Despite Huge Brain Damage, Their Minds Functioned Well

Judging from materialistic assumptions about the brain and the human mind (the idea that our minds are purely the product of our brains), we would expect there to be a high correlation between brain health and mental function. We would expect from such assumptions that there should be as high a correlation between brain health and mental function as there is between leg muscles and running speed.

But surprisingly such a high correlation does not seem to exist. The correlation between brain health and mental function seems to be merely a low correlation. I will now present some facts to support this claim.

First let's look at some results concerning strokes. The study here tested emotional intelligence in 32 patients who had strokes in the frontal lobes, claimed to be the crucial brain parts relating to intelligence. The study found that such persons had an average emotional intelligence of 87 – significantly less than the average of 100, but not a very big difference. This article in US News and World Report says, "It’s important to recognize that strokes do not cause a drop in overall intelligence.” This paper refers to “the generally minor effect of stroke on IQ” in children.

The recently published scientific paper here is entitled “A Lesion-Proof Brain? Multidimensional Sensorimotor, Cognitive, and Socio-Affective Preservation Despite Extensive Damage in a Stroke Patient.” Here is an astonishing report from the paper's abstract, describing a patient who seems mentally undamaged despite massive brain injury:

At age 43, patient CG sustained a cerebral hemorrhage and a few months later, she suffered a second (ischemic) stroke. As a result, she exhibited extensive damage of the right hemisphere (including frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions), left Sylvian and striatal areas, bilateral portions of the insula and the amygdala, and the splenium. However, against all probability, she was unimpaired across a host of cognitive domains, including executive functions, attention, memory, language, sensory perception (e.g., taste recognition and intensity discrimination), emotional processing (e.g., experiencing of positive and negative emotions), and social cognition skills (prosody recognition, theory of mind, facial emotion recognition, and emotional evaluation).

Below is the paper's startling discussion of the very well-preserved memory in this patient who had suffered heavy brain damage from two strokes:

Even more striking are her mnemonic skills: her procedural and semantic knowledge is fully preserved, as shown in her smooth execution of various action routines (e.g., handling her cell phone, tying her shoe laces) and her intact naming and classification skills (e.g., she could flawlessly denominate all the objects she had thematically organized in different sections of her purse); furthermore, her declarative memory is extremely detailed for events which happened weeks, months, and even years ago. She could describe scenes from her childhood and adolescence, she meticulously narrated episodes occurring immediately before and after her strokes, she remembered the names, specialties, and suggestions of all her doctors, and she could recount details of dozens of books she had read throughout her life.

We know that Alzheimer’s disease can cause an inability to recall memories, although whether the memories are actually lost is debatable. What is remarkable is the fact that a large fraction of the brain can be ruined by Alzheimer’s disease before a patient can become noticeably poor at remembering things. Here is a quote from an expert on the disease:

One of the big challenges we face with Alzheimer's is that brain cell destruction begins years or even decades before symptoms emerge. A person whose disease process starts at age 50 might have memory loss at 75, but by the time we see the signs, the patient has lost 40 to 50 percent of their brain cells.

The same very astonishing thing is said in this article, which quotes an expert saying the following:

In Alzheimer’s, brain cells start to die 10, 15, or 20 years before symptoms appear. By the time we observe memory lapses, 40 percent to 50 percent of brain cells are gone, and it’s too late to make a difference.

These statements are astonishing. If our memories are all stored in our brains, why would you have to lose 40 to 50 percent of your brain cells before people started noticing your memory loss? Again, this suggests merely a low correlation between brain health and mental function.

The paper here studied memory effects in 63 patients who had undergone surgery for brain cancer, in addition to other patients who had undergone both brain surgery and radiotherapy. 91% of these 63 patients experienced “no deterioration” in immediate recall; 80% experienced “no deterioration” in delayed recall; and 77% experienced “no deterioration” in recognition. This is a relatively low correlation between brain damage and memory, particularly considering that about half of the patients had 2 or more brain metastases (areas in which the cancer was growing).

Figure 8 of this paper gives us a graph that compares verbal IQ with brain tumor size in a variety of brain cancer patients. Under materialist assumptions, we would expect that there should be a strong inverse correlation between something like verbal IQ and the size of a brain tumor; the bigger the brain tumor, the lower your verbal intelligence should be. But what we see is only a low correlation – a correlation of only .28. High correlations have values like .75 or .85. Astonishingly, the person with the highest verbal intelligence had the biggest brain tumor, and the person with the second highest intelligence also has a very large brain tumor.

