Seven Levels of Mentality, and Why Brains Can't Explain the Last One

Can we account for all of man's mental activities by assuming that they can all be explained by the brain? When considering this question, it may make sense to distinguish between different levels of human mentality, with each level being more more difficult to explain than the previous level. For it might be that our brains are sufficient to explain one level, but insufficient to explain a more advanced level.

Below are seven levels of mentality we can distinguish.

Level 1: Let us imagine a very young baby lying in a crib near a window. A red bird flies and lands on the windowsill. The baby looks out at the bird, and perceives the bird's color. But there is no recognition, and the baby feels neither fear nor wonder at the sight of the bird. There is no thought or emotion, but merely sensory perception.

Level 2: Let us imagine the same event happens. The baby is lying in its crib, and a a red bird flies and lands on the windowsill near the crib. But let us suppose the baby is a little older, and now something a little more advanced happens. The baby feels an emotion of wonder or delight. But there is still no recognition, and no memory is involved.

Level 3: Let us imagine the same event happens. The baby is lying in its crib, and a a red bird flies and lands on the windowsill near the crib. Let us imagine this baby is now almost a toddler. The baby feels an emotion of delight or wonder at seeing the bird, but now some memory is involved. Without thinking any words, the child has a vague feeling of recollection, the feeling that he has seen such a bird before.

Level 4: Now let us imagine the child can walk, and he sees the red bird out in his back yard. When he sees the red bird, not only is there a feeling of delight, and a recollection, but also a use of language. Now the child points to the bird, and says, “I see birdy.”

Level 5: Now let us imagine the child is seven years old. Now he sees the red bird in his backyard, and the sight produces not just emotion and language, but also abstract thinking. The child makes an observation, “Wow, that sure is a beautiful bird,” or perhaps asks a simple question such as “I wonder whether birds like that get tired when they fly.”

Level 6: Now let us imagine the child is now thirteen years old, and is old enough to engage in philosophical thinking. So when he sees the red bird, he asks an advanced question such as “I wonder how it is that birds or any other species ever started to exist,” or “Is it morally right for us humans to be putting birds in cages?”

Level 7: Now let us imagine the person is no longer a child, but is now sixty years old. He can write in depth about many advanced philosophical questions; he can feel many refined emotions; and he is quite capable of writing an entire book about birds. Moreover, he can instantly recall memories that happened five decades ago. So perhaps he remembers the day 50 years ago when he first saw a beautiful red bird in his backyard.

Now, which one of these levels can we explain by assuming brain activity? Some philosophers would deny that even Level 1 can be explained by brain activity. As rudimentary as Level 1 is, it is still an example of Mind, and some philosophers say that we cannot explain how Mind can arise from mere matter. But perhaps they are wrong, and perhaps we can explain Level 1 by assuming that it involves merely sensory perception, which parts of the brain might explain. Conceivably we also might explain Level 2 also by imagining that some kind of hormone or chemical produces a feeling of wonder or delight.

But we cannot explain Level 7 through brain processes. For we cannot explain any way in which the brain could store memories for decades; we cannot explain how brains could instantly recall distant memories; and we cannot explain how a brain could generate abstract thoughts.

Consider the storage of memories. It has been proven through the work of scientists such as Bahrick that humans can store memories fairly reliably for more than 50 years. In order for you to have a workable theory for how brains can be storing memories, a neuroscientist would need to plausibly explain how human memories could be stored in a brain for 50 years. No scientist has done any such thing.

The main theory for how the brain stores memories is the idea that our synapses store memories. But there is a reason why this theory does not work. As discussed here, synapses are subject to very strong molecular turnover and structural turnover which should prevent them from storing memories for longer than a year. The proteins in synapses have an average lifetime of only about a week.  As a scientific paper puts it, "Thus, the constituent molecules that subserve the maintenance of a memory will have completely turned over, i.e. have been broken down and resynthesized, over the course of about 1 week."

