Closed Minds of a Professorial Priesthood

It is very widely acknowledged that one of the traits of a good scientist is open-mindedness. Open-mindedness can be described as the ability to concede that your idea about how something works may be wrong, and a tendency to objectively weigh any evidence that comes up suggesting that the thing may have an explanation or characteristics very different from what you normally think. Almost all of today's scientists would describe themselves as having the virtue of open-mindedness. But the truth is that a large fraction of them are not very open-minded at all. The problem is that scientists are created by university belief enclaves that are breeding grounds for closed-mindedness.

Graduate programs for scientist training may be compared to the seminary education by which people become priests. To become a Catholic priest you must send four years studying in a seminary, and then spend one year as a transitional deacon. To get a PhD in some branch of science, you must spend four or more years in some graduate program, and often as long as seven years or more. A Catholic seminary is an ideological enclave in which all the instructors share a very specific dogmatic belief system. Many a university graduate program is also an ideological enclave in which all the instructors share a very specific dogmatic belief system.

At a Catholic seminary you are taught to unquestioningly accept dogmas such as the Trinity, the physical resurrection of Jesus, and papal infallibility. At a university graduate program you may be taught to unquestioningly accept dogmas such as the dogma that life appeared through chance combinations of chemicals, the dogma that random mutations and natural selection caused the origin of each species, the dogma that brains produce minds, the dogma that synapses store memories, and the dogma that no can have any special psychic powers or psychic experiences beyond the explanation of neuroscientists.

An unwritten rule of many an exclusive social group is what we call the principle of “make it hard to enter the group.” If you make it so that a person must spend hard years to enter some group, you will maximize the chance that people entering that group will conform to its norms once they go to all the trouble of getting into the group. I once saw a fascinating documentary that showed how this “make it hard to enter the group” principle was used by a motorcycle gang. The gang had the rule that to enter as a new member of their motorcycle gang, you first had to spend years doing lowly favors for the gang members, such as fetching them drinks and food. This way the gang made sure that the only people who got into the gang were those willing to pay a high price in effort to enter it; and such people would be very likely to conform to the group's norms once they had gone to such trouble to get into the group.

Seminaries and graduate programs also make use of this “make it hard to enter the group” principle. In fact, a scientist graduate school seems to use such a principle to a much greater degree than a seminary. A typical seminary student doesn't have to pay for his education, but a person studying for a PhD typically has to invest a huge amount in tuition and other university fees, which could easily be $100,000 or more. Just as it is very unlikely someone will spend four hard years of time in seminary education to become a Catholic priest and then defy the belief system of that priesthood, it is very unlikely someone will invest four to eight years of time (and $100,000 or more in tuition and fees) to become a PhD, and then defy the belief norms of the scientist group he has worked so hard to get into. The person who emerges with a PhD from such long years of indoctrination may be no more likely to be open-minded about topics such as human origins, the mind-brain relation and paranormal phenomena than a newly minted Catholic priest will be likely to be open-minded on theological topics.

A good system of scientist education is one that would train scientists to be very humble, and to recognize that their knowledge of nature is merely fragmentary. Our system of scientist education is one that leads scientists to think they are great lords of explanation who pretty much have things figured out. And so we have a neuroscientist like Kandel ending a recent book with a chapter claiming that consciousness is the “last great mystery” of the brain, thereby overestimating his knowledge of the mind and brain by many times, and failing to recognize the countless mysteries on this topic scientists have not solved. Pretentious conceit about your level of knowledge about nature cannot co-exist with open-mindedness.

Very closed-minded scientists sometimes hypocritically lecture us on the virtue of open-mindedness. An example of this is a post on the Real Clear Science site entitled “What It Really Means to Be Open-Minded.” In that post we hear a quote from neuroscientist Steven Novella telling us it is important for scientists to be open-minded. He states the following:

"Scientists, critical thinkers, and skeptics can and should be completely open-minded, which means being open to the evidence and logic whatever it says. If the evidence supports a view, then we will accept that view in proportion to the evidence."