Verbal IQ and brain tumor size (probably in centimeters)

When we consider sudden traumatic injury to the brain, we also find some cases where the correlation between brain health and mental function seems to be merely a low correlation. One astonishing case is that of Gabby Giffords, a US congress representative who was shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. Not only did she live, but (as discussed here) she has recovered to a remarkable degree, to the point of being able to bike, and speak clearly (although in shorter sentences). A similar case was the famous case of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth century railroad worker who had a thick iron railroad spike accidentally drive through his skull, piercing his frontal lobes. A physician soon reported after examining Gage that he was “quite recovered in his faculties of body and mind.” Gage seems to have had some personality changes later, but such changes are trivial compared to what we would have expected from such an injury under materialistic assumptions about the brain.

No discussion of the low correlation between brain health and mental function would be complete without a mention of the work of physician John Lorber. As discussed here, Lorber studied people whose brains had been severely damaged by conditions such as hydroencephaly, in which healthy brain tissue is replaced by a watery fluid. Lorber divided patients into four categories. The last and most severe was a category was one in which “ventricle expansion” due to disease fills 95 percent of the cranium. Remarkably, Lorber found that in this last extreme category, half of the patients had IQ's greater than 100. Lorber also marveled at a patient whose IQ was high despite extremely severe brain damage due to disease:

There's a young student at this university, who has an IQ of 126, and has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.

Then there was the case that the Reuters new agency reported with the headline, "Tiny brain no obstacle to French civil servant." It told the case of a well-functioning civil servant who had merely a "thin sheet of actual brain tissue."  Reuters was reporting on a case described in the medical journal Lancet. 

Then we have the case of savants, people like the late Kim Peek who could remember 98 percent of what he had read in more than 7000 books. Savants sometimes have a strange combination of brain damage and memories better than those of ordinary people.  

These cases all tell us the same thing: that there is merely a low correlation between brain health and mental function, and that people can often have very high mental function even when their brains are greatly damaged. As a scientific paper says, “There does not appear to be a direct relationship between the degree of brain pathology or brain damage and the clinical manifestation of that damage.”

Such cases are not at all compatible with the conventional thinking of neuroscientists that the human mind is merely the product of the brain. But such cases are compatible with the assumption that the human mind is mainly the product of some mysterious reality beyond our understanding: a soul or some cosmic consciousness infrastructure much greater than a human body. 

There are three big reasons for thinking that our minds and memories are not merely products of our brains. The first reason is cases like the ones discussed in this post. The second is the inability of neuroscience to plausibly account for the mental function we observe in humans. Scientists cannot plausibly account for the storage of human memories lasting for 50 years. The leading theory to explain this holds that such memories are stored in synapses, but that theory is untenable because synapses are subject to rapid molecular and structural turnover which should make them incapable of storing memories for longer than a year.  Nor can scientists explain such simple things as how brains can retrieve memories instantaneously like humans do (which creates all kinds of "how did you know where in your brain that memory was stored" issues).  Nor can scientists explain how neurons could possibly do something such as forming an abstract thought (not just the perception of a single bird, but the generic abstract idea of a bird). 

The third reason for thinking that our minds and memories are not merely the products of our brains is the fact that there are many well-established cases of psychic phenomena (such as ESP and near-death experiences), which we cannot explain under "your mind is merely the product of your brain" assumptions. 

The visual below illustrates the type of reasoning used by some people to try to establish conventional assumptions about the brain, and why such reasoning is not convincing.

 

Do the “Easy Life” Guys Want 8 Billion Bucks for Metaphysical Reassurance?

On the Ars Technica website, there is a very detailed and lucid explanation of NASA plans to search for life on Europa, a moon of the planet Jupiter. The mission described is fascinating, but it may be a case of people who want to spend 8 billion dollars to reassure themselves that their dubious philosophical assumptions are correct. The mission seems to be all about proving an “easy life” hypothesis, one which seems to be very unlikely to be true from a purely scientific standpoint.

Europa is believed to be covered with a thick layer of ice, but it is believed that deep below that ice is a watery ocean. The plan is to land a robot probe on the icy surface of Europa. The probe will then drill down into the ice, looking for signs of life. Advanced plans for searching for life on Europa have always looked like the plan shown in the NASA visual below. Under such plans a probe would release something that drills down through the ice, and makes contact with the ocean below.