Not only do neuroscientists fail at explaining how very long-term memories can be stored in the brain; they also fail to explain human memory retrieval. The two main problems in explaining human memory retrieval are these: (1) the problem of explaining how a human being could find the exact location where a memory might be stored in the brain; (2) the problem of explaining how we are able to recall obscure and old memories with such blazing speed.

If human beings took 30 minutes to retrieve a memory, the difficulty would not be so great. We might imagine that a brain simply scans all of our memories, looking for the right one, like a person flipping through the pages of a book looking for a topic. But given the instantaneous memory recall of distant, trivial memories shown on TV shows such as Jeopardy, it is obviously not true that you read through all your memories until you find something.

How are computers able to retrieve information so quickly? Through indexing, which requires sorting. But there is zero evidence that the brain does any type of physical sort or physical indexing. The brain does not have the type of architecture to support physical sorting or indexing. So our memories cannot be indexed in the way that computer information is indexed.

In short, there is no viable explanation as to how a brain could be able to find so quickly a spot in the brain where a memory was stored. Nor does it work to claim that memories are stored everywhere in the brain. The idea that every memory is stored everywhere in the brain is nonsensical.

Although neuroscientists are very bad at explaining how a brain could store or instantly retrieve memories lasting for decades, neuroscientists are even worse at explaining how brains could possibly be generating ideas and abstract thought.

If you go to this page on the “Expert answers” site quora.com, you will be treated to some answers illustrating the utter failure of modern neuroscience on how a brain could possibly generate new ideas. The page gives some answers to the question, “How does our brain form new ideas?”

The first and top-rated answer on this "expert answers" site is given by one Phil Macquire, an individual who has no listed scientific credentials, and who has primarily answered movie questions on this site. Phil gives an answer that shows some literary skill but provides no real insight at all as to how a brain could generate ideas. He says,  "How the subconscious mind performs this incredible feat is such a mystery." 

The next answer by Tanush Jagdish begins by saying, “We don't know,” but then suggests “synaptogenesis,” the creation of new synapses. This is not a plausible idea. Some text such as “tall blue cold triangle” can instantly create an idea in your head that you have never had before, and you certainly did not have to wait for new synapses in your brain to form before you had such an idea.

The next answer by Jeff Nosanov is a circuitous answer that explains nothing, while claiming incorrectly that “ideas cannot be made to happen.” Nosanov ends by saying “that was not a physiological explanation.”  Then the page has some answers by non-scientists which are not illuminating.

A similar page on the “Ask science” sub-reddit at www.reddit.com offers equally little illumination. A Google search for “how the brain generates ideas” will result in a vast wasteland of results failing to offer a single neuroscience study offering any real illumination on this topic. One of the items you will get is a Harvard news story with the title “How the brain builds new thoughts.” But the story is discussing some research that does nothing to explain such a thing – just another one of those oh-so-dubious brain scanning studies in which some scientists scan brains and find trivial differences in blood flow (see here on why such studies are typically of little value).

Essentially the only idea that neuroscientists have to explain a brain creating ideas is some idea of combination, kind of the idea that you create a complex idea by combining simpler ideas. This does not explain the miracle of abstract thought. Let us imagine a savage who experiences 100 cold days, and who then reaches the abstract concept of coldness. This idea is not reached from any type of combination – it is reached by abstraction. Similarly, a person who sees 100 other humans may reach the abstract idea of a human being. But that idea is not reached by combination.

Computers offer not the slightest clue as to how abstract thinking can occur, because no computer has ever had a concept, an idea, or an abstract thought, something that requires a conscious mind. Don't be fooled by the type of computer program called an idea generator. Such programs are typically just programs for combining words into novel combinations. Until a human reads the output of such a program, an idea is not actually created. 

