This Pillar of Physicalism Is Crumbling

Physicalism is the doctrine that all that exists are physical things: mass, energy, fields, and so forth. The term means basically the same thing as materialism. If you are a physicalist, you think that all human mental experiences are purely the result of the brain.

To have some type of intellectual respectability, a physicalist must have some type of semi-specific claim about where human memories are stored in the brain. It won't do for the physicalist to be totally vague about the topic. For example, physicalism would have very little respectability if physicalists talked like this:

Your memories must be stored in your brain, although I haven't a clue as to where in the brain they are stored. Maybe they are in the middle of your neurons. Or maybe your memories are in the axons that connect nerve cells. Or maybe your memories are hiding out in your DNA. Or maybe your memories are in that watery liquid splashing around in the brain. Or maybe memories are stored in synapses. Or maybe memories are stored in the network of holes in the brain, kind of like data written in the holes of punch cards. Sheesh, I have no idea, but I know your memories must be stored SOMEWHERE in your head.

Of course, talk like that sounds quite scatterbrained, so a physicalist must be a little more specific. To have any credibility, he must have an answer to the question: where in the brain are memories stored? For a few decades, a stock answer has been given by neuroscientists: they have generally claimed memories are stored in synapses. Synapses are junctions between nerve cells in the brain.

But there is a great problem with this stock answer. Human memories are known to last for more than 50 years, but synapses are not a stable platform for the storage of information. The standard tale told by neuroscientists has been that memories are stored as changes in the strengths of synapses, what are called synaptic weights. But the things that make up such synaptic weights are protein molecules that have a very short lifetime. The protein molecules in synapses have a lifetime of no longer than a few weeks (this paper finds that they turn over at a rate of about 17% per day).

Besides this very rapid molecular turnover, there are other types of structural turnover making synapses an unstable platform for long-term memory storage. What are called dendritic spines in synapses last no more than about a month in the hippocampus, and less than two years in the cortex. This study found that dendritic spines in the hippocampus last for only about 30 days. This study found that dendritic spines in the cortex of mice brains have a half-life of only 120 days.   The research of Stettler suggests that synapses themselves have a half-life of only about 3 months.

In a previous post published in August, 2016, I discussed such issues, and I argued that very long-term memories (such as 50-year old memories) cannot be stored in synapses as has been so often maintained. In November 2016 there appeared a scientific paper that substantiates a good deal of my reasoning.

The paper by Patrick C. Trettenbrein is entitled “The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift?” Below are some excerpts:

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.

So if memories are not stored in the synapses of your brains, where are they stored? Trettenbrein offers no answer. How can he, when there are no other places in the brain suitable for storing memories that could last for 50 years? I explained in my August 2016 post why it is that other possibilities for memory storage such as DNA in neurons are not suitable explanations. We are familiar with cellular processes that read DNA during what is known as transcription, and we know that information from DNA is read many times too slow to account for the basically instantaneous speed with which humans retrieve memory.

Imagine a Broadway producer who discovers that his star cannot perform, but who has no understudy who can fill in. Such a producer is like a neuroscientist realizing that synapses aren't up to the job of explaining very long-term memories – there is no alternate part of the brain that can be called up to fill in the theoretical hole, like some understudy filling in the gap.

Trettenbrein gives this astonishingly frank and quite correct assessment: “To sum up, it can be said that when it comes to answering the question of how information is carried forward in time in the brain we remain largely clueless.” Such intellectual candor in a scientist is a refreshing change of pace.

We get some similar candor in a new book Why Only Us? Language and Evolution by the leading linguist Noam Chomsky and Professor Robert C. Berwick. Here is an excerpt (pages 50-51):

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.

The apparent impossibility of explaining how brains could store memories for 50 years is perhaps exceeded by the apparent impossibility of explaining how humans could instantly retrieve such memories. Neuroscientists don't even have any decent theory for this, and mainly just kind of shrug their shoulders when this puzzle is mentioned.