The best way to search for life on Europa (credit: NASA)

When I read the Ars Technica article, I was expecting to hear about a mission such as this, one that would somehow make contact with Europa's ocean underneath its ice. But the article did not describe such a mission. It merely described a mission that would drill down a little into the ice, and look for signs of life inside the ice.

There are two reasons why such a mission seems like a gigantic boondoggle that will almost certainly fail. The first and lesser reason is that even if life had evolved in an ocean underneath Europa's thick icy layer, it is unlikely that signs of such life would pass up all the way through such a layer of ice. That ice is believed to be between 15 and 25 kilometers thick (10 to 15 miles thick). It seems unlikely that any type of organism could survive a journey through such a thick layer of ice.

The second and better reason why such a mission seems very unlikely to succeed is that the chance of life appearing in an ocean of Europa seems extremely low. To calculate this chance, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion.” Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here).

Scientists have been knocking their heads on the origin-of-life problem for decades, and have made little progress. The origin of even the simplest life seems to require fantastically improbable events. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear, and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality.

Facts such as these are troubling to those who believe in a random, purposeless universe. To such people, it would be embarrassing to have to concede that our planet seems to have been blessed by an astonishingly improbable set of lucky events that got life started. So such people often advance a kind of counter-thesis: what we may call the idea of “easy life.” The “easy life” hypothesis maintains that we didn't get lucky, because given the right ingredients and chemicals, life will inevitably appear. Such thinking is perhaps rather like the daughter's thinking in this conversation:

Mother: Why are you leaving us and heading 2000 miles to Hollywood? The chance of you becoming a star is one in a million.

Daughter: No, it is inevitable that I will become the world's greatest starlet.

When you are faced with a mathematical reality that something that you want to happen is very unlikely to happen, it is very effective psychologically to “cross out” this troubling improbability by maintaining that the thing is not unlikely at all, but instead has a probability of 100%.

In the case of the proposed Europa mission, we have a mission that we might describe as “Desperately Seeking Easy Life.” Some people pitching such a mission want very much for their “easy life” hypothesis to be proven, and they are asking for 8 billion dollars of taxpayer funds so that they can achieve this metaphysical reassurance, and say to themselves, “I'm so relieved – Earth wasn't so lucky!” It's basically the kind of “give me lots of money so I can be reassured about my assumptions” thing that would go on if a fundamentalist group were to ask for millions of taxpayer dollars to fund projects digging underground looking for Noah's ark.

Looking at the probability of life arising by pure chance in Europa's ocean, a purely chemical and biological assessment must rate the probability as being extremely low. Now it is true that there may have been some additional factor involved in the origin of life on Earth. Perhaps life got started here through the action of some divine being or the action of extraterrestrial visitors. But while such a higher power may have acted to spur the start of life on many planets in our galaxy, the chance of such a higher power working to create life in some buried ocean underneath 20 kilometers of ice seems much smaller. So even if we throw in the possibility of some additional power helping life appear in our galaxy, it still seems unlikely that life would exist in Europa's ice-buried ocean, given all of the fantastically improbable things that have to happen for life to appear from non-life.

The proposed Europa mission seems like a fantastically expensive “shot in the dark” that is very unlikely to succeed. Even if some hint of life were to appear, it might well be some ambiguous signal like the one produced by the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. A mission putting cameras down into Europa's ocean might conceivably yield fascinating footage of swimming creatures. But a mission drilling only a little into the ice (like the currently proposed mission) would merely yield some numerical data that might be of interest only to scientists. Such data probably would still be subject to debate, and would be unlikely to give a final decisive answer as to whether life exists on Europa.

We don't need the Europa mission because there are other ongoing scientific research programs that can be used to test the “easy life” hypothesis. One such program is the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, with a price tag a tiny fraction of the proposed Europa mission. If the “easy life” hypothesis is true, we would expect such searches to be successful before long. (Their failure so far despite thousands of hours of searching time may be a strong indication that the “easy life” hypothesis is not correct.)

Another such program is the search for atmospheric signs of life from planets revolving around distant stars. If the origin of life is easy, and life is all over the galaxy, we can expect that soon our space instruments will start showing up by-products of life (such as abundant oxygen) in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

So an advocate of the “easy life” hypothesis cannot claim that the Europa mission is essential to test such a hypothesis, as the hypothesis will be tested by other programs searching outside of our solar system. 

