Some of the Strangest Deathbed Visions

"Of the various kinds of apparitions, death-bed visions lend themselves the least to telepathic explanation. It appears as if those who passed over were waiting at the gates for their loved one. The dying one is fully conscious of the reason of their coming : sometimes there is an exclamation of surprise at the perception of someone whom the dying did not know to have died (the news having been withheld to prevent a shock), the apparitions always represent the departed, and the vision is shortly followed by death."  -- Dr. Nandor Fodor, Light, 9/8/1933, p. 565 (link).

Below is a newspaper account from 1900 of two deathbed visions, which can be read using the link here, and looking for the "Dying Women" story near the middle of the page. The first account is a typical account of this type, involving a dying person reporting what seems like a glimpse of the Great Beyond. The second account has a "clock stopping" twist that makes it stranger than the average deathbed vision. 

"Friends who attended two women in Newark, N. J„ one of whom is dead, while the other is on her deathbed, are convinced that they saw through the veil that divides this world from the next.

The city is stirred by reports of these visions 'from beyond,' and can give no better explanation of them than that offered by the attendant woman who heard the patients describe what they saw and who now say that approaching death sometimes allows a person who is ill to see beyond the pale.

The first case is that of Miss Mattie Oakley, 18 years old, who lived with her aunt. Mrs. M. E. Van Ness, at No. 90 Elizabeth avenue. The girl was a pupil in the Miller High School. She was to have been graduated next Thursday. She was an orphan. Her parents died several years ago.

She fell ill three weeks ago. Dr. B. H. B. Sleight, of Lincoln Park, attended her. Her aunt, Mrs. Van Ness, tells the story of the vision convincingly, for she is herself convinced. She was sitting with the girl last Monday afternoon, she says. They prayed together. She feared that her niece might die at any moment. For a long time the girl lay still, with her eyes fixed upon the celling, as if she looked through and beyond it. Then she turned to Mrs. Van Ness and she said she had just seen a beautiful vision.

'I stood in heaven,'  she said. Her voice was calm. She seemed
to be of normal mind.

'What have you seen?' Mrs. Van Ness asked.

'My father and mother,' the girl replied. 'They spoke to me. Mother told me to be a good girl. Father said, "Come to me."' 

Mrs. Van Ness and the girl sang a hymn together. A little later the girl died. Mrs. Van Ness is confident that her niece was rational, and that she saw that of which she spoke.

The other case is that of Mrs. Geo. W. Beatty, of No. 78 Sussex street. She is 62 years old. She was attacked by paralysis about nine months ago. Just before the first stroke, she says, the mother of former Mayor Daniel W. Beatty, of Washington, N. J., her stepson, appeared beside her bed, 'robed in pure gold.' A little later she saw Mrs. John Walters, who has been dead for half a century. Last Sunday night the spirit of her late husband appeared walking beside a beautiful river. She called aloud to him, and then she realized that she was in her room but the spirit was beside her. It lingered for a moment, she said, and then it passed through the door, although the door was closed.

At this time, it is said, the clock in former Mayor Beatty's house stopped. The hour of her vision, her friends say, was identical with that at which the clock stopped."

My post here gives five other newspaper accounts of clocks mysteriously stopping at the time of someone's death. 

Below is an untypical account of a deathbed vision, which can be read here. Instead of the dying person having the vision, a vision reportedly comes to a relative far away, alerting that person of a relative's death. There is also a strange element of a feeling of a cold chill acting as an omen of disaster.

Page 477 of the October 7, 1911 edition of the periodical Light gives an account of a deathbed vision. It includes an enormously strange element of faces of the deceased appearing on the face of a dying person. 

"A well-known business man of New York passed away. His widow is a clear-minded and educated lady, without any morbid or superstitious taint in her nature, or any belief in Spiritualism. While bending over her husband shortly before his death she observed that the expression of his face was changing, and the next moment saw there, instead, the face of her dead brother. The two men were entirely unlike in appearance, one being light and having a blond beard, and the other very dark. Shortly afterwards the lady saw on her husband’s face the expression of another deceased friend, and a little later that of a third. Her morbid and overwrought fancy deceived her, someone says. Could two persons be deceived at the same time and in the same way? I ask this because three years ago this lady and her sister watched beside the dying child of the latter. The little girl’s face suddenly changed. One of the ladies saw that the other observed this, and said : ‘ Emily, who was it ? ’ ‘ Adelaide,’ was the answer. 'Yea, Adelaide. ’ The two ladies told our informant that they saw unmistakably the face of their dead cousin, a woman, shining out through the face of the dying child. She could offer no explanation of these phenomena, and we present them, because they seem unusual and interesting."

