Memory Engram Theorists Vacillate All Over the Map

In a February post entitled "Turmoil of the Baffled Engram Theorists," I discussed a Science News article that showed the theoretical disarray of engram theorists, scientists who speculate about a physical brain basis for human memories. Three scientific papers in recent years suggest that claims that human memories are stored in brains do not have a solid theoretical basis well-substantiated by experiments.

One paper was entitled “The mysteries of remote memory,” and was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Speaking of long-lasting memories, the authors told us that “our current knowledge of how such memories are stored in the brain and retrieved, as well as the dynamics of the circuits involved, remains scarce.” Using the term “engrams” to mean the hypothesis that there are cells in the brain that store memories, the authors state “what and where engrams are implicated in remote memory storage and how they change over time have received little experimental attention thus far.” The authors also frankly tell us that “From engrams to spines surprisingly little evidence exists in the literature on the grounds of remote information processing, maintenance and storage to account for the lifelong and persistent nature of the mnemonic signal.” This type of candor is a refreshing contrast from the click-bait hype about memory research that we get in the science news, where dubious studies using insufficient experimental groups are often trumpeted as scientific breakthroughs.

One of the ideas about a brain storage of memory is that memories get stored in dendritic spines, little bumps on dendrites. But this study found that dendritic spines in the hippocampus last for only about 30 days. And this study found that dendritic spines in the cortex of mice brains have a half-life of only 120 days. So such dendritic spines don't last enough to store memories that last for years. The “Mysteries of remote memory” paper mentions a study that found that studied the persistence of dendritic spines, and found a “near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern within 15 days post-learning.” The paper says “these incongruent findings point to the need for an alternative explanation to spine dynamics for remote memory stability.” In other words, we can't explain dendritic spines as some physical basis for long-term memory. Referring to the often stated speculations that memories start out in the hippocampus and are transferred to the cortex, the paper states “unequivocal experimental evidence in support of it is lacking.” The paper then spends some time talking about the very speculative possibility that DNA methylation has something to do with long-term memory, an idea for which there is no evidence. 

The overall impression we get from reading such a paper is one of uncertainty and disarray, as if no clear idea was emerging from brain studies on the long-term storage of memory. We get such an impression even more strongly from two other papers on this topic published in recent years. One is the 2016 paper “What Is Memory? The Present State of the Engram.” Very oddly for a scientific paper, the paper consists of ten sections, each written by a different author or authors. We get conflicting theories as to how a brain might store memories, with little agreement between the sections.

The 2017 paper here is entitled, "On the research of time past: the hunt for the substrate of memory." It is a portrait of memory theorists in disarray, presenting no one theory about how memory might be stored in a brain, and instead suggesting seven or more possibilities, none of which is plausible. The paper is all over the map in its speculations, like someone shooting a gun in all different directions.

The paper tells us on its sixth page that “Engram-labeling studies have shown that certain populations of neurons encode specific memories in mice.” This is not correct. The studies in question are typically small-sample studies with very low statistical power, in which there is a high chance of false alarms. In a typical such study, an experimenter will zap some small portion of a mouse's brain, and claim that he has elicited a fear memory stored in that part, producing a freezing effect in the mouse. But such freezing effects (which require subjective judgments) mean little, since it is known that there are many parts of a mouse's brain that can be stimulated to produce a freezing effect in a mouse.

The paper tells us on page 9 that “synaptic weight changes can now be excluded as a means of information storage.” But for many years neuroscientists have been pushing the very dubious dogma that memories are stored by changes in synaptic weights. As discussed here, this idea never made any sense, for there has never been a proven case of any information that was ever stored as changes in the weights of something, and also synapses are too volatile to store memories that last for decades, for reasons discussed later in this post. 

The authors then proceed to discuss a wide variety of possibilities for how memory might be stored in a brain.  These include the following (the quotes below in italics are from the paper):

Theory 1: “The particularly longlived proteins associated with DNA (i.e., nucleoporins and histones).” This is not a good option because a scientific paper tells us that the half-life of histones in the brain is only about 223 days, meaning that every 223 days half of the histone molecules will be replaced. So histones are not suitable for storing memories lasting decades.

Theory 2: “Some have suggested that DNA (or the epigenetic modifications on it) is the most suitable candidate for memory, being the cellular storage mechanism for other (lifelong) information.” For why this speculation is untenable, see the section entitled “Why Very Long-Term Memories Cannot Be Stored in the Cell Nucleus” in this post. Human DNA molecules have been exhaustively analyzed by multi-year projects such as the Human Genome Project and the ENCODE project, and no evidence has been found of human memories stored in DNA. See the "Why Long-Term Memories Cannot Be Stored in the DNA Methylome" section of this post for why DNA methylation is also an unsuitable possibility for memory storage. If DNA molecules stored memories, we would find that the DNA molecules in the brain of a dead person would vary a lot, with one DNA molecule in the brain being very different from another. Instead, all DNA molecules in the brain are basically the same, and are the same as DNA molecules in other parts of the body. 