In short, there is no plausible brain explanation for how humans could be storing memories for 50 years; there is no  plausible brain explanation for how humans can instantly retrieve distant memories; and there is no plausible brain explanation for how humans can even create abstract ideas.  See here and here for additional support for these claims. It is sometimes argued that we need to postulate something like a human soul or spirit (something beyond the brain) to account for paranormal phenomena such as ESP and near-death experiences.  It may also be argued very forcibly that we need to postulate something like a human soul or spirit to account for certain types of normal mental functioning that we observe every day. 

Postscript: Just after finishing this post, I read this new scientific article, which quotes a neuroscientist speculating about memory storage. The article says:

Neuroscience has also been struggling to find where the brain stores its memories. “They may be ‘hiding’ in high-dimensional cavities,” Markram speculates. 

High-dimensional cavities? Cavities are holes, not information storage media.  I think the quote bolsters my claim that scientists do not have any plausible explanation of how brains can be storing memories for 50 years.

Post-postscript: Reporting something similar to what was reported by the physician John Lorber, a professor of neurological surgery recently made an observation about some of his patients: 

I have scores of patients who are missing large areas of their brains, yet who have quite good minds. I have a patient born with two-thirds of her brain absent. She’s a normal junior high kid who loves to play soccer. Another patient, missing a similar amount of brain tissue, is an accomplished musician with a master’s degree in English. 

Cases such as these seem incompatible with the idea that you brain is the sole source of your mind, but are quite compatible with the idea that your soul is a large source of your mental functioning. 

Biomedical Blunders Blow Billions

In the new book Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hopes, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris, we are told this: “Misleading animal studies have led to billions of dollars worth of wasted effort and dead ends in the search for drugs.” There is a rather acidic visual on the front cover of the Rigor Mortis book. We see a toe tag tied around the letter “I” in the title, like the toe tag they tie around the toes of corpses. In the “Name” slot of the toe tag, we see: “Biomedical Research.”

That visual is an exaggeration, since biomedical research isn't dead. But judging from the book, there are serious problems in the field. It seems that a very large fraction of research studies cannot be replicated. The problem was highlighted in a widely cited 2005 paper by John Ioannidis entitled, “Why Most Published Research Studies Are False.” A scientist named C. Glenn Begley and his colleagues tried to reproduce 53 published studies called “ground-breaking.” He asked the scientists who wrote the papers to help, by providing the exact materials to publish the results. Begley and his colleagues were only able to reproduce 6 of the 53 experiments.

In 2011 Bayer reported similar results. They tried to reproduce 67 medical studies, and were only able to reproduce them 25 percent of the time. On page 14 of the book by Harris, we are told that one expert estimates that 28 billion dollars a year is spent on untrustworthy papers.

Part of the problem is a culture that provides high rewards for splashy results that can be called “ground-breaking,” but which makes it rather hard for a biologist to get a paper published if the paper reports a failure to replicate a previous study. Another part of the problem is insufficient attention to methodology and precise mathematics. One expert quoted on page 172 says that in the current culture of biomedical research, it “pays to be first” but “it doesn't necessarily pay to be right.” The expert laments, “It actually pays to be sloppy and just cut corners and get there first,” noting that this is “really wrong.”

On page 96 we learn about a problem with misidentified cell lines, in which experiments are done assuming some series of cells are from one type of organism when they are actually from some other type of organism. We read:

A 2007 study estimated that between 18 and 36 percent of all cell experiments use misidentified cell lines. That adds up to tens of thousands of studies, costing billions of dollars....Sometimes, even the species isn't correct. Nelson-Rees found a “mongoose” cell line was actually human and determined that two “hamster” cell lines were from marmosets and humans, respectively. “Have the Marx Brothers taken over the cell-culture labs?” Roland Nardone asked in a 2008 paper bemoaning this state of affairs.

On page 203 of the Harris book, an expert laments that “we haven't trained a lot of our biologists to think mathematically or to understand or analyze data.” On the same page we are told that there are no standards in whole genome sequencing, that there are no standards in searching for mutations in genomes, and that in searching for mutations in genomes, “Nobody does it the same way.”