We don't at all understand how it is that brains could create consciousness or understanding, because none of the computers we have built has the slightest bit of real consciousness or real understanding. But we do know something about the requirements for an instantaneous retrieval of information that is stored for decades, because we have built computers capable of such feats. Among the requirements for a fast computerized retrieval of information stored for decades are things like this:

• the existence of a stable place for information storage, so that stored information can last many decades, with a fast read-write capability into and out of that storage place
• the existence and use of encoding formats (for example, ASCII, .jpeg, and binary) allowing information to be written using storage protocols necessary for the physical storage of different types of symbolic information
• the creation of indexing entries allowing stored information to be very rapidly retrieved
• the existence of a positional or coordinate system allowing the system to know the very precise physical location of where some particular piece of information is stored, so that one exact piece of information (and only that piece) can be very rapidly retrieved
• the existence and use of decoding formats that are the inverse of encoding formats, allowing encoded information to be decoded
• the use of some mathematical algorithm comparable to hashing, allowing a search string or cue to be translated into an index position allowing the index entry to be very rapidly found, allowing very rapid retrieval of the stored information

A neuroscientist cannot describe in detail any brain functionality that is like any single one of these things, but somehow old men are able to instantly recall 50-year old memories. How then can we not conclude that this must involve something much more than the brain?

The synapse doctrine of memory storage is a pillar of physicalism, but that pillar is crumbling, as more and more evidence comes in that synapses are an unstable “shifting-sands” type of platform completely unsuitable to explain human memories that last for 50 years. But what happens when our scientists eventually realize that the “jig is up,” and that they can no longer get away with telling this never-proven story that memories are stored in synapses? Will they then abandon physicalism, and realize that the human mind must be at least partially the result of something more than just the brain, perhaps some soul or some mysterious consciousness reality that transcends the human body?

Don't hold your breath. I think it will be rather like this. Let us imagine a little boy who has somehow got the idea that his parents are going to give him a pony on Christmas morning. Suppose the boy woke up early on Christmas morning, and he's searched all around the house and the yard, but there's no sign of a pony anywhere: not waiting in any of the rooms, not hiding under any of the beds, not in any of the closets, and not in the garage. Rather than realistically saying, “I must change my assumptions, there's no pony around here,” the boy will probably say, “There must be a pony around here somewhere.”

Similarly, even though there seems to be absolutely no specific place in the human brain that could be storing memories that last for 50 years, our neuroscientists will probably just keep jumping around from one untenable “brain storage of memories” theory to another, telling themselves, “Those memories must be stored somewhere in your head.” They could make a leap of imagination to postulate spiritual possibilities beyond the brain – a soul or some wider consciousness infrastructure beyond the brain. But although quite plausible, and also strongly suggested by various psychic phenomena, such possibilities are taboo in a regimented academic culture that currently acts like a straightjacket on many a mind. 

 

Why SETI Experts Make Lousy UFO Commentators

When I was a boy reading about the prospects of intelligent life on other planets, I came to the conclusion that it was likely that within a few decades mankind would receive radio signals from other worlds. I thought this was quite likely to occur before the end of the twentieth century. Authors such as Carl Sagan were making it sound like we could expect to pick up extraterrestrial radio signals before very long. Sagan kept telling people that there were a million extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy alone. With so many civilizations, how long could it be before we picked up a radio signal from one of them? 

SETI scientists use radio telescopes like this one

But it is now the year 2016, and no such radio signal has been received. SETI (which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is the term used for the scientific quest to detect extraterrestrials by looking for radio signals. SETI has been a flop thus far, a failed enterprise. So we don't often see SETI experts on our television screens. When we do see our SETI experts on television, it is often on television shows discussing UFO sightings. But this doesn't make sense, because there are several reasons why SETI experts make lousy commentators on UFO sightings.

The first reason is that being a SETI expert is in no way a qualification for saying anything about a UFO sighting. You might think otherwise, on the grounds that SETI experts “know extraterrestrials.” But they don't. If SETI ever pays off, and radio signals are received from some extraterrestrial civilization, then (after what may be a long period of deciphering and analysis) it may become true that SETI experts know something about extraterrestrials. But right now our SETI experts don't know a thing about extraterrestrials.