Postscript:  The selling point constantly made for SETI outside of our solar system is: there are so many planets where life might have appeared, so eventually we'll find something. But that argument cannot be used whenever you are talking about searching for life on one particular moon or planet. Think of it this way. Investing in some telescopic search of many stars (or a radio search of many stars) is like buying two big stacks of lottery tickets. But sending a robot mission to look for life on one moon or planet is like buying a single lottery ticket, and just as unlikely to pay off.  8 billion dollars is way too high to pay for a lottery ticket. 

It's As If Many Types of Natural Things Know What They Never Learned

In the history of the universe extremely improbable things seem to happen very frequently, to a degree that seems to defy conventional explanations. There are various ways commonly used to describe such wonders. One way is to talk about fine-tuning of the universe. Another is to talk about complexity emergence. But there's an interesting rarely-used type of description that we can use to describe a very wide range of phenomena, from the ultra-large to the ultra-small. We can describe such phenomena by saying: natural things often behave as if they knew things they never learned.

Let's start at an extremely large scale, and consider galaxies. Scientists have not adequately explained either the formation of spiral galaxies, or their persistence over billions of years. The revolution of galaxies every 200 million years or so should cause the spiral arms of spiral galaxies to “unwind,” which should cause galaxies to lose their spiral arms in less than a billion years. Instead, galaxies keep their beautiful spiral shapes for as long as 10 billion years or longer. One way to describe these facts is to say that is as if protogalaxies (clouds of gas and dust that form into galaxies) know how to form spiral galaxies, and it is as if spiral galaxies know how to keep their spiral structure preserved.

Galaxies are made mainly of stars, stars that burn brightly for billions of years. There are a large number of requirements for stars like the sun, and you can describe the appearance of stars like ours by discussing fine-tuning requirements. But an alternate narrative is to say: very large masses of matter somehow knew how to perform the difficult trick of performing thermonuclear fusion, and they also knew how to keep doing this at a slow, steady rate continuing for billions of years. This is a very precise balancing act, because if it is not done just right, a star will either burn up its nuclear fuel quickly, or collapse in on itself because of its own gravitational contraction.

In order to have planets and life, you need atoms – not just hydrogen atoms, but more complicated atoms such as carbon atoms and oxygen atoms. Every carbon atom is a little system consisting of 18 parts: 6 neutrons, 6 protons, and 6 electrons organized in a particular way. They can't just clump all together into a dense ball, as that would not allow carbon atoms to connect to other carbon atoms in such a way so that complicated molecules can be formed. You can describe the organization of something like a carbon atom as being the product of various complicated laws and forces, but a simpler way to describe it is just say that is as if protons, neutrons and electrons knew how to form into the systems we call atoms.

The origin of life is an unsolved mystery. For reasons discussed here and here, for life to appear from non-life seems to involve almost miraculous luck. One way to describe such a thing is to say: it is as if non-life knew how to turn into life.

After life appears, it seems to undergo an astonishing series of progressions. One way to describe such progressions is to hypothesize that simple prokaryotic cells knew how to turn into complex eukaryotic cells, that aquatic life knew how to change into land-based life, and that land-based life knew how to change into air-based life.

At a certain time perhaps 100,000 years ago or earlier, we see an astonishing transformation that we cannot explain. Humans started using language, the origin of which is still unexplained. We could describe this by saying humans who did not know how to speak somehow knew how to start building languages they had never been taught. A similar description might be applied to the beginning of agriculture, mathematics, and city building. It is as if humans somehow acquired all kinds of skills they had never been taught.

Are these cases of “natural objects that seem to know things they were never taught” all cases in the past? No, we seem to see continued examples of such a thing, and our existence depends on it. One dramatic example seems to be morphogenesis, the process by which a newly fertilized speck-sized egg progresses to become a full human baby. How this happens is a great unsolved scientific mystery.

It is not at all correct to say that what is going on is simply that some list of instructions is being read from DNA. DNA is written in a bare-bones “poor man's” language consisting of 20 nouns (all amino acids), and no more than a handful of verbs (such as the equivalent of “start,” “stop,” and “use.”) Contrary to the unwarranted claims of some, there is in DNA no list of instructions of the steps to follow to progress from a fertilized egg to a full baby, nor is there any blueprint laying out a three-dimensional body plan of humans. So in describing the mysterious progression from a fertilized egg to a human baby, we can again say that it as if a natural object seems to know something that it never learned.

There is still another dramatic example on which our existence depends: protein folding. Proteins are made of amino acids, and the linear sequence of amino acids that make up a protein is specified by DNA. But proteins have very elaborate three-dimensional shapes, and their functionality depends on them having such shapes. DNA has no capability for specifying three-dimensional shapes. What happens is that somehow protein molecules are able to form into intricate three-dimensional shapes through what is called protein folding.