A Pro Publica article is entitled, “When Evidence Says No, But Doctors Say Yes.” Apparently there is a problem of some doctors recommending procedures that aren't backed up by evidence. Below is a quote from the article:

In a 2013 study, a dozen doctors from around the country examined all 363 articles published in The New England Journal of Medicine over a decade — 2001 through 2010 — that tested a current clinical practice, from the use of antibiotics to treat people with persistent Lyme disease symptoms (didn’t help) to the use of specialized sponges for preventing infections in patients having colorectal surgery (caused more infections). Their results, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, found 146 studies that proved or strongly suggested that a current standard practice either had no benefit at all or was inferior to the practice it replaced; 138 articles supported the efficacy of an existing practice, and the remaining 79 were deemed inconclusive.

Another huge problem in contemporary medical practice involves doctors who invest in fantastically expensive equipment, and who then give advice that may be biased by their desire to pay off the cost of such a machine (or profit from its use).

It seems that there is a huge amount of unnecessary medical treatment being done. A New Yorker article by a doctor states the following:

In just a single year, the researchers reported, twenty-five to forty-two per cent of Medicare patients received at least one of the twenty-six useless tests and treatments....The Institute of Medicine issued a report stating that waste accounted for thirty per cent of health-care spending, or some seven hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, which was more than our nation’s entire budget for K-12 education....Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.

If you are asked to take some expensive test or undergo some expensive medical procedure, the following are good questions to ask your doctor:

(1) Is the course of treatment or testing you are recommending considered a standard practice or "best practice" for patients with my set of circumstances? 

(2) If you were teaching a room full of medical students, would you recommend this exact treatment or testing for someone with my set of circumstances?

Look for a firm, confident answer of "Yes," rather than a weaker answer such as "Doctors often do this."

During earlier times, people had complete faith in words spoken by anyone wearing the black outfit of the priest. Today we have somehow been socially conditioned to regard anyone with a white coat as a totally reliable source of information. Perhaps both forms of “color confidence” involved too much uncritical trust.

Postscript:  An article in the Guardian states the following:

More than 70% of the researchers (pdf), who took part in a recent study published in Nature have tried and failed to replicate another scientist’s experiment. Another study found that at least 50% of life science research cannot be replicated. 

A Nature article states this: "Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature." This smells like scientists having too much overconfident faith in their fellow scientists.  

Book Looks at the Universe's Many Royal Flushes

The fascinating question of cosmic fine-tuning has been given a very impressive and comprehensive treatment in the recent book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos by astrophysics professor Geraint F. Lewis and astronomy postdoctoral researcher Luke A. Barnes. The book looks at the many ways in which our universe seems to have improbably “hit the jackpot” or “won the lotto,” having a series of incredibly lucky breaks that were necessary for our eventual existence. On page 29 the authors describe the thesis of a fine-tuned universe like this: “The claim is that small changes in the free parameters of the laws of nature as we know them have dramatic, uncompensated, and detrimental effects on the ability of the universe to support the complexity needed for physical life forms.” 

One case involves the existence of abundant carbon and oxygen in the universe, two elements that must exist in abundance for life to exist. Carbon and oxygen didn't exist in the early history of the universe, which was almost entirely hydrogen and helium. Carbon and oxygen were formed gradually by stars. A great deal of luck is required for any universe to be able to produce either carbon or oxygen; and for a universe to produce abundant amounts of both carbon and oxygen, some fantastically improbable strokes of luck are required. The authors note this on pages 118-119 (referring to the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom):

If we nudge the strength of the strong force upwards by just 0.4 per cent, stars produce a wealth of carbon, but the route to oxygen is cut off. While we have the central element to support carbon-based life, the result is a universe in which there will be very little water. Decreasing the strength of the strong force by a similar 0.4 per cent has the opposite effect: all carbon is rapidly transformed into oxygen, providing the universe with plenty of water, but leaving it devoid of carbon.