Such a statement of principles is very amusing coming from Novella, who over the years in his blog posts has shown himself to be an extremely closed-minded thinker who automatically rejects any evidence that seems to clash with the tenets of neuroscience orthodoxy, as reflexively as a man may jerk his knee after it is struck with a wooden hammer. An example of Novella's inappropriate closed-minded thinking is a statement he made in a blog post last year:

"Psi or anomalous cognition, is a group of alleged phenomena that include sensing what other people are thinking, viewing remote locations not accessible to the normal senses, and predicting the future in some way. These claims are inherently implausible because there is no way to account for them with known phenomena. They appear, therefore, to violate well-established laws of physics. Therefore, any reasonable scientists would argue, the threshold of evidence needed before concluding that a psi phenomenon is real should be very high. What we have is very low-grade evidence at best, therefore it is reasonable to reject claims for psi."

This is closed-minded obstinacy. The claim that the evidence for psi is “very low-grade evidence at best” is a simple falsehood. Extremely convincing laboratory experiments showing the reality of things like ESP have been done for more than a century. An example is the experiment done by professor Riess in which a person at a remote location was tested, and scored more than 70% on 1850 trials, in a test in which the expected result by chance was only 20%. The chance probability of this has been estimated  as 1 in 10 to the 700^th power. The reason why the overwhelming scientific evidence for ESP has not been sufficiently accepted by scientists is that people like Novella keep telling us falsehoods by saying things such as the evidence for psi is “very low-grade evidence at best.”

Yesterday on the Psychology Today web site, we had a surprisingly good summary of the overwhelming evidence for psi, presented by Steve Taylor PhD. Taylor tells us, "The evidence for psi is already very convincing," and refers us to this recent review published in the mainstream scientific journal American Psychologist, a review which tells us, "The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines."  

As for Novella's reasoning about possibility and the laws of physics, they contain two glaring errors. The first is his statement, “These claims are inherently implausible because there is no way to account for them with known phenomena.” You do not show the unlikelihood of something by the fact that there is no way to account for it with known phenomena. It happens quite frequently in the course of science history that scientists make novel observations that cannot be accounted for by the explanations known at that time, leading scientists to come up with new ideas about causes. An example is how observations of stellar rotation rates around the galactic center led scientists to postulate dark matter, and the example of how meteorite falls led scientists to postulate the existence of asteroids.

A more glaring error by Novella is the conclusion that since some observations cannot be accounted for with known explanations, “They appear, therefore, to violate well-established laws of physics.” The fact that you cannot account for something with known explanations does not at all suggest that any laws of physics are being violated.

Creating a pretentious priesthood through its academic ivory towers resembling seminaries, our science education system has trained scientists to be completely closed-minded about a wide variety of things. But closed-minded scientists often fancy themselves to be open-minded. There is one good way to test whether or not a scientist is truly open-minded on a topic: look to see whether the scientist shows signs of having very carefully studied the best evidence for some idea that conflicts with the dogmatic claims made by the scientist group that scientist belongs to. If you find evidence of such erudition, it does not prove that the scientist is open-minded on the topic, but may gave you a reason to suspect that he or she is. Almost all scientists who make statements about paranormal phenomena show no signs of having spent much time studying the evidence for such phenomena.

A person may be intimidated by the thundering sounds of scientists telling us, "This is our consensus," or "We say this is impossible," as intimidated as Dorothy was when she first saw the scowling floating head of the Wizard of Oz.  But when we understand the sociological and ideological factors which often are the stilts which support such opinions, and that the pronouncements of scientists are often merely the articles of faith of a belief community, then there may occur a certain "Toto pulling back the Wizard's curtain" moment in which intimidation is reduced. 

Memory Molecule Myth: PKMzeta Debunked

In a recent article at the Nautilus web site, scientist Ken Richardson suggests that his fellow scientists have been guilty of some molecular mythology. He points out that scientists have repeatedly used “action verbs” in describing DNA, telling us that inside DNA are genes that “act,” “behave,” “direct,” “control,” “design,” are “responsible for,” and so forth. But then Richardson tells us “a counter-narrative is building” to correct such erroneous ideas, and then gives us reasons for thinking that genes are merely passive chemical units that do no such things.

Another example of molecule mythology involves a protein called PKMzeta. Some neuroscientists have suggested that PKMzeta has the ability to make memories last for decades in synapses, even though the proteins that make up synapses are very short-lived (having an average lifetime of two weeks or less). Quite a few of the papers or posts spreading this idea were written or co-written by the same person, Todd C. Sacktor. It is never explained clearly how a protein molecule could perform this great feat of magic. For anyone to explain such a thing clearly, he would first need to have a clear theory of how conceptual memories and episodic memories could be stored in synapses. No neuroscientist has ever presented a clear and explicit theory of any such thing. Neuroscientists merely vaguely tell us that somehow memory storage in a brain occurs through “synapse strengthening,” without presenting any clear theory of how that could occur.