The radio search for extraterrestrials (SETI) involves a set of things that has nothing to do with UFO sightings. SETI experts know things such as big radio telescopes, computer search algorithms, which planets might be habitable, and natural and artificial radio sources. No such things come into play in UFO sightings. So a SETI expert is no more qualified to pontificate about a UFO sighting than your plumber or your hairdresser.

A second reason why SETI experts make lousy UFO commentators is that it seems whenever SETI experts talk about UFO sightings, they seem to show no evidence of having researched the facts about the sightings, and resort instead to lazy armchair reasoning that might occur to anyone. In this way they follow a kind of rule of laziness typically followed by scientists trying to debunk ideas that may be taboo in their little tribe of scientists. Similarly, 95% of scientists making dismissive comments about extrasensory perception (ESP) or life after death show no sign of having researched the evidence for such things.

The armchair arguments made by such SETI experts are extremely weak. One of their arguments is that if extraterrestrials were to ever arrive, we would see a spaceship the size of Manhattan orbiting our planet, or a UFO landing on the White House lawn. Such arguments are not valid, because such possibilities are merely two of a million possible ways in which extraterrestrials might interact with us. 

 

Another armchair argument I recently heard by a SETI expert is that sightings of UFOs should be dismissed because they are merely eyewitness testimony, and don't involve permanent physical evidence. Using similar reasoning, we would have to let half of the murderers in prison walk free, because their convictions were based only on eyewitness testimony.

A third reason why SETI experts make lousy UFO commentators is that within this little tribe of scientists there seems to be some weird strategy that goes rather like this: SETI experts think that they can make themselves look like discerning, “no nonsense” scientists by dismissing all evidence of extraterrestrials except for the type of radio evidence they are looking for. This thought process is very weird. We can imagine a similar thing going on in the mind of a scientist researching Bigfoot.

Scientist: So I have asked the National Science Foundation for 10 million dollars in research money. I will use the money to fund a team of scientists who will go into the deep forests of northern Canada, and look for infrared heat signatures coming from Bigfoot creatures.

Reporter: Interesting. Do you believe any of those people who claim to have seen Bigfoot?

Scientist: Seeing Bigfoot ?!? Why, I don't believe in that type of nonsense.

It makes no sense for SETI experts to follow such a strategy. The more evidence there is for extraterrestrial visitations on our planet, the more likely it is that some SETI radio search for extraterrestrials will pay off. So why should SETI experts have a predisposition to reject UFO sightings? Perhaps it is some kind of “no one shall come to the extraterrestrials but through my path” thinking on the part of the SETI expert, similar to the “no one can come to God but through our path” thinking of narrow-minded theologians.

A fourth reason why SETI experts make lousy UFO commentators is a psychological reason. UFO sightings may act as a kind of “salt in the wound” for scientists who have invested decades of their life in a failed search for extraterrestrial signals.

Let's imagine you tell a person there are two investment options: Investment 1 and Investment 2. The man invests $20,000 in Investment 1, and loses all his money. Now suppose you say to this person after he had lost all his money: you would have made a million dollars if you had invested in Investment 2. Will this person tend to accept such an idea? No, he will never believe it. The man's loss of his $20,000 is his wound, and telling him that he would have become rich if he had invested in the other option is like rubbing salt in his wound.

Now consider a senior SETI researcher who has spent decades in a fruitless search for extraterrestrial radio signals. The failure of this quest is like his wound. If that person accepts that UFO sightings are good evidence for extraterrestrials, that is like salt in the wound. For now the SETI researcher has to have thoughts like this:

How foolish of me. I bet my money on the wrong horse! Rather than spending decades in a fruitless search for radio signals from extraterrestrials, I should have been investigating UFOs. Think of what I could have accomplished if I had gone down that path.