Protons and neutrons are made up of smaller particles called quarks. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark. On page 50 to 51 of the Fortunate Universe book, we are told some reasons why a life-bearing universe requires that these quark particles have masses not too far from the mass they have. If the down quark was about 70 times more massive or the up quark was about 130 times more massive, there would be only one element, and complex chemistry would be impossible. More sensitively, if the up quark was more than six times more massive, protons could not exist, and there would be no atoms. But later we learn of a much more sensitive requirement demanding that the quark masses be almost exactly as they are in order for the universe to be hospitable for life.

Reiterating the conclusions of this scientific paper, the book also notes on page 120 that we would not have a universe with abundant carbon and oxygen if the quark masses were different by much more than a few per cent. The book notes how improbable such a case of “hitting the distant bulls-eye” was:

And remember from last chapter that because the quarks are already “absurdly light” in the words of physicist Leonard Susskind, a range of mass that is a small percentage of their value in our Universe corresponds to a tiny fraction of their possible range. It is about one part in a million relative to the Higgs field, which gives them their mass. It is about one part in 10²³ relative to the Planck mass!

On page 75 of the book we have a diagram that is basically the same as the diagram below from an article by one of the authors. The author shows that if you make random values for the strong nuclear force and a fundamental constant called the fine structure constant, then only a very tiny fraction will allow carbon-based life. Because the graph uses a logarithmic scale, it visually exaggerates the size of the tiny white rectangle. If you were to program a computer to assign random numbers for these two (the strong nuclear force and the fine structure constant) between 0 and 1000, less than one in a million times would the numbers end up within the tiny white rectangle. 

From Barnes article here

On page 63 the book has a discussion of fine-tuning involving the Higgs mass and Higgs boson:

Life requires a value not too much different to what we observe. There must be an as yet unknown mechanism that slices off the contributions from the quantum vacuum, reducing it down to the observed value. This slicing has to be done precisely, not too much and not so little as to destabilize the rest of particles. This is a cut as fine as one part in 10¹⁶...This problem – known as the hierarchy problem – keeps particle physicists awake at night.

On page 111 of the book we are told about some ways in which the strong nuclear force is sensitive to changes:

A small decrease in the strength of the strong force by about 8 per cent would render deuterium unstable. A proton can no longer stick to a neutron, and the first nuclear reaction in stars is in danger of falling apart. An increase of 12 per cent binds the diproton – a proton can stick to another proton. This gives stars a short cut, an easy way to burn fuel. If the diproton were suddenly bound within the Sun, it would burn hydrogen at a phenomenal rate, exhausting its fuel in mere moments.

So many royal flushes

Then there is the cosmological constant problem, the case of fine-tuning discussed here. It's the issue that quantum field theory predicts that ordinary space should be very densely packed with quantum energy, making it even denser than steel. But somehow we live in a universe that has only the tiniest sliver of the vacuum density that it should have. Below is what page 162 of the book has to say about this:

Maybe there is a mechanism at work here, a mechanism that we clearly don't yet understand, which trims the energy in the quantum vacuum; so, while it is intrinsically very large, the value we observe, the value that influences the expansion of the universe, appears to be much, much smaller. But this would have to be a very precise razor, trimming off 10¹²⁰ but leaving the apparently tiny amount that we observe....But what if this mechanism for suppressing the influence of the cosmic vacuum energy was not so efficient, removing the effect of 10¹¹⁹ rather than 10¹²⁰, so there would be ten times the vacuum energy density we actually measure? Remember, such vacuum energy accelerates the expansion faster and faster, emptying out the Universe, cutting off the possibility of stars, planets, and eventually people.

Towards the end of the book, the authors discuss some common objections made to minimize the importance of such conclusions. One objection goes like this: improbable things happen all the time (for example, there was only 1 chance in a billion that you would have the 9-digit Social Security number that you have). The objection is easily dismissed on these grounds: improbable things do happen all the time, but improbable lucky things do not happen all the time. The cases of cosmic fine-tuning are not merely improbable things happening, but incredibly improbable lucky things happening; and it is not at all true that incredibly improbable lucky things happen all the time.