Of course, if you do not have a clear theory of how memories could be stored (for even a few minutes) in synapses, you cannot possibly have a clear theory as to how some protein molecule such as PKMzeta could possibly cause memories stored in synapses to persist for decades, even though the proteins that make up such synapses are very short-lived, lasting an average of less than two weeks. Trying to defend against the charge that synapses are totally unsuitable for storing memories for decades, because of the short lifetimes of the proteins that make up synapses, a scientific paper states, “As long as PKMZ [PKMzeta] remains active and there is an absence of forces which terminate its activity (such as LTD), it will continue to sustain the biochemical changes at the synapse which serve as the neurobiological basis of memory, allowing the memory to persist for durations far exceeding the turnover of its component molecules.” But how could such a miracle of persistence occur, which would be like a message written in wet sand at the seashore persisting for decades, even though the wet sand was being replaced and written over whenever the tide came in? The science paper does not tell us.

Again, we have the case of an “action verb” inappropriately used to describe a molecule. We are told that PKMzeta has a “sustain” super-power allowing it to preserve fantastically complicated information supposedly stored externally in synapses made up of short-lived molecules that are constantly being replaced. There is nothing in the structure of PKMzeta that should cause us to believe it can do any such thing. No theorist has presented an explicit theory as to how anything like PKMzeta could preserve a memory. Such theorists may sometimes present chemical details to impress us, but such details do not constitute a theory unless a theorist gives explicit examples of precisely how specific memories (such as someone's memory of seeing Paris or someone's memory of details learned about World War I) could be permanently stored with the aid of PKMzeta.  No theorist has done any such thing. 

I suppose that if a PKMzeta molecule were able to cause memories to persist despite rapid protein turnover,  we might imagine it as some kind of "genius" molecule that has thoughts like this:

Oh, my goodness, I see that a memory is starting to degrade because of protein turnover! The memory now states, "Ottawa is the capitol of," which isn't even a full English sentence. Why, I'd better synthesize some new proteins to fill in for those proteins that died,  so there can be a nice complete English sentence. Now, what was that country that Ottawa is the capital of?  

Of course, anything the slightest bit like this is very hard to believe in. It would seem that the most minimal requirements that a molecule would have to fulfill in order to be a "memory maintenance molecule" would be the following:

(1) The molecule would have to somehow know whenever a particular protein molecule (that was part of a memory stored in a synapse) had died or disappeared because of the short lifespans of protein molecules.
(2) The molecule would have to somehow cause a replacement protein of the same type to appear in the same place as the vanished molecule, so that the memory did not degrade. 

The problem is that no one can envision a credible scenario under which a molecule could have either of these powers. To imagine how much of a miracle it would be for memories to persist despite constant protein turnover,  you can imagine a homeowner with ten picnic tables in his backyard, each of which is filled with leaves on which a word or two is written. Imagine these leaves spell out narratives, factual information, and ideas. But the problem is that about one day in three there are winds blowing the leaves off of the tables, and scattering them far away. Also, the leaves don't last longer than a year, because they tend to crumble. Now imagine the homeowner has to keep all this information preserved in the leaves, not just for a few nights but for 50 years. That would be a mountainous job.  An equally mountainous job would have to be done if memories were to be preserved in brains despite constant protein turnover causing proteins to persist an average of less than two weeks, and no one has explained how a molecule could possibly do such a feat.  Since synapses face not only rapid protein turnover inside them but also the problem that synapses don't last for longer than a year or two,  they have the same "double degradation" problem that such a homeowner would have with his information written on leaves. 




In the article here, a PKMzeta enthusiast is asked to explain how PKMzeta could cause memories to persist. The scientist gives a lengthy answer which fails to explain how PKMzeta could do such a thing. He merely says "a cluster of PKMzeta molecules can keep themselves turned on perpetually," and then claims that this supposed ability "is a plausible mechanism for memory persistence," without justifying that claim. This fragmentary theorizing is just hand waving. It has never been demonstrated that any cluster of PKMzeta molecules is capable of storing any information (such as a list of words) for a period as long as a month.  We can imagine hypothetical lab experiments that might try to show such a thing, but they have never been done. The paper here refers to "900 synaptic proteins." PKMzeta is only one of those 900 proteins in synapses, being no more common in synapses than an average synapse protein. You don't solve the "short lifetime of proteins" problem by trying to argue that one in 900 of those proteins might somehow have some stability.  As for the scientist's use of the word "plausible," it has been noted by others that "plausible" is the most abused word in theoretical science discourse, and that scientists often carelessly use the word "plausible" without ever doing anything at all to show a likelihood. 