But such thoughts are too psychologically painful. So the empty-handed SETI researcher is someone we can always expect to speak dismissively of UFO sightings. Even when they are as dramatic as the Hudson Valley UFO sightings of the 1980's, in which thousands of people reported seeing UFOs the size of a football field (according to a report in the New York Times).

Is the Force in Star Wars the Seed of a Great Philosophical Theory?

I have greatly enjoyed the various Star Trek series and movies over the years; and I can still remember the excitement I felt as a nerdy teenager when I first bought a book explaining all the details of the original Star Trek series. But one little complaint I have about the various incarnations of Star Trek is that none of them seems to have a spiritual bone in the body. While we may see what seems to be an occasional ghost or a spirit in Star Trek, it is always eventually explained away in non-spiritual terms. There is a hint of spirituality in the fifth Star Trek movie, involving a search for God, but the “god” turns out to be some rather malevolent local entity. About the only spiritual things I can remember in the many versions of Star Trek is the empathic ability of counselor Deanna Troi, who has an apparently psychic ability to sense other people's feelings, and also a similar ability Spock briefly displays in one episode of the original Star Trek series, in which he senses the distant deaths of fellow Vulcans in a starship.

But the Star Wars series of movies has much greater spirituality, for in them we have the recurrent theme of the Force. Here is how Obi-Wan Kenobi first describes the Force in the first Star Wars movie:

The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

Yoda the Jedi master of the Force explains it this way: “Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us."

In the Star Wars movies, the Force is associated with psychic powers such as telepathy and psychokinesis. The masters of the Force known as Jedi can influence the minds of others through thought suggestion, as Obi-Wan Kenobi does when he gets out of a jam by telepathically influencing the mind of security guard. A Jedi can also sense distant important events by sensing a disturbance in the Force, as Obi-Wan does when he detects a “great disturbance in the Force” when the Death Star destroys a distant planet. A Jedi can even use the force to move objects such as a light saber. Someone can also use the Force to achieve things he could never normally do, such as when Luke Skywalker uses the Force to help him perform the difficult task of blowing up the Death Star.

I can't help thinking that in this idea of the Force there is the seed of a great philosophical theory. You could probably use the idea of the Force as a kind of launching pad or springboard to create a very interesting and viable philosophical theory, although you would probably need to go off in a direction rather different from the way the Force is depicted in Star Wars.

Here is why the idea of a cosmic life-force seems worthy of exploring. Life in the universe has done and continues to do astonishing things that we cannot explain. Contrary to the overconfident dogmatic claims of many a scientist, we cannot explain the origin of life from inanimate matter, nor can we explain how life achieved such astonishingly coordinated complexity. Shallow generalizations such as “fit stuff prospers, and unfit stuff doesn't” (a concise way of stating the principle of natural selection) are not at all sufficient to explain the intricate machinery we see within cells and the astonishingly improbable three-dimensional shapes of protein molecules.

We don't even understand how life behaves the way it now behaves. No one can give a coherent explanation of how it is that a tiny fertilized ovum is able to progress to become a baby. DNA is written in a “bare bones” language that seems to be incapable of stating the instructions for such a progression to occur. What we have in DNA is mainly lists of chemicals and on/off switches, but not either a three-dimensional blueprint nor a sequential series of instructions for building complex three-dimensional objects such as a human body.

So from an explanatory standpoint it would be great if there were some cosmic life force that could help us to explain such things. Such a force might or might not be intelligent. Perhaps it might just follow general rules. We know that the cosmic force of electromagnetism follows a set of rules, but no one thinks electromagnetism is a conscious agent.

A cosmic life force seems rather plausible when one considers that we already know of four cosmic forces, the four fundamental forces of physics (gravitation, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism). But those cosmic forces are merely necessary conditions for the appearance of complex life; they are not sufficient conditions for such an appearance. (A necessary condition is something that must be present for something else to exist, but does not guarantee its existence; a sufficient condition for that thing is something that guarantees that it will exist.) From an explanatory standpoint, it would be useful to postulate some cosmic life force that acts as a sufficient condition for the appearance of life.