Another objection appeals to the existence of a multiverse: maybe there are an infinity of universes, and in such a case the odds of one of them being successful might be good. This is not a sound objection because it merely increases the number of random trials; and increasing the number of random trials does nothing to increase the chance of any one random trial succeeding. If you drive into Las Vegas and drive out with $50,000,000 in your car, that's an astonishing piece of luck; and it's no less astonishing if there are an infinity of such lucky winners scattered across an infinity of universes in which an infinity of different things happen. Adding a multiverse does not increase the odds of lucky events in any one particular universe such as ours.

In so many different ways (physics, cosmology, biology) the universe seems to scream at us in a thundering voice: “Purpose and non-randomness!” But all this falls on the deaf ears of many experts in academia who keep summarizing things by telling us, “It's all just randomness.”

Future Risks Cloud the Issue of When to Take Social Security Benefits

For Americans approaching retirement age, an important decision is when to apply to the Social Security administration to start getting Social Security retirement benefits. A person can apply as early as age 62, and as late as age 70. The longer you wait, the larger your monthly check will be. For each year that you delay benefits, your monthly check will increase by roughly 7.5 percent. So a person with modest lifetime earnings might choose between getting 1000 dollars a month at age 62, 1335 a month at age 66, or 1783 a month at age 70. If you made more money during your working years, the monthly paycheck at each age might be larger.

Some experts tell us the decision about when to take benefits is simple. They offer the simple formula: delay applying for benefits as long as you don't need the money now. If a person followed this advice, he would ask himself at age 62, “Do I need the Social Security money this year?” If the answer was negative, he would delay applying for benefits until the next year. And he would ask the same question when he was 63, 64, and so forth. He might delay filing for Social Security benefits until he was 70. Or, if he found that he needed the Social Security check at age 67, he might apply for benefits in that year.

But this “delay applying for benefits as long as you don't need the money now” is an oversimplification. The decision on when to apply for Social Security benefits is actually a very complex one. As we will see, all of the following factors are relevant to your decision:

• Whether or not you need the Social Security check during any year between age 62 and 70.
• Your current heart rate
• What age your parents died at
• Whether you have a family history of cancer or heart disease
• Whether you are a smoker or obese
• Whether you are working after the age of 62
• How much money the US government currently owes
• Whether you think medical science will invent some anti-aging treatment you can afford
• How high US budget deficits will be in the coming years
• How high is the chance that the US government will cancel Social Security or trim its benefits

One tool to help make the decision about when to take Social Security benefits is what is called a break-even analysis. There are online tools that allow you to do this. For example, this site has a tool that asks your full retirement age, your Social Security benefit at age 62, your Social Security benefit at age 66, and your Social Security benefit at age 70. You can get these from your yearly Social Security statement. The site will give you a “break-even analysis” graph like the one below. 

 

What does the graph show you in this case? It shows you that there is a “break-even age” at about age 79. Theoretically, if you expect to live longer than this age, you will get more money from the government by delaying taking your Social Security benefits, rather than taking them at age 62.

So, clearly the simple slogan “delay applying for benefits as long as you don't need the money now” is an oversimplification. A better slogan might be “delay applying for benefits if you think you will live beyond the break-even age” (although I will discuss some reasons why even that slogan is on rather wobbly ground).

How would you tell whether you should expect to live beyond the break-even age? You might go to some actuarial tables, and find the expected life expectancy for a person of your age. The table here (on the Social Security Administration web site) will give you a rough idea.

But there are other things to consider. If you are a smoker or obese, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on the table. If you have a family history of heart disease or cancer, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on the table. If one of your parents died of natural causes before the age of 80, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on the table. If your resting heart rate is above 80 beats per minute, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on a life expectancy table. But if you happen to think that some anti-aging treatment will be invented in the next two decades, and you think that you will be able to afford it, perhaps you will make a higher estimate of your life expectancy.