Theory 3: “The late Roger Tsien recently proposed the notion that perineuronal nets, the extracellular matrices around neurons and synapses, provide the architecture for information.” Wikipedia tells us that these perineuronal nets are “composed of chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans,” but this paper tells us that the half-life of such molecules is only 10 days, making them unsuitable for a storage of memories lasting a lifetime. The idea behind this perneuronal nets speculation is that memory may be stored in a pattern of holes, like punch cards. The idea is absurd. IBM punchcards worked back in the 1960's because they worked with a punchcard reader which shined light through the punch cards. The brain has nothing like a punchcard reader to read information if it had information stored in such a way, and such a system only works with flat two-dimensional surfaces, not three-dimensional surfaces like that in the brain. There are two research papers that claim to have a result suggesting that perineuronal nets may be important in memory, but both do nothing to establish such a claim, because they both used fewer than 10 animals in some of their study groups (for a moderately reliable research result, 15 is the minimum number of animals per study group).

Theory 4: “Structures composed of short-lived components could constitute a long-term memory if the configurations were preserved by normal homeostatic replenishment.” To the contrary, there is certainly no “normal” bodily mechanism that might allow “structures composed of short-lived components” to store memories for decades.

Theory 5: “Other theories involve information storage or processing in microtubules, the long polarized helices of tubulin subunits that compose the cellular skeleton.” There is no evidence for such theories, and there is a good reason for rejecting them: the fact that there is high molecular turnover in microtubules. This paper tells us, “Neurons possess more stable microtubules compared to other cell types...These stable microtubules have half-lives of several hours and co-exist with dynamic microtubules with half-lives of several minutes.” So microtubules in the brain last less than a week, and are not any place that memories lasting decades could be stored.

Theory 6: “The physical connectivity within neural ensembles is a plausible new candidate substrate for memory information storage, with many merits, including robustness to insult, bioenergetic efficiency, stability of information storage in a potentially binary format, and a high capacity for informational content.” This is a completely different idea from all the previous things discussed, and the paper does not discuss it truthfully. Far from being a "plausible" idea having “many merits,” the idea has no merits. No one has any plausible idea as to how mere “physical connectivity” could be storing the complex things human remember. The paper refers us to the previously mentioned “What Is Memory? The Present State of the Engram” paper, but the sketch of the idea given in that paper does not present the idea in a coherent manner. We see a diagram showing what looks like a necklace of green beads as a representation of how "physical connectivity" could supposedly store information.  That's not a way to store complex information like humans learn. If there is “stability of information storage” in the connections between neurons, it is not the type of stability that would allow memories to be stored for years, let alone decades. The proteins in synapses have an average half-life of less than a week, and synapses themselves have a lifetime of less than a year. The research of Stettler suggests that synaptic connections do not last longer than about three months. In a paper he stated the following, referring to remodeling which would break any "connectivity pattern":

Depending on whether the population of boutons is homogeneous or not, the amount of bouton turnover (7% per week) has different implications for the stability of the synaptic connection network. If all boutons have the same replacement probability per unit time, synaptic connectivity would become largely remodeled after about 14 weeks.

A very important recent scientific paper is the paper “Synaptic Tenacity or Lack Thereof: Spontaneous Remodeling of Synapses.” The paper used the term “synaptic tenacity” for the idea that synapses (brain connections) are relatively stable. Making a devastating case against such a claim, the paper stated the following:

The aim of this Opinion is to discuss challenges to the notion of synaptic tenacity that come from general biological considerations and experimental findings. Such findings collectively suggest that synaptic tenacity is inherently limited, since synapses do change spontaneously and to a fairly large extent....It is probably unrealistic to expect that synapses maintain their particular contents and, by extension, their functional properties with pinpoint precision. This expectation is further challenged by the fact that synapses are not rigid structures but rather are dynamic assemblies of molecules (and organelles) that continuously migrate into, out of, and between neighboring assemblies through lateral diffusion, active trafficking, endocytosis, and exocytosis....Closer examination reveals, however, that properties of individual synapses, such as spine volume, presynaptic bouton volume, synaptic vesicle number, active zone (AZ) molecule content, and PSD protein content fluctuate considerably over these timescales....Imaging studies in primary culture indicate that synaptic configurations erode significantly over timescales of a few days....The findings summarized above indicate that synaptic tenacity is inherently limited or, using the terminology of Rumpel, Loewenstein, and others, that synapses are intrinsically ‘volatile’....When it comes to cognitive functions, long-term memory is one area where the notion of synaptic volatility raises perhaps some of the most challenging questions. In light of findings discussed in this Opinion article, and possibly others, age-old notions concerning relationships between histories of ‘elementary brain-processes’, connection strengths, and memory traces might need to be revisited; put differently (to paraphrase James, modern science might need to improve on this explanation.

The evidence presented by this “Spontaneous Remodeling of Synapses” paper is devastating evidence against the predominant theory of the brain storage of memories (that memories are stored by changes in synapse strength), and also Theory 6 mentioned above, that memories are stored by some “connectivity pattern” created by synaptic connections. Neither theory can be true if synapses have the kind of volatility described in the paper.