Such a life force might play a role in the appearance of every complex living thing. It could be that the progression from a fertilized ovum to a human baby would never occur without inputs from some cosmic life force. If so, perhaps the Star Wars movies get things a little backwards when they suggest that life creates the Force. Perhaps it is more like: the Force creates life.

A mysterious cosmic life-force might also help us explain various paranormal psychic anomalies that materialist scientists have tried to sweep under the rug. Their rug has a great big person-sized bump from all the paranormal anomalies they have swept under it.

Some might like to believe in a cosmic life-force as kind of an alternative to believing in an active deity, although one could believe in both without contradiction. A deity wishing for life to exist throughout a vast universe might create some kind of cosmic life-force to reduce the need for divine interventions to be constantly occurring throughout the vast cosmos, just as a man might create a robot to do some of his work.

Here are three suggestions I would give to any philosophical thinker trying to create a theory of a cosmic life force.

Emphasize the explanatory value of such a force. Why believe in a cosmic life force? It won't do to say, “It's a useful plot device.” But if one can describe how postulating such a force might fill some of the holes in our understanding of the universe's evolution and unexplained psychic phenomena, such a cosmic life force becomes much more plausible.

Dump the dark side of the force. In the Star Wars movies we often hear that there is a dark side of the force that leads people to evil. While that's a great plot device, I wouldn't think that it should have any place in a philosophical theory of a cosmic life-force. Evil can easily be explained by garden-variety stupidity and selfishness. We don't need a mysterious cosmic force to explain that.

Democratize the force. In the Star Wars movies the Force has rather elitist connotations. The idea is that the Force can be channeled by only an elite few, the Jedi masters. A more appealing idea would be if everyone could somehow use a cosmic life-force to benefit in some way.

If a philosophical thinker advances a theory of a cosmic life-force, that person is advancing a form what is called vitalism. Vitalism was rather popular in the nineteenth century, but vitalism has been officially declared extinct by modern biologists. But don't be deterred by that. Below is a translation of the type of things the modern biologist will say about vitalism.

Assertions	Translation
Vitalism used to be rather popular, but it was killed off when DNA was discovered. No scientist believes in any type of vitalism any more. It's a dead duck. Don't even think about digging up this dead horse from its grave !	It is officially forbidden for you to advance any theory that some life force or vital force is needed to explain the appearance or workings of life. This is a taboo that cannot be violated. Anyone advancing such an idea is a damnable heretic who has committed a thought crime in violation of official orthodoxy.

What happened was that scientists declared vitalism dead in the 1950's on the ground that they had discovered “the secret of life” by discovering DNA. But DNA is only one of the many secrets of life, many of which are undiscovered. The human genome has been thoroughly analyzed, and we seem to have just as many unanswered questions about life as before DNA was discovered. The discovery and analysis of DNA has shed no light on the origin of life, and has made that origin seem all the more puzzling, since new questions were raised such as: where does the genetic code come from, and how could the first DNA have appeared? And DNA has not explained the mystery of morphogenesis, the mystery of how a fertilized ovum manages to progress to become a human baby. Nor has DNA done very much to explain the mysteries of the human mind. For reasons discussed here, such basic questions as “where and how is the body plan for humans stored?” have not been answered by studying DNA, which is mainly a list of chemicals which has neither a three-dimensional layout for body plans nor a sequential set of procedural instructions for building bodies.

Given the persistent mysteries of life, there is still tons of room for a vitalistic philosophy based on the idea of some cosmic life-force. Claiming that DNA's discovery explains life's workings is like saying you can explain the strange workings of the US Congress once you have discovered a building plan for the US Capitol building.

The Chinese have long had a theory of a vital force, one that they call qi or chi. Such a concept has been widely held for centuries, and has many serious adherents who claim to have evidence for it, in the form of medical benefits produced by making use of such a vital force. I cannot claim to have studied the evidence for such claims, so I won't say anything either for them or against them. 