So matters have got quite complicated. Then there is a whole other can of worms to consider: whether the US government will in the future cancel Social Security or cut back on its benefits.

When giving financial advice on when to take Social Security benefits, almost every book and web site naively assumes that we can be confident that the US government will continue to pay benefits at the current rates, adjusted for inflation. For example, in her book How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide, Jane Bryant Quinn gives us this cheerful assurance on page 72:

But benefits won't drop....Social Security keeps millions of older people out of poverty and saves millions of adult children from having to support mom and dad. No president, no Senate, no Congress will let those voters down.

But there is little basis for being so cheerful. The House of Representatives just passed a bill (approved by the President) that plans to make drastic cuts in health care. President Trump has released a budget that proposes sharp cuts in Social Security disability insurance payments. While the latter is not a cut in Social Security retirement payments, it is so “in the vicinity” that it should raise question marks about whether the government will be trimming Social Security retirement payments in the future. We should also consider that the United States national debt continues to spiral out of control, having reached nearly 20 trillion dollars after 16 years in which it doubled. The deeper the national debt, the more likely that the US government will trim future Social Security retirement benefits.

So whenever you see one of those break-even analysis charts, it might be better to visualize the chart like this. The question marks indicate the uncertainty that future payments will be made far into the future.

There are several ways in which the government could effectively cut Social Security benefits in a roundabout, sneaky way, without directly cutting anyone's paycheck. The government might suddenly raise the retirement age. Someone delaying benefits until he reached 66 might one day find this 66 had become 67 or 68; and someone delaying benefits until he reaches 70 might one day find that this 70 had become 71 or 72.

The government might also modify tax laws so that more of Social Security benefits are taxed. This might be done on either the federal or the state level. Or the government could introduce an assets test for Social Security benefits. So if you had a house worth $200,000 or more, you might find yourself no longer eligible to receive benefits.

Still another underhanded way for the government to shrink benefits would be for the federal government to be miserly in its cost-of-living adjustments, which are supposed to make Social Security payments keep up with inflation. The government already seems to be taking that route. Below are the miserly Social Security cost-of-living adjustments for the past 7 years. 

 

Another sneaky way for the government to reduce benefits would be to privatize Social Security benefits. If your future monthly Social Security checks were replaced by some stock fund that you owned, it would be hard to tell if the second was worth much less than the first.

There is also a very important question we must ask about conventional advice about when to take Social Security benefits. The question is: is such advice based on a faulty investment principle?

When people suggest that you should delay as long as possible before applying for Social Security benefits, they seem to be assuming this type of principle: maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money. Is that a good general principle for people of all ages? It may not be. Consider a person with $20,000 in savings. That person can maximize his chance of making the most amount of money by investing his money in stock options – a risky investment with a potential for very high returns. But stock options are so risky that the standard advice is: never invest in stock options if you need the money you are investing.

“Maximize your chance of making the most amount of money” may actually be a poor principle for an older person to follow. And it seems particularly dubious to recommend following this principle to someone so that he can get some extra monetary bonanza that will gradually accrue very late in life – in your eighties or nineties. By then you may be in such poor state of health that you won't be able to enjoy your extra money as much as you would if you were younger. For example, you probably won't be using your extra money to go on some tiring vacation when you are 85 or 90.

A better financial principle may be this: minimize your chance of getting the least amount of money. A person following this principle may come to a completely different decision about when to take Social Security benefits than if he were following the principle of “maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money.”