Below is a very interesting account of a doctor who claimed to have twice seen a soul departing from the body when someone was dying. The doctors claimed that the souls looked like blue smoke. 

You can read the account here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=jvFCAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA2&dq=deathbed+vision&article_id=2891,7442987#v=onepage&q=deathbed%20vision&f=false

The account here tells the same account in fewer words:

An old newspaper account discusses something similar seen by others at a deathbed: one involving a blue flame, and the other a dark vapor leaving the head, forming into a human figure:

Anyone interested in this topic of strange lights or strange mists seen at a deathbed should read my post here, which discusses several other cases of this type. 

Partial corroboration of some of the accounts above might be found in the account below, in which the paranormal researcher Hamlin Garland reports seeing a bluish smoky cloud arising from someone's chest, with the cloud forming into a kind of spirit hand:

On the next page Garland reports, "The spectral hand darted out, seized the goblet, lifted it and brought it to the psychic's lips."

Below is one of the strangest deathbed visions ever recorded. You can read the account here. I can summarize for those not wanting to squint to see the text. In the account a woman has a vision of her late father coming to carry away her sick mother. Then the vision ends. Immediately checking on the sick mother, the woman finds that she had died. 

Use the link here to read six other posts of mine on the topic of deathbed visions (you can read them all by continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right). In the 2023 scientific paper here ("A Review of Clinical Signs and Symptoms of Imminent End-of-Life in Individuals With Advanced Illness"), we read this about End-of-Life Dreams and Visions (ELDVs):

"It is estimated that nearly 50-70% of dying people experience ELDVs (Dam, 2016; Mazzarino-Willett, 2010). While ELDVs often occur when death is imminent within days or hours before death, it is often non-specific and may also occur about weeks or months before death (Depner et al., 2020; Kerr et al., 2014; Levy et al., 2020; Nyblom et al., 2022; Santos et al., 2017)."

Below is a diagram showing how deathbed visions fit into a larger framework of related topics:

Hi-Tech Futuristic Concentration Camps May Be Called "Happiness Havens"

If there are ever concentration camps in the United States, I imagine that they will not be called "concentration camps." They will probably be given some other name that makes them seem less appalling. I also imagine that if there are ever concentration camps in the United States, they won't have some physical appearance that makes people recall Dachau or Auschwitz.  There would probably not be fences with barbed wires, and high towers manned by guards with machine guns. Instead there would be some arrangement in which the imprisonment was handled by some slick hi-tech setup. 

We can imagine a welcome page that would be handed out to the newly arrived prisoners of such concentration camps:

Greetings to you, guest!  We welcome you as a guest to Happiness Haven #184 !

Our Happiness Haven is a wonderful place for you to live with other people like yourself. Here we have many hi-tech conveniences that will keep you happy and safe. 

Very soon after you arrive, you will be supplied with some of these wonderful hi-tech inventions, like the ones below:

These marvelous innovations you will enjoy include these:

Your Taser Bracelets:  Taser bracelets will be worn by all of our guests, on both of their wrists. The Taser Bracelet is a wonderful invention that will keep you in compliance with all of the rules of this Happiness Haven. If you happen to violate one or our rules, you will feel your Taser Bracelet jolting you with a brief electrical shock. Don't worry -- it won't kill you. It will merely be a reminder to stop violating one of our rules. 

Your Happiness Headcap:  All of our guests will wear on their heads a wonderful invention that we call a Happiness Headcap.  The Happiness Headcap serves multiple functions.  It is equipped with electrodes that will read your brain waves. If you ever experience a strong emotional state such as hate or rage, your Happiness Headcap will alert our robot staff of your abnormal state of mind,  causing our robot staff to pay special attention to you. If you ever try to act in some unexpected way, such as trying to suddenly leave this Happiness Haven, your Happiness Headcap may supply a surge of electricity that produces unconsciousness. 