In a 2010 book two neuroscientists state that they are “profoundly skeptical” about the main theory of a physical storage of memory, but suggest that they have nothing like a substitute theory to offer:

We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer.

I submit that the reason for such hesitancy is that there is no theory of a physical storage of memory that can stand up to careful scrutiny, no theory that can explain both memories that can form instantly and the fact that we can instantly retrieve memories of things learned or experienced long ago. Deprived of any credible neural explanation, we should conclude that human episodic and conceptual memory must be a spiritual or psychic or soul phenomenon, not a neural phenomenon.

One of the many reasons for rejecting claims that memories are stored in brains discussed at this site is the essentially instantaneous speed at which humans are able to remember very rarely recalled pieces of information. You say to me, “Dizzy Dean,” and I may in less than two seconds start saying, “eccentric St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, in the 1930's,” even though I haven't thought or read about Dizzy Dean in decades. How could a brain achieve this effect through reading just the right little spot where the information was stored, which would be like instantly finding a needle in a mountain-sized haystack, given a million little spots in the brain where a memory might be stored?

One major reason why it seems hard to believe that the brain could achieve instant recall is that neurons are slow. Information is passed around in a brain at the slow speed of about 100 meters per second, which is only the tiniest fraction of the speed at which electrical signals move about in a computer. Based on this fact we should consider a brain absolutely incapable of performing memory recall as quickly as humans do.

It is often claimed that the brain “makes up” for its slow speed of nerve transmission by being “massively parallel.” The claim that the brain is massively parallel is false. In the computer world, a computer system is massively parallel if it consists of multiple CPUs or central processing units, each of which is running a computer program. We know of nothing in the brain that acts like a computer CPU, nor do we know of anything like a program that the brain runs to compute. It is false to claim that each neuron is like its own CPU. Neurons do not run any program like a computer CPU does. So we cannot at all overcome the problem of low signal transmission speeds in the brain by claiming that the brain is “massively parallel.” It is true that the brain consists of many neurons working together, but that does not make the brain massively parallel. My television set has many transistors working together, but my television set is not massively parallel; and my arms have many cells working together, but that does not make my arms massively parallel. The brain does does not consist of multiple programs running together on multiple processors, and we don't even know of a single program running anywhere in the brain.

Let us imagine some weird group of conspiracy theorists who maintain that secret information from the World War II era is stored in the leaves lying about in modern Germany. If the theorists were to maintain that such information is written on individual leaves, you could easily show the absurdity of the theory by pointing out that leaves don't last much longer than a year. If the theorists were to maintain instead that it was the arrangements of the leaves that stored the information, with one type of leaf pile representing one thing and another type of leaf pile representing something else, you could also show the error of the theory by pointing out that leaf piles are unstable and ever-changing, being blown around by the wind. Similarly, the protein turnover, synaptic volatility and synaptic remodeling discussed in the "synaptic remodeling" paper above are constraining effects as powerful as the short lifetimes of leaves and the instability and impermanence of leaf piles. Anyone claiming that memories persist in synapses for 50 years is advancing a claim as unbelievable as the 50-year "leaf storage" claims of such conspiracy theorists. 

“Nobel's Razor” as a Rule of Thumb for Judging Science Claims

There are quite a few problems involving scientific research.  One problem is what is called medical ghost-writing, in which pharmaceutical companies will hire people to write up a study, and then recruit doctors to sign their names to the study, even if the doctors had little or no involvement in the study.  A wikipedia.org article on the topic says, "A 2009 New York Times article estimated that 11% of New England Journal of Medicine articles, 8% of JAMA, Lancet and PLoS Medicine articles, 5% of Annals of Internal Medicine articles and 2% of Nature Medicine were ghost written." 

Another problem is that press releases issued by universities, colleges, and various other institutions are frequently announcing scientific research in ways that include exaggerations, unwarranted claims or outright falsehoods. A scientific paper reached the following conclusions, indicating a huge hype and exaggeration crisis both among the authors of scientific papers and the media that reports on such papers:

Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study.

Another huge problem involves what is called the Replication Crisis. This is the fact that a very large fraction of scientific research results are never replicated. The problem was highlighted in a widely cited 2005 paper by John Ioannidis entitled, “Why Most Published Research Studies Are False.” 

Although physics is often regarded as a more “hard” and reliable form of science, there is still tons of wobbly speculation in the world of cosmology and theoretical physics. An example was the recent paper by three cosmologists claiming to have found evidence of something called “Hawking points” in the cosmic background radiation, which they interpreted as supporting their cyclical theory of the universe that almost no one else but them believes in. A cosmologist studying the cosmic background radiation for the faintest traces of something he wants to believe in may be compared to someone who checks his toast with a magnifying glass every day, and eventually reports something that he thinks looks a little like the face of Jesus. 

What rule can you use to distinguish between solid well-established science on the one hand and hype and speculation on the other hand? Can we simply use the rule of “trust something if you read it one of the top science publications like Science or Nature or Scientific American, but maybe be skeptical if you read about it in a publication or web site of lesser stature?” No, this principle does not at all work. Nowadays the most respected science publications often contain quite a few misleading headlines proclaiming as discoveries dubious research results that do not at all qualify as discoveries. For example, in the leading science journals, we very often find neuroscience experiments done with too few test animals, such as only 7 (15 test animals per study group is the minimum for a moderately reliable result). 