Let us consider an imaginary scenario of a man named Joe who has just turned 62 and has $150,000 in savings. He retires at age 62, and decides to delay taking his Social Security benefits until age 70, thinking to himself: “I'll get a bigger monthly check if I wait until 70 to file for benefits.” Joe spends his $150,000 covering his expenses over the next eight years. At age 70, he has run out of money; but he applies for Social Security benefits. A few months later, something horrible and unexpected happens: the Social Security program is canceled by a heartless administration. Joe is now left with nothing. He would have avoided this problem entirely if he had taken Social Security at 62. He could have used his Social Security payments to cover his expenses, and still be left with $150,000 at age 70.

If we imagine that Joe has one adult son at age 70, but no wife (who died earlier), and we imagine that Joe dies at age 70, it is a similar situation, except that things are bad for Joe's son rather than him. Instead of getting a $150,000 inheritance, Joe's son is left with nothing.

Joe might have suffered such a disaster if he greedily followed the “young man's principle” of “maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money.” But if Joe had more sensibly followed the principle of “minimize your chance of getting the least amount of money,” he would have avoided this disaster altogether, by taking his Social Security benefits when he was 62.

When some financial adviser advises you to wait to retire until 66, what is he really saying is that it will work out well financially for you if you work until 66 and then start taking Social Security benefits at that time. But such advice is not the same as a recommendation that you should wait to take Social Security benefits until age 66 if you stop working at age 62. If you have more than $80,000 in savings, it can make more sense to start taking Social Security benefits at age 62, because you will get a monthly check earlier and also you might be able to make a lot more in capital appreciation or interest from your savings than you would if you tapped those savings to fund your retirement between the age of 62 and 66. There may also be an additional tax benefit from taking Social Security benefits at age 62 if you have a spouse who is still working. This is because the Social Security benefits are taxed less than 401K withdrawals or non-Roth IRA withdrawals.

I am not a financial adviser, so I cannot make any recommendation on when you should take Social Security benefits. I will merely note that in light of the considerations discussed here, taking Social Security at the earliest possible age (particularly if you are single or if you have decided to stop working at age 62) may be wiser than is generally acknowledged. Be aware that a person advising you to wait until 70 to apply for Social Security benefits may be operating under some principle of “maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money,” which may be a good principle for adventurous young people, but may be an unwise principle for people in retirement or approaching retirement. The quite different principle of “minimize your chance of getting the least amount of money” may lead to a completely different decision on this matter.

Nerdy Postscript: Please ignore this postscript if you never use spreadsheets for personal finance decisions.

There is a way for you to make your own break-even analysis, one that may be more accurate than one done on an online calculator. You can set up a spreadsheet like the one shown below. This allows you to fine-tune the inputs (which in this case are the columns on the left). The simplest way to do the spreadsheet is to just type in the second column the numbers your Social Security statement has given you for how much you will get if you retire at 62, to type in the third column the number your Social Security statement has given you for how much you will get if you retire at 66, and to type in the fourth column the number your Social Security statement has given you for how much you will get if you retire at 70. You can use the Sum() function to create the columns on the right, which provide cumulative totals for the annual benefits listed on the left. 

 

The advantage of creating such a spreadsheet is that you can fine-tune the calculations, making them more realistic for your specific case. For example, in the top left corner you might create a formula which takes into account the fact that if you retire at 62 you may be earning additional income on money you have already saved, interest you would not be earning if you started taking Social Security benefits at age 66.

In your spreadsheet you can then create a graph of the last three columns. The graph will look like one of the break-even charts shown above. But it may give you a more realistic calculation, because you have fine-tuned the inputs.

Below is a spreadsheet graph created from the three columns at right. It graphs cumulative money received under three options: taking Social Security at age 62 (red), taking Social Security at age 66 (yellow), and taking Social Security benefits at age 70 (green), varying over a 28-year time span from age 62 to age 90, with the break-even age occurring at about age 81. This spreadsheet assumes the case of someone not working after age 62. 

 

If you print out such a graph, it would be a good idea to pencil in a bunch of question marks in the upper right corner of the graph. That will remind you that the longer you go into the future, the more doubtful are predictions about money you will receive from Social Security, because of the very substantial chance that benefits will be reduced in the future.