Happiness Haven #184 exists so that you can be happy!  Here we believe that the best way to be happy is to stay useful.  All of our guests are required to stay useful, by working 12 hours a day in the coal mine at the center of our facility. 

You may be thinking: I lack the energy to work so many hours. Don't worry. At the beginning of each day, a roving robot will give you a  drug injection of powerful amphetamines that will fill you with enough energy to do your daily quota of work. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. I heard some people say that this place is really just a concentration camp. Is that true?

A. No, that is not true! This is a Happiness Haven.  Please be aware that your Happiness Headcap continually monitors your speech. If you ever say the phrase "concentration camp" or any similar forbidden phrase, your Happiness Headcap will send a signal that activates your Taser Bracelets, providing you with a severe electrical shock. 

Q. Am I free to leave this Happiness Haven?

A.  Yes, you are free to leave! But you can only leave if you apply for a written authorization, to get what we call an Exit Ticket.  You can apply for such an Exit Ticket, but it may take many months or years before you receive such authorization. 

Q. What happens if I try to leave this place without such an Exit Ticket?

A. Although there are no fences surrounding this Happiness Haven, its perimeter is patrolled day and night by robots and flying drones that are programmed to kill anyone trying to exit without an Exit Ticket.  Also, this Happiness Haven is surrounded by a circular mine field.  Please do not try to outrun our flame-throwing flying drones, as that might be a painful experience. 

Q.  But I've always been lucky, so why can't I take my chances by leaving without an Exit Ticket?

A. One reason this is futile is that part of your "Guest Welcoming Ceremony" was when we injected you with a high-tech tracking device allowing us to track your location even if you escape. 

Q, Can I write to my friends and family while I am here?

A. Of course you can! To simplify the communication process, you will be given a computer interface allowing you to choose one of 7 pre-written letters, each of which will discuss how much you are enjoying your stay at this Happiness Haven. 

Q. Why is it that I can't even remember how I got here?

A. You probably were transported here by a "robot roundup."  Some robots in major cities are programmed to roundup certain types of persons, such as people who seem to be homeless or people attending protest rallies against our government's wise policies. During such "robot roundups" a robot may have injected you with a drug causing you to sleep for days, until you could be transported to this Happiness Haven. 

Q. Why was this place ever set up?

A. After the government was taken over by AI computers, there were two problems. The electrical power demands of huge AI server farms were rising exponentially. Also, the streets were filled with people unemployed by AI automation, people who could no longer afford their rents. One of the supercomputers realized you could help solve both of these problems by setting up Happiness Havens like this where the unemployed would work at coal mining that would help make kilowatts for AI systems. 

Q. My friend says that "guests" like him and me and most of the others here are really just slave laborers. Is that true?

A. Why of course not! It is a fact that this Happiness Haven is one of 200 sites that our government has officially designated as a Merry Fun Center.  So this place must be an oasis of joy, because your government would never lie to people. 

Scientist Flubs and Flops, #6

 

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• "Natural selection can explain much about why species are the way they are, but it does not necessarily offer a specific explanation for human intellectual powers, much less any sort of basis for confidence in the reliability of science." -- Biologist Austin L. Hughes, "The Folly of Scientistm."
• "Natural selection has been shown to have occurred (for example, among populations of Darwin's finches), but there is no evidence that it accumulates over longer periods of time to produce speciation in the Darwinian sense." Cambridge University biology professor K. D. Bennett,  Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life , page 75. 
• "Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts." -- Botanist Hugo de Vries, "The Mutation Theory. Volume II, page 609. 
• "Natural Selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher." -- Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man."
• " 'Natural Selection,' simply and by itself, is potent  to explain the maintenance or the further extension and  development of favorable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterward become." -- Biologist St. George Mivart, "On The Genesis of Species," Chapter II, 1871 (link). 
• "Rather than emerging gradually, a few at a time, the evidence presented in these four papers suggests the occurrence of punctuated bursts. At every major phylogenetic node that was examined, the appearance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of novel homology groups was detected. Evolution by bursts is, of course, not expected if natural selection is the main driver....The fossil record depicts the appearance of the first angiosperms as a sudden event, with no clear progenitors...The nodes at the origin of the angiosperms are certainly striking in terms of the total number of novel genes that seem to have appeared in a short space of time....It seems that vast numbers of existing genes are jettisoned and replaced by entirely different ones. Such processes would represent a radical overhaul in the genetic composition of organisms. How this might be accomplished is another mystery." --"The Origin of Novel Genes,"  Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London.
•  "It  seems  doubtful  whether  any  organ  having  the function  of  a foot  or  of  a hand  could  be  changed  by  a gradual process  into  a wing,  without  passing  through  an  intermediate state,  in  which  it  would  be  inefficient  for  either  purpose ; — and such  a change  would  be  immediately  detrimental,  and  could  not be  effected  by  natural  selection."  --Joseph John Murphy, biology scholar, author of a massive biology tome   (link).
• "It is well known that the instincts of animals are as innumerable as they are marvelous. They have in common the characteristic that they allow the creature to act spontaneously, without reasoned thought, without hesitation or groping, and to attain the desired end with a certainty with which neither reason, nor training, nor impulse, can compare....Now the origin of instincts is no more explicable by natural selection or by the influence of the environment than the formation of species."  Gustave Geley, physician and mind researcher (link).