It is also not at all true that you can rely on the truth of a science headline that you read in the New York Times, since the writers at this publication almost never show signs of critically scrutinizing dubious claims by scientists and university press releases. Nor is it true that you can count on a research result that is directly stated in the title of a scientific paper. Scientists frequently give their papers dubious titles announcing results they have not proven. Nor is it true that you can count on a result announced by a distinguished college or university such as MIT. Nowadays the press offices of colleges and universities are notorious for the dubious hype of their press releases, and this problem is not at all confined to less prestigious academic institutions. In this post and in the series of posts I have labeled “overblown hype” you will find many examples to back up the claims I have made in this paragraph.

Can we perhaps distinguish between solid science and unproven speculation by following the principle “trust in things that most scientists believe”? No, because of some of the reasons discussed in this post and this post. Unfortunately, communities of experts can become ideological enclaves, and in such enclaves it is all too easy for a majority to reach an opinion that is not well established, once that opinion becomes “all the rage” in that community.

There is actually no reliable process in place for determining what doctrines are believed in by a majority of scientists. It is quite unreliable to try to gauge the opinion of scientists by analyzing scientific papers, because a scientific paper may repeat standard shibboleths to increase its chance of getting published, and it's hard to tell how much the authors believe in such customary utterances. An opinion poll of scientists is a more reliable way of measuring their opinions. But most such polls suffer from defects, such as offering too little choice, and not offering an option of “I don't know” or “I'm uncertain about this.” Some opinion polls of scientists also require them to publicly assert their opinions to their superiors, which is not a reliable way of measuring private opinion.

The most reliable way to measure opinions on a topic is a secret ballot. But there is no process in place for measuring the opinions of scientists through a secret ballot. Furthermore, common opinions regarding a consensus of scientists are based entirely on impressions got from US and European scientists. A true global measure of scientific opinion (including all the scientists in India and China) might have many surprises. In light of all these difficulties, it is not a particularly reliable or useful guideline to try to distinguish between strong science and less reliable science claims by using common opinions about which things most scientists believe in or don't believe in.

But I can think of one simple “rule of thumb” principle that is pretty good for distinguishing between solid topnotch science on the one hand and weaker claims on the other hand. The principle is what I call “Nobel's Razor.” This is simply the principle: if some science claim has won a Nobel Prize, regard it as topnotch “Grade A” science, but if no one has ever won a Nobel Prize for establishing the claim, regard it as something less than topnotch, well-established science.

The Nobel Prize committees award annual prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine and physiology. Over the years, the Nobel Prize committees have been extremely good about awarding prizes only to very solid scientific results (with a handful of exceptions). The Nobel Prize committees “wait for the dust to settle,” almost always avoiding giving a prize to any research result until its solidity has been established over a period of several years. For example, Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic background radiation in the mid-1960's, but had to wait until 1978 before getting their richly deserved Nobel Prize in Physics.

There are some interesting examples of things that are claimed to be examples of established science, but which have never won any Nobel prizes. One such example is that no one has ever won a Nobel prize for any work establishing Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, nor any work helping to establish Neo-Darwinism. This is a great embarrassment to Darwin enthusiasts. It is true that Darwin died before the Nobel prizes were established. But we may ask: if Darwinism is really a topnotch scientific result, why has there been no Nobel Prize for any type of research work done to establish such a theory?

Other interesting examples of widely-repeated claims by scientists that have no Nobel prizes in their favor are the opinion that the human mind is a product of the brain, and the opinion that human memories are stored in our brains. No one has ever won a Nobel prize for research helping to establish such ideas. The link here shows the scientists who won the Nobel prize in medicine and physiology, and what research they did to win the prize. None of the prizes are for work involving memory, consciousness, or the relationship of the brain and the mind.

You can see here a list of all people who have won Nobel prizes in physics. No one has ever won for any research on dark matter, dark energy, the multiverse, or the “cosmic inflation” claim that the universe underwent an instant of exponential expansion (not to be confused with the more general theory of the Big Bang).

Do all these omissions mean that this “Nobel's Razor” principle is not a good way of distinguishing between topnotch well-proven science on the one hand and lesser claims that are not very well proven? No, such omissions help to establish the solidity of such a “Nobel's Razor” rule-of-thumb, and to help show that the Nobel committees have been excellent about only giving awards to results that are well established by observations or experiments. When people press you to believe in some science claim that is not topnotch science demonstrated by observations or experiments,  you can ask such persons, "Why should I believe in that when no one ever won a Nobel Prize for establishing it?" Such a question will not be an effective reply to assertions about global warming, seeing that the IPCC committee was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. 

Postscript: Despite it being a good "rule of thumb" to trust science that got a Nobel Prize, in some cases the Nobel Prize committee awards science Nobel Prizes it should not have awarded. A notable case (the case of Christian Anfinsen) is discussed in my post here, which notes misstatements in one year's press release for a Nobel Prize. 