But the PKMzeta enthusiasts have done a few studies which they claim lends credibility to their claims. I will describe a typical such study. A small number of mice are injected with something that suppresses the PKMzeta molecules in their body (or perhaps they are genetically engineered so that they don't have any PKMzeta). Memory experiments are then done. It is sometimes found that such mice perform not as well as normal mice. Such experiments have been hailed as support for the “memory maintenance” claims about PKMzeta.

There are several reasons why such studies do not at all show the claims about PKMzeta are correct. The first is that a result such as I described could never show that PKMzeta can save memories from destruction for years. Whenever memory is tested, it's hard to figure out what the cause is for a discrepancy between two test groups. A difference in a test result might be because (1) PKMzeta is involved in perceiving whatever observation is being tested; (2) or that PKMzeta is involved in memory storage; (3) or that PKMzeta is involved in memory retrieval; (4) or that PKMzeta has something to do with attention or focus used in a memory test. A test discrepancy could never tell us which of these things was involved. And if some mice did worse in remembering things without PKMzeta, that might justify the small claim that PKMzeta has something to do with memory, but could never justify the vastly more extravagant claim that PKMzeta is capable of preserving memories for decades.

Another reason why such studies do not at all show the claims about PKMzeta are correct has to do with a general malaise in neuroscience. A general problem in modern neuroscience is the production of papers with marginal results that we cannot trust because of things such as small sample sizes and publication bias. Let us imagine that neuroscientists want to prove some idea that fits in with their ideological expectations. A great number of experiments might be done, almost all producing no support for the idea. But perhaps 1 in 20 might produce results marginally supporting the idea, probably because of chance variations in data. Now, today negative results are vastly less likely to get published than positive results. So if 19 researchers get a negative result, conflicting with what neuroscientists hope to get, it could be that 10 of them don't even bother to write up their results as a scientific paper, and that the other 9 do write up a paper but don't get it published (because of the journal bias against negative results). However the one researcher who (by chance) got a positive result will write up his result as a scientific paper. Since it will be a result neuroscientists were hoping to get, he will almost certainly get the result published.

This publication bias is a great problem affecting the reliability of scientific research. Because of it we should follow a precautionary neuroscience rule like this: don't believe something has been established unless the result turns up fairly consistently at a high level of significance, in studies with large sample sizes.

Has this happened in regard to memory experiments involving PKMzeta? Not at all. In 2011 a scientist reported three separate studies showing that inhibiting PKMzeta has no effect on memory if tested between 10 and 15 day after the memory forms.  In 2013 two groups of scientists published results conflicting with claims that PKMzeta might allow memories to persist a long time. One study by a team of scientists used genetically engineered mice that had no PKMzeta. It found that such mice “have no deficits in several hippocampal-dependent learning and memory tasks,” and concluded that PKMzeta is not required for memory or learning. Another study by a different team of scientists found that absence of PKMzeta “does not impair learning and memory in mice.” A 2015 study found that inhibiting PKMzeta has no effect on memory in tests performed 30 days after the memory forms. A 2016 paper also found that that inhibiting PKMzeta has no effect on memory in tests performed 30 days after the memory forms.

Such studies would seem to completely debunk claims that PKMzeta enables memories to persist for decades in synapses despite the short lifetimes in the proteins.

The SUNY scientists such as Sacktor who helped to spread the PKMzeta myth have tried to fight back with papers such as this 2016 paper. But in that very paper we see evidence that second-rate science is being used to try to prop up claims about PKMzeta. In Figure 7 the scientists tell us how many mice were used for their experiment involving the memory effects of PKMzeta deprivation. They used only 8 mice per study group. That's way too small a sample size to get a moderately convincing result. It is well known that at least 15 animals per study group should be used to get a moderately convincing result. If you use only 8 animals per study group, there's a very high chance you'll get a false alarm, in which the result is due merely to chance variations rather than a real effect in nature.  In fact, in her post "Why Most Published Neuroscience Studies Are False," neuroscientist Kelly Zalocusky suggests that neuroscientists really should be using 31 animals per study group to get a not-very-strong statistical power of .5, and 60 animals per study group to get a fairly strong statistical power of .8.  Compare these numbers to the 8 animals per study group mentioned in Figure 7 of the Sacktor paper. 