Articles on the Fermi Paradox Are Flub-Filled

What is called the Fermi Paradox is the supposed paradox between the non-observation of extraterrestrials living outside of Earth, and the supposed likelihood that our galaxy would be filled with intelligent civilized extraterrestrials. The Fermi Paradox has long been a kind of tool of stealth indoctrination for those advancing the tenets of Darwinist materialism. People are most effectively indoctrinated when they are not told they are being indoctrinated. If you start out an article saying "I will now explain at length why you should believe in the doctrines of Darwinist materialism," many people will skip the article. But in an article discussing the Fermi Paradox, a reader can avoid any such introduction. Instead he may start out sounding like an open-minded answer seeker, by saying, "Let me tell you why there's a big unresolved question that we don't understand." 

Typically while the Fermi Paradox is explained, we will be indoctrinated in various extremely doubtful or untrue or untenable claims, claims that we might Fermi Flubs.

Fermi Flub #1: The Claim Our Galaxy Is Filled With Earthlike Planets

The first mistake typically made in Fermi Paradox discussions is the claim that we know our galaxy is filled with planets like Earth. We do not know any such thing. No planet should ever be called "like Earth" or "earthlike" unless life has been discovered on it, and life has never been discovered on any other planet. It is true that thousands of planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. But almost none of them have been found to be Earth-sized planets revolving in the habitable zone around stars like the sun. The habitable zone is a zone a planet must be in to allow the existence of liquid water. It is depicted in the schematic diagram below, in which the yellow circle represents a sun or star, and the green area represents the habitable zone, and the brown circles represent planets. 

So far about 5000 planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. But only about 80 of these are thought to be planets that might allow the existence of life. You can see the list here. For a planet to allow intelligent beings, numerous conditions must be met:

(1) The planet must be in the habitable zone of a solar system, allowing liquid water to exist.

(2) The planet must revolve around a suitable star. A G-class star like the sun would be a suitable star, but only about 7% of stars are G-class stars. We don't know whether intelligent life could ever exist in a planet revolving around a white dwarf star or a red dwarf star, although that might be a possibility. 

(3) The planet might have to have the right tilt or obliquity (Earth's is 23 degrees), allowing seasons so that the surface is not too hot or too cold. 

(4) The planet might need to exist in a solar system with a large Jupiter-sized planet that would act as a gravitational magnet to attract asteroids and comets, thereby preventing excessive asteroid collisions or comet collisions on the planet, which might be devastating. 

(5) The planet might need to have a large moon like Earth has (the reasons for that are complicated). 

(6) According to a recent scientific study, a planet producing intelligent life would need to have "oceans, continents and plate tectonics." The paper estimates that the chance of a planet having such things is small, something like < 0.00003–0.002.  

It is true that since our galaxy has more than 100 billion stars, it could easily be that there are quite a few planets meeting all of the necessary conditions. A reasonable rough guess might be that there are probably between a few hundred and a few thousand planets in our galaxy with all the right conditions for the eventual appearance of intelligent life. 