More Poor Answers at the "Ask Philosophers" Site

The “Ask Philosophers” website (www.askphilosophers.org) is a site that consists of questions submitted by the public, with answers given by philosophers. No doubt there is much wisdom to be found at this site, although I found quite a few answers that were poor or illogical – such as the ones listed in my previous post. Below are some more examples.

Question 464 is an excellent and concise question: “Is it more probable that a universe that looks designed is created by a designer than by random natural forces?” In reply to this question, Stanford philosopher Mark Crimmins gives a long answer that is poor indeed. He tries to argue that it is hard to exactly calculate just precisely how improbable it might be that a universe was designed, no matter what characteristics it had. Using the term “designy-ness” to apparently mean “resembling something designed,” Crimmins then states, “the mere 'designy-ness' of our universe is not by itself a good reason for confidence that it was designed.”

This doesn't make sense. If we find ourselves in a garden that appears to be designed, with 50 neat, even rows of flowers, that certainly is a good reason for confidence that the garden was designed. If we find ourselves in a structure that appears to be designed, with nice even walls, nice even floors and a nice convenient roof, that certainly is a good reason for confidence that such a structure was designed. And if we find ourselves against enormous odds in a universe with many laws favoring our existence, and with many fundamental constants that have just the right values allowing us to exist, this “designy-ness" would seem to be a good reason for confidence that such a universe was designed. If you wish to escape such a conclusion, your only hope would be to somehow specify some plausible theory as to how a universe might accidentally have such favorable characteristics by chance or by natural factors. It is illogical to argue, as Crimmins has, that the appearance of design in a universe is no basis for confidence that it is designed.  I may note that confidence (which may be defined as thinking something is likely true) has lower evidence requirements than certainty. 

As for his “it's too hard to make an exact calculation of the probability” type of reasoning, anyone can defeat that by giving some simple examples. If I come to your backyard, and see a house of cards on the back porch, I can have great confidence that such a thing is the product of design rather than chance, even though I cannot calculate precisely how unlikely it might be that someone might throw a deck of cards into the air, and for a house of cards to then appear. And if I see a log cabin house in the woods, I can have very great confidence that such a thing is a product of design, even though I cannot exactly calculate how improbable it might be that falling trees in the woods would randomly form into a log cabin.

In question 24743, someone asks the question, “How can a certain bunch of atoms be more self aware than another bunch?” The question is a very good one. We can imagine a shoe box that has exactly the same element abundances of the human brain, with the same number of grams of carbon, the same number of grams of oxygen, and so forth. How could a human brain with the same abundances of elements produce consciousness, when the atoms in the shoe box do not? We can't plausibly answer the question by saying that there is some particular arrangement of the atoms that produces self-awareness.

Let us imagine some machine that rearranges every 10 minutes the element abundances in the human brain, producing a different combination of positions for these atoms every ten minutes. It seems to make no sense to think that the machine might run for a million years and not produce any self-awareness, and that suddenly some particular combination of these atoms would suddenly produce self-awareness.

The answer to this question given by philosopher Stephen Maitzen is a poor one. He merely says, “There's good evidence that the answer has to do with whether a given bunch of atoms composes a being that possesses a complex network of neurons.” There is no such evidence. No one has the slightest idea of how neurons or a network of neurons could produce self-awareness. If you try to suggest that somehow the fact of all of the atoms being connected produces self-awareness, we can point out that according to such reasoning the connected atoms in a crystal lattice should be self-aware, or the densely packed and connected vines in the Amazon forest should be self-aware.

A good answer to question 24743 is to say that there is no obvious reason why one set of atoms in a brain would be more self-aware than any other set of atoms with the same abundances of elements, and that such a thing is one of many reasons for thinking that our self-awareness does not come from our brains, but from some deeper reality, probably a spiritual reality.

In question 4922, someone asks about the anthropic principle, asking whether it is a tautology, or “is there something more substantive behind it.” The anthropic principle (sometimes defined as the principle that the universe must have characteristics that allow observers to exist in it) is a principle that was evoked after scientists discovered more and more cases of cosmic fine-tuning, cases in which our universe has immensely improbable characteristics necessary for living beings to exist in it. You can find many examples of these cases of cosmic fine-tuning by doing a Google search using either the phrase “anthropic principle” or “cosmic fine-tuning,” or reading this post or this post.

The answer given to question 4922 by philosopher Nicholas D. Smith is a poor one. Smith says the anthropic principle “strikes me as neither a tautology nor as something that has anything 'more substantive behind it.' " Whether we can derive any principle like the anthropic principle from the many cases of cosmic fine-tuning is debatable, but clearly there is something enormously substantive that has triggered discussions of the anthropic principle. That something is the fact of cosmic fine-tuning. If our universe has many cases of having just the right characteristics, characteristics fantastically unlikely for a random universe to have, that philosophically is a very big deal, and one of the most important things scientists have ever discovered – not something that can be dismissed as lacking in substance.