This is the same “too small sample size” problem (discussed here) that plagues very many or most neuroscience experiments involving animals. Neuroscientists have known about this problem for many years, but year after year they continue in their errant ways, foisting upon the public too-small-sample-size studies with low statistical power that don't prove anything because of a high chance of false alarms.

If you look up the PRKCZ gene behind the PKMZeta protein molecule, using this page and this page of the Human Protein Database, you will find no characteristics that seem unusual, and nothing suggesting any superstar status. The pages make no mention of the gene even being used in synapses, telling us that the gene is "mainly localized to the cytosol" and "in addition localized to the plasma membrane."   The very idea of some kind of "superstar protein" or "superstar gene" is contrary to the experience in recent decades of scientists, who have found in general that bodily functions almost always involve the coordinated ballet of very many different genes (typically hundreds of them to accomplish a particular task). 

The 2015 scientific paper here shows that PKMzeta rapidly degrades in synapses. The authors say that therefore a stable amount of PKMzeta "would be difficult to maintain at synapses and store memories over long time scales." The paper tells us “There is growing evidence against a role for PKMzeta in memory.” Figure 9 of the paper also shows that a kind of cousin molecule or "isoform" of PKMzeta (PKC lambda) also quickly degrades, experiencing a 50% loss or degradation every 10 hours. So it seems that there is no truth to the idea of PKMzeta (or PKC lambda) as some magic bullet that allows memories to persist for decades in synapses that are constantly having their proteins replaced.

Where does that leave neuroscientists? It leaves them without a leg to stand on in their claims that memories are stored in brains. Based on everything we know about synapses, there is no reason to believe that synapses are capable of storing a memory for even a month, let alone the 50 years that is how long older humans can remember things. As discussed here and here, equally grave problems prevent scientists from creating any credible account of how memories could be encoded into neural states or how seldom-retrieved facts learned many years ago could be instantaneously recalled from a brain that seems to lack any capability for fast look-ups from exact neural positions. We also know (as discussed here and here) that massive damage can occur to brains (such as surgical removal of half of a brain) while producing little effect on memory, which would seem to be impossible if memories are stored in brains. How long before we realize that human memory cannot be a neural thing, but must be a psychic or spiritual phenomenon?

Postscript: Some people tell tall tales about the protein CAMKII similar to the tall tales told about PKMZeta. We are sometimes told that some alleged autophosphorlyation of CAMKII can help explain stable memories. Most of the reasons I have cited against PKMZeta also apply with equal strength to CAMKII. At this link we are told an experiment debunked the idea that  autophosphorlyation of CAMKII has a role in memory storage.  The lifetime of a CAMKII molecule is only 30 hours, according to this source. The book here makes this statement:

In the mid-1980's there was much excitement about the idea that autophosphorlyated CaMKII might serve as a self-perpetuating signal that could subserve permanent memory storage. However, a variety of experimental results generated since then suggests that perpetual activation of CaMKII does not occur with LTP-inducing stimulation or memory storage.

This scientific paper says the following:

Previous models have suggested that CaMKII functions as a bistable switch that could be the molecular correlate of long-term memory, but experiments have failed to validate these predictions....The CaMKII model system is never bistable at resting calcium concentrations, which suggests that CaMKII activity does not function as the biochemical switch underlying long-term memory.

This recent scientific paper says on page 9, "Overall, the studies reviewed here argue against, but do not completely rule out, a role for persistently self-sustaining CaMKII activity in maintaining" long term memory. 

Post-Postscript:  Those who have studied the history of science are familiar with epicycles, a complicated speculation that was introduced into Ptolemy's theory of astronomy, to try to fix cases in which the theory did not match observations. We may say these CaMKII speculations and PKMZeta speculations are epicycles intended to fix the failing synaptic theory of memory storage.  But while the Ptolemaic epicycles were exact speculations, the CaMKII speculations and PKMZeta speculations are very vague, failing to specify any exact theory of memory storage. 