Fermi Flub #2: Claims That Abiogenesis Is Likely on Suitable Planets

The second big mistake in Fermi Paradox discussions is the claim that life is expected to appear on any suitable planet in the habitable zone that has liquid water. This claim is groundless. The fact is that even the simplest self-reproducing cell is an incredibly high state of organization requiring hundreds of complex inventions within it: the hundreds of different types of protein molecules required for even the simplest cell. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018. 
• "Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules."  John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 411. 
• "The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature." -- 3 scientists (link).
• "The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand." -- "The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth" by astronomer Paul Sutter. 
• "Even the simplest of these substances [proteins} represent extremely complex compounds, containing many thousands of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in absolutely definite patterns, which are specific for each separate substance. To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's 'Aeneid'  from scattered letter type." -- Chemist A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," pages 132-133.
• "The expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe." -- Scientist Tomonori Totani, "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe," a paper confessing we would not expect one natural origin of life (abiogenesis) even in the entire observable universe (link).
• "We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." --  -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," page 250.

The Fermi Flub #2 claim will typically be made by some person making dubious appeals to authority. A writer will typically claim that most scientists believe that abiogenesis (a natural origin of life from non-life) is likely when planetary conditions are right. Such a writer will never back this up with any opinion poll of scientists. We must remember that in general claims about what scientists believe on any matter remotely controversial are claims that are not well-supported. One reason is that scientists are very bad about measuring the opinions of scientists on controversial topics. There are very few well-designed polls asking scientists of their opinions about controversial topics such as whether the natural origin of life is likely on an Earth-sized planet. 

Often we are told that scientist Frank Drake estimated that the chance of life appearing on a suitable planet was 1.00. But Drake was an astronomer, not a specialist in biology; so his opinion on this matter should be given no great weight. 

The enormous unlikelihood of abiogenesis (an unguided origin of life from non-life) is by itself sufficient to make the Fermi Paradox disappear. Even the simplest life requires a very high purposeful organization of matter that we should never expect chance events to produce on even 1 planet in 1,000,000,000,000,000.  Based on such an unlikelihood, there is nothing surprising about our failure thus far to observe life in outer space. 

Fermi Flub #3: Claims That Large Multicellular Life Is Likely Once Life of Some Type Exists

People talking about the Fermi Paradox and the chance of intelligent extraterrestrials routinely suggest that once life got started on a planet, we should expect that large multicellular life forms should arrive. We should expect no such thing. The origin of large multicellular life forms (even when microscopic life existed earlier) is something not credibly explained by scientific theory. The leap from microscopic life forms too small to see to large vastly organized multicellular life forms is a giant leap not credibly explained by Darwinism or the idea of natural selection. Contrary to Darwin's often-repeated slogan that nature does not make leaps, a change from merely microscopic life forms to large life forms such as fish is a gigantic leap that cannot be credibly explained under gradualist ideas such as Darwinism. 

In the history of planet Earth, there is the long-standing and still unresolved mystery of the Cambrian Explosion.  Scientists say that in a relatively short period of time of only a few tens of millions of years, there suddenly appeared all of almost all of the major types of multicellular organisms, what are called phyla (including the Chordates phylum that mankind belongs to).  There has never been a credible Darwinist explanation for such a vast leap of organization and biological innovation, which cannot be explained under ideas of tiny changes produced by so-called natural selection. 

The arising of multicellular organisms with such gigantic levels of hierarchical organization is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. To properly understand the dismal failure of scientists to explain the arising of multicellular organisms,  simply consider the failure of scientists to explain the origin of any mammal individual. Scientists do not understand the progression from the single cell of a speck-sized zygote to the vast state of organization that is a full-grown human body.  Their failure to explain such a progression is shown by the huge lies they have told on this topic, such as the lie that a human body arises because a blueprint for constructing a body is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint, no recipe or program for building a human. DNA does not have any anatomy construction information, does not specify how to make any cell in the body, and does not even specify how to make the components from which cells are constructed (organelles and protein complexes).  DNA merely contains low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Never think that people telling big lies about something understand that topic. The fact that so many biologists have told us such outrageous lies about DNA and its genes (such as the lie that DNA is a body blueprint or a program for building bodies) is a clear sign of how "lost in the woods" biologists are when it comes to explaining the arising of any mammal body. 