Against all odds, our universe got many "royal flushes"

In question 40, someone asks a classic philosophical question: “Why does anything exist?” The questioner says, “Wouldn't it be more believable if nothing existed?” The answer to this question given by philosopher Jay L. Garfield is a poor one. After suggesting that the questioner read a book by Wittgenstein (the last thing anyone should do for insight on such a matter), Garfield merely suggests that the question “might not really be a real question at all.” That's hardly a decent answer to such a question.

An intelligent response to the question of “why is there something rather than nothing” would be one that acknowledged why the question is an extremely natural one and a very substantive question indeed. It is indeed baffling why anything exists. Imagining a counter-factual, we can imagine a universe with no matter, no energy, no minds, and no God. In fact, such a state of existence would be the simplest possible state of existence. And we are tempted to regard such a simplest-possible state of existence as being the most plausible state of existence imaginable, for if there were eternal nothingness there would be zero problems of explaining why reality is the way it is. We can kind of get a hint as to a possible solution to the problem of existence, that it might be solved by supposing an ultimate reality the existence of which was necessary rather than contingent. But with our limited minds, we probably cannot figure out a full and final answer as to why there is something rather than nothing. We have strong reason to suspect, however, that if you fully understood why there is something rather than nothing, you would have the answer to many other age-old questions.

In question 3363, a person very intelligently states the following:

When I think about the organic lump of brain in my head understanding the universe, or anything at all, it seems absurdly unlikely. That lump of tissue seems to me more like a pancreas than a super-computer, and I have a hard time understanding how organic tissue is able to reach conclusions about the universe or existence.

We get an answer from philosopher Allen Stairs, but only a poor one. Stairs claims, “Neuroscientists will be able to tell you in a good deal of detail why the brain is better suited to computing than the pancreas is.” This statement implies that neuroscientists have some idea of how it is than a brain can think or create ideas or generate understanding of abstract concepts. They have no such thing. As discussed here, no neuroscientist has ever given a remotely persuasive explanation as to how a brain could understand anything or generate an idea or engage in abstract reasoning. A good answer to question 3363 would have commended the person raising the question, saying that he has raised a very good point that has still not been answered, and has at least brought attention to an important shortcoming of modern neuroscience. Philosophically the point raised by question 3363 is a very important one. The lack of any coherent understanding as to how neurons could produce mental phenomena such as consciousness, understanding and ideas is one of the major reasons for rejecting the idea that the mind is purely or mainly the product of the brain. Many other reasons are discussed at this site.

In question 4165 a person raises the topic of near-death experiences, and asks whether philosophy has an opinion on this type of experience. The answer we get from Allen Stairs is a poor one. He attempts to argue that “it's not clear that it would do much to support the idea that the mind is separate from the body,” even if someone reported floating out of his body and seeing some information that was taped to the top of a tall object, information he should have been unable to see from an operating table. This opinion makes no sense. Such evidence would indeed do much to support the idea that the mind is separate from the body. This type of evidence has already been gathered; see here for some dramatic cases similar to what the questioner discussed (verified information that someone acquired during a near-death experience, even though it should have been impossible for him to have acquired such information through normal sensory experience). 

Stairs states the following to try and support his strange claim that people repeatedly reporting floating out of their bodies does not support the idea that the mind is separate from the brain:

How would that work? Does the bodiless mind have eyes? How did the interaction between whatever was up there on top of that tall object and the disembodied mind work? How did the information get stored? How did the mind reconnect with the patient's brain? The point isn't that the mind must be embodied. The point is that a case like this would only amount to good evidence for minds separate from bodies if that idea gave us a good explanation for the case. As it stands, it's not clear that it gives us much of an explanation at all, let the best one.

Stairs seems to be appealing here to a kind of principle that something isn't an explanation if it raises unanswered questions. That is not a sound principle at all, and in general in the history of science we find that important explanations usually raise many unanswered questions. For example, if we were to explain the rotation speeds of stars around the center of the galaxy by the explanation of dark matter, as many astrophysicists like to do, that raises quite a few unanswered questions, such as what type of particle dark matter is made up of, and how dark matter interacts with ordinary matter.

As for Stair's insinuation that postulating a mind or soul separate from the body is “not much of an explanation at all,” that's not at all true. By postulating such a thing, it would seem that we can explain many things all at once. By postulating a soul as a repository of our memories, we can explain why people are able to remember things for 50 years, despite the very rapid protein turnover in synapses which should prevent brains from storing memories for longer than a few weeks. By postulating a soul as a repository of our memories, we can explain why humans are able to instantly recall old and obscure memories, something that cannot be plausibly explained with the idea that memories are stored in brains (which creates a most severe “how could a brain instantly find a needle in a haystack” problem discussed here). By postulating a soul as the source of our intelligence, we can explain the fact (discussed here) that epileptic children who have hemispherectomy operations (the surgical removal of half of their brains) suffer only slight decreases in IQ, or none at all. By postulating a soul, we can explain how humans score at a 32 percent accuracy on ganzfeld ESP tests in which the expected chance result is only 25 percent (ESP being quite compatible with the idea of a soul).  And by postulating a soul apart from our body, we can explain why so many people have near-death experiences in which they report their consciousness moving out of their bodies. So far from being “not much of an explanation at all” as Stairs suggests, by postulating a soul separate from the body, it would seem that we can explain quite a few things in one fell swoop.