How this happens is a mystery that scientists have been struggling to learn for decades, with very little success. It does not seem to be true that the mere linear arrangement of amino acids in DNA is sufficient to specify the three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule. One way to describe the situation is as follows: linear polypeptide sequences of amino acids seem to act as if they know how to form themselves into suitable three-dimensional protein molecules, even though we can't explain how such knowledge was acquired.

When we study the mysterious subject of instincts, we seem to find many other examples of natural things that seem to know things they never learned. Bees know how to make hives; birds know how to fly with other birds in perfectly synchronized formations; beavers know how to build dams; and so on. Most of the more dramatic cases of instinct cannot be explained by a mother animal teaching a child. Nor can we properly explain animals having instincts by appealing to DNA, which uses merely a minimal language for expressing the contents of proteins, not the infinitely more sophisticated language needed to state behavioral rules. These cases of instinctive skills in animals seem to be further cases of natural things acting as if they knew things they never learned.

Another example of natural things that seem to know things they never learned is what occurs when a young child first learns to speak. We take this for granted, but it seems quite the little miracle. How does a very young child pick up the rules that are needed to form sentences, rules that can never be explained to the child until the child has first learned how to speak? Again, we have a case where it is as if a natural thing (the child) knew something it had never learned: the rules of grammar and language.

When we study savants, we find many dramatic examples of people who seemed to somehow know things they never learned. There are many examples of people with dramatic deficiencies (such as very low IQ, blindness, autism, or birth defects) who displayed astonishing musical abilities, drawing abilities or calculation abilities. In Darold A. Treffert's excellent book Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome, we hear of quite a few cases of savants who picked up skills almost instantly: piano playing, first-rate artistic skills, or esoteric mathematical calculation skills. Acquisition of skills so rapidly seems inexplicable in people with normal bodies, and seems doubly inexplicable in people with dramatic handicaps. Treffert describes some examples in this online essay. Below is an excerpt:

Leslie Lemke is a musical virtuoso even though he has never had a music lesson in his life. Like “Blind Tom” Wiggins a century before him, his musical genius erupted so early and spontaneously as an infant that it could not possibly have been learned. It came ‘factory installed’. In both cases professional musicians witnessed and confirmed that Lemke and Wiggins somehow, even in the absence of formal training, had innate access to what can be called “the rules” or vast syntax of music.

To explain some of these anomalies, Treffert proposes an idea of what he calls “genetic memory.” He seems to think that perhaps our genes are storing all kinds of secret elaborate instructions, and suggests that maybe savants are able to somehow access such instructions. Treffert has done some great work in documenting savants, and I recommend his books on the topic. But this hypothesis doesn't work.

DNA and genes are basically just instructions specifying the ingredients of proteins. DNA is written in a minimalist language in which the nouns are only the names of amino acids. So DNA couldn't store something like rules of musical proficiency. Nor can we explain how it is that such rules could possibly have come to be stored in DNA, certainly something that would not have any survival value or Darwinian explanation. And if we were to explain some of the cases I have discussed by imagining some mysterious “genetic memory,” it would still leave most of the cases I have discussed unexplained, as most of these cases involve things that don't have DNA.

To reasonably account for all of the very many ways in which natural things act as if they knew skills they have never learned, we would need to break out of the straight-jacket of mechanistic and materialistic thinking, and consider explanations involving one or more things that have unreasonably been declared taboo by our mainstream professors: things such as teleology, a cosmic life force, or mysterious spiritual or psychic drivers of cosmic phenomena. 

Postscript: A new scientific study tells us that protein folding is "surprisingly more complex than previously known."  We are told, "The JILA team identified 14 intermediate states—seven times as many as previously observed—in just one part of bacteriorhodopsin, a protein in microbes that converts light to chemical energy and is widely studied in research." So look at my visual above, and imagine not a single transition, but something like a 14-step process going on, which happens in seconds. How does a mere chain of amino acids know how to do such choreography culminating in an elaborate 3D form, like some origami sculpture? The answer can't be in DNA alone. We have no explanation for what is going on here. It's as astonishing as someone throwing a bucket of sand on the ground, and then watching it self-assemble into a sand castle. 

Post-postscript: In this post I was not trying to suggest any theory that very small things have consciousness. It is possible, though, that such things have a kind of programming. A piece of software is not itself conscious. 