Why There May Be Few Science Breakthroughs Before 2050

Some have claimed that the pace of technological and scientific progress is accelerating. But while technology is progressing at a brisk pace, there is little evidence that progress in science is accelerating. In fact, there are reasons for thinking that our current scientific progress is occurring at a rather slow rate.  In December 2018 Gizmodo.com published a post entitled “The Biggest Science Stories of 2018.” The post failed to mention any new discoveries that were very noteworthy. The list of top science stories of 2018 included quite a few items that were not breakthroughs, such as the following:

• “Scientists continued to warn about climate change” (important, but nothing new) 
• “Stephen Hawking passed away”
• “Space equipment broke”
• “More fancy space equipment is on the way”
• “Drinking and smoking still bad”
• “More natural disasters”

These are not at all the type of items one would see in a “top science stories of the year” article if science progress was occurring at a very impressive rate.

Below are ten reasons why there may be relatively few big breakthroughs in science during the next 30 years.

Reason #1: The Low-Hanging Fruit Has Already Been Picked

The scientific discoveries of the past 100 years have involved finding out about basic facts about nature, such as: (1) the fact that all life is made of cells; (2) the basic facts about the parts of cells, such as mitochondria and DNA; (3) the basic facts about the sun and how it makes energy; (3) the basic structure of the universe and its expansion. Finding out such things was relatively easy. But finding out more subtle truths about the working of nature may be much, much harder, a job we can compare to picking the high-hanging fruit of a very tall apple tree.

Reason #2: Very Hard Abiogenesis May Limit the Biology Breakthroughs

Biologists hoped that by now there would be two giant headlines from the world of biology, one reading “Life Created in Lab,” and the other reading “Life Found in Space.” The first headline would be one announcing the creation of a microscopic life form from chemicals swirling about in some artificial environment simulating the early Earth. The second headline would be one announcing the discovery of extraterrestrial life. But there is a huge reason for thinking that we will see neither of these headlines in the next 30 years. The reason is that abiogenesis (the appearance of life from non-life) seems to be incredibly hard, requiring a kind of miracle of luck, rather like the luck needed to throw a deck of cards into the wind, with the deck forming into a house of cards. If abiogenesis is so very difficult, the chance of us seeing either the “Life Made in Lab” breakthrough or the “Extraterrestrial Life Found” breakthrough before 2050 may be very slim.

Reason #3: The Breakthroughs Hoped for by Neuroscientists May Be Impossible

If you are a person believing in the dogmatic assumptions of neuroscientists, you may hope for two giant breakthroughs. The first would be for neuroscientists to discover an explanation of how a brain can create consciousness, ideas, and thinking. The second would be for neuroscientists to discover biological workings of memory, such as exactly how a brain stores memories and how a brain retrieves memories so quickly. Given the financial factors that reward exaggeration and hype, we will no doubt continue to see click-bait hype stories with headlines such as “Secret of Memory Found” (articles that do not stand up to critical scrutiny). But there are very good reasons for thinking that there will never be any neuroscience breakthrough that explains how a brain could store memories for 50 years, nor any neuroscience breakthrough explaining how a brain could instantly recall memories, nor any neuroscience breakthrough explaining how a brain could produce consciousness, self-hood, thought or idea. These reasons are all the reasons for thinking that consciousness, thought, self-hood and memory are actually not products of the brain at all.

Below are a few (but by no means all) of the many reasons for doubting the “brains produce minds” claim:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases (discussed here and here) in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury, disease, or hemispherectomy;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact (discussed here) that there is no understanding of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that for more than 40 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences occurring after their hearts stopped, during times when their brains were inactive, and they should have had no consciousness at all, with many of the medical details they reported during such experiences being independently verified (as described here).

If consciousness, thought, self-hood and ideas are not actually a product of the brain, and memories are not stored in brains, as suggested by the reasons above, then there will probably be in the next few decades very few big and exciting neuroscience breakthroughs, such as scientists reading memories from dead brains, or scientists making people super-smart by giving them brain implants.

Reason #4: There May Be No “Science Singularity,” Because of an Impossibility of Ever Producing Conscious Intelligence by Physical Effects

No one has any idea how to make a human-like intelligence by conventional techniques of accumulating manually coded programming logic. Hopes for a true general-purpose artificial mind rely on the idea of creating an electronic mind that somehow builds upon brain principles. The idea is to borrow some “mind from matter” principles found in a brain, and kind of “ramp up” those principles to a higher degree, making something even smarter than a human.