Some Poor Answers at the “Ask Philosophers" Site

The “Ask Philosophers” website (www.askphilosophers.org) is a site that consists of questions submitted by the public, with answers given by philosophers. No doubt there is much wisdom to be found at this site, although I found some answers that were poor or illogical. Below are some examples.

In Question 27225 someone asks the excellent question “if Order and Reason are a part of Nature” or if “this is simply how humans view things and try to make sense of things.”

Philosopher Peter S. Fosl answers this question by saying this:

For myself, I think the traditions of philosophical skepticism have raised serious doubts about whether or not this question can be finally answered. It seems, given the apparent lessons of those traditions, that it wisest to suspend judgment on the question but nevertheless to keep inquiring and to remain open to the chance that we might figure it out.

Given what we know about the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and the laws of nature, this answer is a poor one. We live in a universe with astonishing order and fine-tuning. To give one example of many, each proton in the universe has the same mass, a particular mass 1836 times greater than the mass of each electron. Despite this mass difference, the absolute value of the electrical charge of each proton is precisely the same (to more than fifteen  decimal places) as the absolute value of the electrical charge of each electron. Were it not for this “coincidence,” which we would not expect in even 1 in a trillion random universes, life could not exist in our universe, for (as discussed by the astronomer Greenstein) the electromagnetic repulsion between particles would be so great that planets would not be able to hold together. As we live in a universe that has many such “coincidences” necessary for our existence, the wise way to answer question 27225 is to say that order and reason seem to be abundantly manifest in our universe.

Galaxy NGC 1398 (Credit: NASA)

In question 3435 someone asks the following:

I really don't understand what the big deal is with the apparent 'fine tuning' of the constants of the universe, or even if 'fine tuning' is even apparent! The conditions have to be just right for life to emerge, sure, but so what? Conditions have to be just right for many things in the universe to occur, but we don't always suspect an outside agent as responsible.

This answer is given by philosopher Jonathan Westphal:

Suppose human life is extremely improbable. What does that show? Alas, again the answer is, absolutely nothing at all. The improbable sometimes happens, although, of course, not very often! We should thank heaven that it did!

This answer is a poor one. We use probability all the time to reach conclusions about what happened and who was responsible for it. The more improbable something is, the more justified we may be in judging that something more than mere chance was involved. You do not justify ignoring an appearance of intention or design by evoking a principle that “the improbable sometimes happens.” Such a point is easily dismissed by pointing out that something that serves a favorable functional purpose virtually never happens by chance.

If human life appeared despite enormous odds against it (such as the odds of throwing a pack of cards into the air and it forming by chance into a house of cards), that would seem to be an extremely important clue to the nature of reality, and not at all something that should be dismissed as something that means “absolutely nothing at all.” If you were walking in the woods, and saw a garden with 40 long neat rows of flowers, with an equal space between each row, you would be absolutely justified in assuming that some design and purpose led to this arrangement; and you would chuckle at the very bad judgment of anyone who claimed the arrangement had occurred by chance, on the grounds that “the improbable sometimes happens.”

In Question 221, a person asks the following:

I heard about the analogy of a computer and the mind, but I'm fuzzy about the connection. Please help!

We then get an answer from Peter Lipton that includes the following:

What makes the analogy attractive is the thought that mental states might also be functional states. Thus the same kind of thought might be 'run' on or 'realized' in different physical states on different occasions, just as the same program might be run on different types of computer hardware. One attraction of this idea is that it seems to capture the intuition that mental states are not simply identifiable with lumps of matter, while avoiding any suggestion that they are spooky non-physical stuff.

This answer is a poor one. It seems to encourage the very erroneous idea that the mind is like a computer by arguing that software (a computer program) is somehow like thought. A thought is vastly different from software. Rather than trying to argue for the mind being like a computer, the answer should have stressed that the two are drastically different. A computer is a physical thing, but a mind is a non-physical thing. A mind has life experiences, thoughts, feelings, and ideas, none of which a computer has. So it makes no sense to say the mind is like a computer. It is not like any computer that we know of. Also, Lipton erroneously suggests we should avoid thinking of mental states as non-physical, which makes no sense, because mental states are non-physical.

Question 317 is this question:

How do thoughts exist in our brains? How are they stored? Is this a chemical or electrical process?

The answer provided by Louise Antony is a poor one. She states, “The most plausible proposal about what kinds of states these might be is, in my view, the view that says that thoughts are actually sentences in a 'language of thought', expressed by means of some kind of neurological code, on analogy with the 'machine language' employed by computers at the most basic level.” This idea is not plausible at all, and there is no evidence for it. Antony gives no neuroscience facts to support it.