Postscript: Although the latest Star Wars movie seems to have little emphasis on the Force (despite its title), in Episode 1 of the series (The Phantom Menace) it is remarkable how far the concept is developed. One character says he is sure it is "the will of the Force" that Anakin Skywalker be trained as a Jedi.  And when Anakin's mother is asked who is the father of Anakin, she says there was "no father," causing the movie viewer to get the idea that perhaps the Force can cause a virgin birth. 

They Put a “Science” Sticker on Their Gossamer Threads of Speculation

When you hear the phrase “tribal folklore,” you probably think of some image such as members of a primitive tribe sitting around a campfire, while someone with a necklace of bones and a feather headdress tells a story such as “Once upon a time the sun god spat out the earth.” But tribal folklore can arise and flourish in the modern halls of American universities, where there exist tribes such as the small tribe of cosmologists. Below is the story of how some tribal folklore not only started to flourish, but experienced runaway growth, like some out-of-control kudzu.

Around about 1978, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) were puzzled by a problem of fine-tuning. They had figured out that the expansion rate of the very early universe (at the time of the Big Bang) must have been incredibly fine-tuned, apparently to one part in ten to the sixtieth power. This dilemma was known as the flatness problem.

Enter Alan Guth, an MIT professor. Guth proposed a way to solve the flatness problem. Guth proposed that for a tiny fraction of its first second (for less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), the universe expanded at an exponential rate. The universe is not expanding at any such rate, but Guth proposed that after a very brief instant of exponential expansion, the universe switched back to the normal, linear expansion that it now has.

This idea was extremely far-fetched from the moment it was proposed, particularly the idea of the universe making this sudden switch so quickly. But nonetheless Guth's idea became very popular among the small tribe of cosmologists. We can call this idea Guthism, and we can call the cosmologists who adopted it Guthists.

But there was a big problem with Guthism. Its early versions (as advanced in the early 1980's) simply did not work. They had all kinds of problems. The Guthists tried to fix this. First, they got busy creating hundreds of different versions of Guthist theories, all based on the idea that the universe had undergone an instant of exponential expansion. So instead of just one Guthist theory, before long there were hundreds of variant theories.

Some of these theories indulged in runaway speculations. One variation called eternal inflation imagined that our universe was just one bubble in an infinite sea of bubble universes. The advantage of this is that no matter improbable it might be that a universe might undergo a phase of exponential expansion and then change to the regular expansion we observe, a Guthist could say that such a thing would have happened at least once in the infinite sea of bubble universes.

We must take a step back here, and categorize the scientific status of Guthism.  Guthism is sold as science; its proponents have put a "science" sticker on their gossamer threads of speculation.

However, Guthism is best described not as science, but tribal folklore. It is a species of folklore that has become popular among the very small tribe of humans called cosmologists.

Below is the basic piece of folklore behind Guthism:

At the very beginning the universe started out with just the right conditions for it to start expanding at an exponential rate. So for the tiniest fraction of a second, the universe did expand at this explosive exponential rate. Then, boom, the universe suddenly switched gears, and started expanding at the much slower, linear rate that we now observe.

There is no evidence supporting this speculation, so it is quite accurate to call it a piece of tribal folklore. The actual expansion of the universe that we observe justifies no belief other than the belief that the universe has expanded at the same linear rate that we now observe it expanding at.

But our Guthists often mislead us about whether there is evidence for their Guthist folklore. Here is a very misleading statement recently made by Guthist cosmologist Ethan Siegel:

You see, we can extrapolate the Big Bang backwards to an arbitrarily hot, dense, expanding state, and what we find is that it didn’t get infinitely hot and dense early on, but rather that — above some energy and before some very early time — there was a phase that preceded the Big Bang, and set it up. That phase, a period of cosmological inflation, describes a phase of the Universe where rather than being full of matter and radiation, the Universe was filled with energy inherent to space itself: a state that causes the Universe to expand at an exponential rate.