Cox's Ghost Goof

Although he is an engaging television personality, physicist Brian Cox can go way wrong when he veers into metaphysics, as when he advances the completely groundless “fake physics” claim of an infinity of parallel universes. Cox has recently claimed that research at the Large Hadron Collider (the biggest machine used by physicists) has ruled out ghosts.

Cox's reasoning is that if there were ghosts or souls, they would have to be made of some new type of particle that scientists hadn't yet discovered; but such a new ghost particle hasn't been found by the Large Hadron Collider; therefore, ghosts or souls don't exist. This reasoning is fallacious.

Cox has assumed that ghosts or souls must be made of some type of undiscovered particles, that are either mass or energy. But this assumption is invalid. We can imagine several different possibilities:

Possibility 1: Souls or ghosts are not made of any type of matter or energy at all, but consist of some utterly non-material thing that we may call soul-stuff, spirit, or mind-stuff.

Possibility 2: Souls or ghosts are made of some special configuration of ordinary energy such as photons.

Possibility 3: Souls or ghosts are made of some special configuration of neutrinos, a particle that is known to be able to pass through solid matter.

Possibility 4: Souls or ghosts are made of some undiscovered type of matter or some undiscovered type of energy, different from anything physicists are familiar with.

Based on reports of ghost sightings, all of these are viable possibilities. Evidence that ghosts can travel through walls is slight, so Possibility 2 is still viable. Even if it could not travel through walls, a ghost made only of photons might have various ways of getting into a room, such as traveling through windows.

Now it is clear that no results from the Large Hadron Collider do anything at all to exclude the first three of these possibilities, because the first three possibilities do not involve any type of new matter particle or energy particle that wasn't known before the Large Hadron Collider started operation several years ago. And also Possibility 4 is also not excluded by results from the Large Hadron Collider, because it's still perfectly possible that ghosts or souls may consist of some undiscovered type of matter or undiscovered type of energy that the Large Hadron Collider simply hasn't found yet.

Scientists believe that a significant fraction of the universe's total substance is something called dark matter. But no evidence for dark matter has been produced by the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists believe that most of the universe's substance is something called dark energy. But no evidence for dark energy has been produced by the Large Hadron Collider. But scientists have just kept on believing in dark matter and dark energy, despite these negative findings. In light of such facts, it is absurd or hypocritical for Cox to be speaking as if we shouldn't believe in ghosts because no ghost particles have been found by the Large Hadron Collider. To make such a claim is to evoke a rule (“If the Large Hadron Collider didn't find it, it doesn't exist”) that is exactly opposite to the rule scientists are following in regard to the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter and dark energy.

What exactly is the Large Hadron Collider? It's a gigantic ring-like machine in which scientists accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, and crash them together. It's a machine that was designed not to search for ghosts, but to partially replicate the high energy conditions near the time of the Big Bang in which the universe was born. The Large Hadron Collider tells us something about what particles appear under insanely high-energy collisions that are about the least subtle things imaginable – no more subtle than the condition under which two jet planes might collide head on. Such a machine is, of course, totally unsuitable for detecting some extremely subtle “ghost energy” or “ghost particles” that might be associated with ghosts or souls. 

A messy particle collision at a particle acclerator

Prior to Cox's comments on this matter, I cannot recall a single person who has ever speculated that findings from the Large Hadron Collider had the slightest relevance to the existence of ghosts or the existence of a soul. Cox's attempt to draw a connection between the two is highly imaginative, but unsubstantial.

Cox also gives us some completely erroneous reasoning suggesting that the Second Law of Thermodynamics argues against ghosts or the survival of the soul. This is entirely fallacious. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy tends to increase in a closed system – meaning a system receiving no external inputs. If you consider the universe as a closed system, such a law may predict increased entropy in the universe as a whole in future eons. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us nothing about the lifetime of an individual body (whether material or immaterial, biological or ghostly) – for the simple reason that such things are not closed systems, and may receive external inputs.

Very weighty evidence for apparitions was accumulated in the classic 700-page scientific book Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, which met high standards of corroboration. Cox doesn't want you to believe in ghosts, which have been repeatedly observed by reliable witnesses for centuries. But Cox does apparently want you to believe in the infinitely more unbelievable “fake physics” idea of an infinity of parallel universes, something for which there is not the slightest bit of evidence. I, on the other hand, prefer to follow the rule of: believe in proportion to the evidence, regardless of your presumptions and expectations.