The idea that our thoughts could be stored using some neurological code involves a host of problems. One problem (discussed at length here) is that there is no place in the brain that could serve as a plausible site where memories could be stored for decades. The leading theory of memory storage in the brain is that memories are stored in synapses. But that theory is completely implausible, for we know that the proteins that make up synapses have average lifetimes of less than two weeks. Another problem (discussed here) is that we can imagine no plausible scheme by which our thoughts could ever be translated into information that could be stored in the brain using some neurological code. A study of how computers store information will show that such a thing involves all kinds of sophisticated translation systems such as the scheme by which letters are converted into numbers (the ASCII system), and another scheme by which such numbers are converted from decimal to binary. Such translation is easy for a computer, but it is all but inconceivable that such translations could be going on in our brains, which never got anything like the ASCII system contrived by human designers. Then there is the huge "instantly finding the needle in the haystack" problem (discussed here) that we know of no way in which a brain could ever instantly retrieve memories if they were stored in brains, the brain lacking any of the things we have in computers that allow for fast information retrieval (things such as indexing, sorting, and hashing). If there was a “neurological code” by which the brain stored information, we would have discovered it already; but no such thing has been discovered.

Far from being “the most plausible proposal,” the possibility mentioned by Antony is a very implausible proposal, and an idea that no one has ever been able to sketch out in any detailed and credible way. Difficulties such as I have mentioned should have been been mentioned in Antony's answer, and she should have said that because of such reasons, we do not know that our memories or thoughts are stored in our brains, and do not know that our thoughts exist in our brains. Our thoughts may exist as part of our souls rather than our brains, or our thoughts may have a non-local existence apart from our body, just as the number pi exists independently of any circle. 

In Question 2354, someone asks, “Is telepathy possible or is this just a magician's trick? We get a poor answer from Allen Stairs. Very inconsistently, he says, “I suspect that it is not possible,” but then mentions ESP experiments using the Ganzfeld protocol in which “receivers are able to pick the correct target at a rate significantly above chance.” He doesn't mention the numbers, but in the Ganzfeld experiments the average success rate is about 32% (as discussed here), compared to a rate of only 25% that someone would get by chance. Given such overwhelming evidence for ESP, why would anyone say that telepathy “is not possible”? Later Stairs says “while there is some evidence on behalf of telepathy, it's very far from making a strong case.” But why would anyone claim something “is not possible” on one hand, and that “there is some evidence” for it? That makes no sense. The evidence for telepathy and other forms of psi is extremely strong. The Ganzfeld experiments would by themselves be adequate evidence for ESP, and there are many other experiments (such as these done by Joseph Rhine with Hubert Pearce) in which the success rate was so high that it constitutes overwhelming evidence for telepathy, very much making exactly the strong case that Stairs denies.

In Question 5176 someone asks, “Is it a common view among philosophers that human beings are simply biological computers?” Eddy Nahmias answers us by telling us, “There are few substance dualists (who think the mind is a non-physical entity).” This is not accurate. There are many philosophers who think the mind is a non-physical entity.

Question 24702 asks the following:

Assuming that the multiverse account of the universe is true -- and every possible reality is being simultaneously played out in an infinite number of parallel universes -- am I logically forced into accepting a nihilistic outlook on life? Or is it still possible to accept the truth of the multiverse account and still rationally believe that the pursuit of life goals is both meaningful and valuable, despite the fact that every possible outcome -- or potential reality -- is unfolding somewhere in another parallel universe?

In response to this question, philosopher Stephen Maitzen gives a poor answer. He states the following:

The beings very similar to you who inhabit other universes are at best "counterparts" of you, which leaves open the question "What will you do with your life?" It may be well and good if one of your counterparts works hard to achieve wisdom, promote justice, or whatever, in some other universe. But his/her hard work isn't yours and doesn't occur in your universe.

Instead of this lame answer, Maitzen should have pointed out the lack of any empirical basis for believing in any universe other than our own. He should have asked the user: why are you assuming the truth of an infinitely extravagant claim for which there is no evidence​? 

In my next post I will discuss some additional examples of poor answers given at the "Ask Philosophers" web site. 

Postscript: Today's "Question of the Day" on the "Ask Philosophers" site is a question that ends by asking, "What then, prevents any layman from calling himself a philosopher a priori and considering himself equal to you?"  The answer by philosopher Allen Stairs is an answer ringing with a sound of superiority and elitism. He says this:

You may still wonder: what does it actually take to make someone a bona fide philosopher?...People who have several publications in respectable philosophy journals would count, for example. So would people with PhDs in philosophy who have positions in philosophy departments at accredited universities. Such folk are paradigm cases of philosophers (at least, in the early 21st century in the west.) People recognized as philosophers by paradigm-case philosophers will count. People similar to paradigm-case philosophers are candidates for being counted as philosophers; the stronger the similarity the stronger the case. 

This is a poor answer. A good answer to the question, "What then, prevents any layman from calling himself a philosopher a priori and considering himself equal to you?" is: nothing at all.  To philosophize is the birthright of every human, and anyone who thinks deeply on any complex topic has every right to call himself a philosopher. Philosophers should strive for humility, rather than mounting some high horse and calling themselves "paradigm-case philosophers."  There is no reason why we should be more inclined to accept or reject a philosophical argument of a PhD than to accept or reject the philosophical argument of a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker.  All are equal on the battlefield of philosophical argumentation.