There are many scientists who have confessed the truth about DNA and its genes, telling us that DNA is no blueprint or program or recipe for making a body. The great majority of such scientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of such a thing, just like the great majority of neuroscientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of the reality that a significant fraction of humans report out-of-body experiences. The lack of any anatomy specification in DNA implies that the origin of every human body (a state of enormously high hierarchical organization) must be a top-down event driven by some enormous causal agency beyond our understanding, not some bottom-up event caused by mechanistic molecular events.

Because we lack any naturalistic explanation of how one-celled life could progress to become the vast organization of a multicellular organism capable of building tools, spaceships and radio antennae,  no one can say with any confidence that one-celled life would  have a decent chance of progressing to become multicellular life capable of creating civilizations. 

Fermi Flub #4: The Claim That Intelligent Life Is Likely to Arise on a Planet After Multicellular Life Exists on It

Almost no one gets it right when discussing the likelihood of intelligent life arising on a planet once multicellular life existed on it. The truth is that we cannot estimate what the likelihood is of such a thing, because we do not have a credible theory of how intelligent minds arise by any kind of bottom-up process.  The claim that human minds arise from the action of the human brain is not a credible claim.  The reasons for disbelieving in such a claim are very many, including these: 

• Scientists discovered the genetic information in all cells around 1950, but it is now the year 2025, and no has ever used a microscope to discover any stored memory information in a brain of a human being, even through brain tissue has been examined at resolutions vastly greater than the resolutions sufficient to discover DNA in cells. 
• Many humans (both children and adults) have had half of their brains removed to stop very bad and frequent epileptic seizures, but when such surgery is done, it has little effect on intelligence or memory, with learned knowledge being well preserved. 
• Many humans can remember very well things they learned or experienced 50 years ago, but the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses (claimed to be the storage place of memories) is 1000 times shorter than 50 years (less than two weeks). 
• Humans are able to form new memories instantly, in contradiction to all theories of brain memory storage, which typically postulate "synapse strengthening" that would take at lease quite a few minutes.
• Even though the brain has no physical characteristics that might help allow any such thing as instant memory retrieval (something like an indexing system or a position notation system or coordinate system that might allow stored information to be quickly found), humans are able to retrieve learned information instantly upon hearing some person name or event name or place name, even if they haven't heard such a name in many years.
• Very many humans (as many as 10 percent or 20 percent of the population) report floating out of their bodies, and observing their bodies from above them in space. 
• Inside brains there is very severe noise of several different types that should prevent humans from being able to reliably recall large bodies of information stored in a brain, but it is a fact that many people (such as actors playing the role of Hamlet) can recall very large bodies of textual information with perfect accuracy. 
• There are hundreds of documented cases of people who saw an apparition of someone who died, but who they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the time when the apparition was seen. 
• There are also very many cases of apparitions seen by more than one person at the same time, something we should expect to never or virtually never happen if a mere brain hallucination was causing the sighting of the apparition. 
• Instead of having some vastly greater brain connectivity that might help explain the superiority of the human mind, a study found that brain connectivity is about the same in all mammals; so we have about the brain connectivity of mice. 
• As discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, there is two hundred years of written evidence (often written by very weighty figures such as scientists and doctors) for the reality of clairvoyance, an ability that is not explicable under any theory that minds are created by brains. 
• Quite a few people who have lost  half of their brains due to disease or epilepsy surgery have average or above average intelligence; and the physician John Lorber showed that some people have above-average intelligence despite having the great majority of their brain tissue destroyed by disease. 
• Besides a wealth of narrative evidence that some humans can have ESP (an ability inexplicable as a brain effect), there is abundant robust laboratory experimental evidence for ESP (discussed here, here and here). 
• No one has any credible detailed theory of how a brain could ever store learned information (such as academic information) or episodic memories as neuron states or synapse states; and if such a thing were happening, it would require a whole host of very specialized memory-encoding proteins, which have never been discovered (along with some not-yet-discovered encoding scheme millions of times more complicated than the genetic code discovered around 1950). 
• Brains show no signs of working harder during heavy thinking or memory recall, and brain scan attempts to find signs of such greater activity merely report variations such as half of one per cent, the kind of variations we would expect to get by chance, even if brains don't produce thinking or recall. 
• Because of numerous severe slowing factors such as the cumulative slowing effect of synaptic delays and dendrites, signal transmission in the brain should be way too slow to account for the blazing fast thinking speed of some people able to do mathematical calculations at incredible speeds, and also the instant memory recall humans routinely show. 
• People with dramatically higher recall of episodic memories or learned information seem to have no larger brains or brain superiority that could explain this.
• Contrary to the dogma that brains produce minds, ravens with tiny brains can do as well on quite a few mental tasks as apes with large brains; and also tiny mouse lemurs do just as well on quite a few cognitive tests as mammals with brains 200 times larger. 
• As discussed here and here, scientists have very well documented inexplicable physical effects occurring around some people, suggesting they either have powers that cannot be explained in terms of brains and bodies, or are somehow in contact with others who have such powers. 
• There are numerous reasons for suspecting some source of a human soul or spirit outside of the human body, including the sudden unexplained origin of the universe with just the right expansion rate to allow eventual planet formation, the very precise fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and laws of nature needed for biological habitability, the origin of life so hard to credibly explain as an accidental chemical event, the extremely hierarchical organization of biological organisms, the great abundance of complex fine-tuned protein molecules in organisms (each seeming to involve a vast mathematical improbability), the great abundance of immensely organized biological forms that are not explained by genomes that merely specify low-level chemical information, and abundant photographic evidence for paranormal effects that seem to suggest some unfathomable intelligence beyond any human understanding (see here and here for examples). 
• People (sometimes called autistic savants) with very serious brain defects sometimes have astonishing powers of memory almost no one else has. 
• Dying people commonly report seeing apparitions of the dead (usually their relatives), as reported here, here, and here; people having near-death experiences very frequently report encountering their deceased relatives; and widows and widowers frequently report voices or apparitions corresponding to their deceased spouses -- all just exactly as we would expect if we have souls that survive death. 
• Many decades ago Leonora Piper was studied at great length for many years by scientists and scholars, and for many years she reported information about deceased people that should have been unknown to her. 
• Human beings have many subtle and refined mental abilities (such as philosophical imagination, artistic creativity, musical ability, and subtle spirituality) that are inexplicable as results of brain evolution, such things having no value in increasing survival or reproduction. 