This is a falsehood, as the Guthist theory of cosmological inflation (that the universe once expanded at an exponential rate) is not at all something that can be derived by any type of extrapolation. Extrapolating the universe's current expansion back to the very beginning of time in no way supports the conclusion that the universe underwent an exponential expansion of the type imagined by Guthists. Saying that extrapolation leads to exponential expansion (Guthist cosmic inflation) at the universe's beginning is like saying that you can extrapolate the motion of a baseball pitcher's fastball to calculate that it will end up in the exhaust pipe of your car, because the hitter may hit the ball out of the stadium, and the ball may bounce off the parking lot asphalt, landing in your car's exhaust pipe. The scientific papers of the Guthist theorists don't use extrapolation to set up the conditions for exponential expansion; they rely instead on speculations as ornate as the exhaust pipe speculation just given.

In the same post (entitled “Is There Another 'You' Out There in a Parallel Universe?”), Siegel sinks into the kind of runaway, out-of-control folklore that Guthists like to engage in, as when he says, “There are a huge number of Universes out there — possibly with different laws than our own and possibly not — but there are not enough of them to give us alternate versions of ourselves; the number of possible outcomes grows too rapidly compared to the rate that the number of possible Universes grows.” To the contrary, we have zero evidence for the Guthist claim of exponential expansion in the early universe, and zero evidence for any other physical universe other than our own.

One of the reasons why Guthism isn't really a scientific program is that it is neither based on observations nor does it make precise predictions that we can test. A New Scientist article puts it this way:

But no measurement will rule out inflation entirely, because it doesn’t make specific predictions. “There is a huge space of possible inflationary theories, which makes testing the basic idea very difficult,” says Peter Coles at Cardiff University, UK. “It’s like nailing jelly to the wall.”

The Guthist idea of exponential expansion was originally created to try to remove the precise fine-tuning needed to have the critical density of the universe match the actual density of the universe, to sixty decimal places. The thinking was kind of like, “Ugh, we don't like fine-tuning in nature, so let's try to get rid of it.” But the Guthist cosmic inflation theory requires its own fine-tuning to work – just as much or more as the fine-tuning it was designed to remove. Judging from a recent cosmology paper, Guthist claims require not just one type of fine-tuning, but three types of fine-tuning. The paper says, “Provided one permits a reasonable amount of fine tuning (precisely three fine tunings are needed), one can get a flat enough effective potential in the Einstein frame to grant inflation whose predictions are consistent with observations.” How on Earth does it represent progress to try to get rid of one case of fine-tuning by introducing a theory that requires three cases of fine-tuning? And the estimate of three fine-tunings in the paper is probably an underestimate, as other papers I have read suggest that 7 or more precise fine-tunings are needed.

This is not theoretical progress

In terms of actually advancing human knowledge, Guthism has been a bust for cosmology, a misadventure that future cosmologists will probably look back on with disdain. We have learned nothing about reality by these unverifiable speculations that the universe underwent an instant of exponential expansion during its first second. But Guthism has been very good for cosmologists themselves. This is because Guthism provides our cosmologists with an easy way of earning a paycheck, a nice meal-ticket. The modern cosmologist is supposed to write several scientific papers every year, and writing a Guthist paper on yet another variation of cosmic inflation theory is easy work for today's cosmologist. We cannot observe anything that happened before the recombination era that happened about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. So if you are a cosmologist, you can make a nice, safe living writing speculative papers about various weird physical possibilities during the universe's first instant; and no one will be able to disprove your speculations.

Let me describe a very simple method for distinguishing between a scientist who has actually discovered something and a scientist who is indulging in speculation, perhaps just giving you a little folklore of his science tribe. After the scientist discusses his pet doctrine, you just ask him or her: “What observations or experiments forced you to believe that?” In the case of a relatively solid finding such as the Big Bang, the scientist can give a good answer, by mentioning things like the discovery that galaxies are receding away from us, and the discovery of the cosmic background radiation around 1965. But in the case of the Guthist theory of exponential expansion of the universe during only a fraction of its first second, a scientist will have no decent answer to the question of, “What observations or experiments forced you to believe that?”