now 2014, and no one is living on the moon. We haven't even made it to Mars, and probably won't get there for many years. Although there are “chat bot” computer programs that might fool you (for a while) into thinking you're talking with some one, there is no computer that even has the intelligence of a 1-year-old. The only space station is a small station in which a few astronauts live in cramped conditions, without artificial gravity.

 The Roomy Space Station in 2001: A Space Odyssey

But what about Clarke's nonfiction predictions about our century – how well do they hold up? In 1999 Clarke wrote for the London Sunday Telegraph an article called “The Twenty-First Century: A (Very) Brief History.” Below are some of the predictions he made, along with comments about their accuracy.

Clarke predicted that the year 2002 would see “the first commercial device producing clean, safe power by low-temperature nuclear reactions,” causing the inventors of cold fusion to get a Nobel Prize in physics in that year. Serious misfire.

Clarke predicted that the year 2004 would see the first example of a human clone. Misfire.

Clarke predicted that the year 2005 would see the first return of a soil sample from Mars. Misfire.

Clarke predicted that in the year 2006 the last coal mine would be closed. Very serious misfire.

Clarke predicted that in the year 2009 (because of a nuclear accident) all nuclear weapons would be destroyed. Serious misfire.

Clarke predicted that in the year 2010 “quantum generators (tapping space energy)” would be deployed, and that electronic monitoring would all but eliminate professional criminals from society. Both predictions were complete misfires.

Clarke predicted that in the year 2011 a space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa would discover life on that moon. Misfire.

Clarke predicted that in the year 2014 construction of a Hilton Orbiter Hotel would begin. Misfire.

These misfires are not hand-picked from a list of predictions including quite a few successes. As far as I can tell from his 1999 forecast , pretty much nothing that Clarke predicted to happen between the year 2000 and 2014 actually happened (except for the arrival of a space probe to Saturn, which was already due to arrive in the year Clarke predicted).

These predictions were from one of the twentieth century's leading futurists, who had written a widely-read book entitled Profiles of the Future. My purpose here is not to belittle Clarke, who I regard highly. My purpose is merely to suggest the lesson that no matter how highly regarded a particular futurist may be, you should remember that his predictions are just educated guesses.

So the next time you see Ray Kurzweil predict that highly intelligent computers are just around the corner, take it with a grain of salt.

You should also pay very little attention to the prediction in today's news, from the SETI Institute's senior astronomer Seth Shostak. Shostak predicts that if intelligent life exists in space, we will find it within twenty years. Although there is every reason to suspect that there is very much intelligent life outside of our planet, there is fairly little reason to conclude that if it exists we will find it in twenty years.Whatever reasons have prevented us from finding such intelligent life for the past fifty years may well also prevent us from finding it in the next fifty years.