Here are some relevant quotes:

• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "Synaptic transmission and axonal transfer of nerve impulses are too slow to organize coordinated activity in large areas of the central nervous system. Numerous observations confirm this view [73]. The duration of a synaptic transmission is at least 0.5 ms, thus the transmission across thousands of synapses takes about hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. The transmission speed of action potentials varies between 0.5 m/s and 120 m/s along an axon. More than 50% of the nerves fibers in the corpus callosum are without myelin, thus their speed is reduced to 0.5 m/s. How can these low velocities (i.e. classical signals) explain the fast processing in the nervous system?" -- The paper "Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules" by 7 scientists.
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 

The fact is that humans lack any credible material explanation for human minds, human memory, and the mental capabilities of humans.  So we have no basis for estimating what the chance would be of non-intelligent life on a planet progressing to become intelligent life on a planet. 

 

Fermi Flub #5: Paying No Attention to the Topic of Cosmic Teleology When Estimating the Likelihood of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Articles on the topic of the Fermi Paradox pay no attention to the topic of cosmic teleology. This is the topic of whether we live in a purposeful universe that was deliberately designed to allow intelligent beings like us to exist. There is very much relevant evidence that can be produced on this topic, such as the evidence for cosmic fine-tuning. But writers on the Fermi Paradox never discuss such evidence, even though it is supremely relevant to the topic of the estimation of the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets.  

For example, considering purely mechanistic factors, you might estimate that there is virtually no chance of intelligent life existing on other planets in our galaxy, based on consideration of prohibitive odds. But once you consider the possibility of purposeful cosmic teleology, then it's an "all bets are off" affair, in which gloomy estimates of prohibitive odds no longer control things.  Despite all of the reasons above suggesting that blind processes would never produce a civilization on another planet, it is still quite possible that civilizations are abundant on other planets, because there is a purposeful cosmic agency interested in the appearance of such civilizations. 

But senselessly writers about Fermi's Paradox never seem to mention the topic of cosmic teleology.  They sound like people writing about the likelihood of tall buildings arising on other planets, who only consider the probability of chance processes producing such buildings, without ever considering the factor that intelligent agency might help produce such buildings.