But the reasons listed above are reasons for thinking that human intelligence and consciousness is a spiritual, psychic or transcendent effect that cannot be explained by brain activity. If such a thing is correct, then probably none of the biggest breakthroughs anticipated for computers and robotics will occur. If there is no “mind from matter” principle employed by the human brain, we absolutely will not be able to make minds as smart or smarter than humans by employing and amplifying such a “mind from matter” principle.

If we are unable to produce super-intelligent robots or computers, then we will probably not have any kind of “science singularity,” in which a host of science breakthroughs occur because super-intelligent robots or super-intelligent computers are working on scientific research or solving scientific problems.

Reason #5: We May Not See Many Big Nanotechnology Breakthroughs

At the turn of the century, people were talking about a new industrial revolution that would be produced by nanotechnology, technology involving engineering incredibly small parts. Between 1990 and 2005 futurists predicted that nanotechnology would be the source of countless breakthroughs. But a 2015 Time magazine article was entitled, “Here's Why Nobody's Talking About Nanotech Anymore.”

Of all the investment fads and manias over the past few decades, none have been as big of a fizzle as the craze for nanotech stocks....Ten years on, precious few of the nanotech stocks and venture-backed startups have delivered on their investment promise ...According to Google Trends, searches on “nanotechnology” have steadily trended downward to between 15% and 20% of the levels of a decade ago. Searches for “nanotech” – the catchy buzzword preferred by investors – have grown even quieter.

Many of the more exotic applications of nanotechnology may not be technically feasible. Futurists have long advanced the idea that tiny nanobots may circulate through your body to repair your cells. But there may be technical reasons why such things are technically unfeasible. Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley argued that the molecular assemblers imagined by nanotechnology enthusiast Eric Drexler were not feasible, because of various scientific reasons such as what he called the “fat fingers” problem.

Reason #6: Physical Factors May Make Cosmology Breakthroughs Unlikely

In the field of cosmology, there is little prospect for further breakthroughs any time soon. The past history of the universe would seem to forbid us from learning much of anything more about the universe's origin. During the first 300,000 of the universe's history, all light was hopelessly scattered by the extreme density of matter and energy. So we can't look back to the very beginning of the universe just by building bigger telescopes. Due to the impossibility of observing other universes, there is no possibility of verifying any speculation about a multiverse. There is always the possibility that some exotic experiment might provide an observation of dark matter or dark energy, but the chance of that seems rather slim.

Reason #7: Immensely Complex Biology and the Limits of DNA May Limit Genetic Engineering Breakthroughs

Before the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, it was predicted that once this project was completed, the door would be open to a thousand breakthroughs. We were told that once we had mapped human genes, we could then start achieving all kinds of medical progress by gene manipulation. But the medical progress that has followed the completion of the Human Genome Project has been relatively small. Part of the reason is that the role of genes is incredibly complex. A single effect in the body may be the product of hundreds of genes interacting, just as a symphony is the product of 60 or more instruments; and there are countless effects and structures in the body that seem impossible to explain by genes (which are basically just lists of amino acids, not agents). Very much that is going on in the body cannot be explained only by genes, such as protein folding, embryonic development and morphogenesis. Because of the gigantically complex workings of the human body, and the limited causal power of genes and DNA, there may be relatively few breakthroughs produced by genetic engineering.

Reason #8: The “Collector's Curve” Will Limit Progress in Paleontology

One way in which scientific progress might occur is by research in paleontology that clarifies natural history. But the prospects of progress in this area are slim, because of something called “the collector's curve.” The collector's curve is a law of diminishing returns that means the longer scientists have looked for something like fossils, the smaller the results will be. The most numerous and easy-to-find fossils have already been found, and it will be harder and harder to find fossils still undiscovered.

Reason #9: Science Research Dollars Will Continue to Be Poorly Allocated, As Researchers Try to Shore Up Dogmas, Failing to Pursue Countless Promising Leads

Modern academic science is massively infected by dogma, and a substantial fraction of scientific activity involves trying to shore up existing dogmas.  So, for example, neuroscientists spend endless hours experimenting with rodents, trying to get some result that will shore up existing dogmas about brains and minds; and biologists spend endless hours trying various arrangements of genomic data, trying to get some hypothetical ancestry diagram that will be compatible with existing natural history dogmas.  Meanwhile, a thousand more profitable lines of research go largely unexplored, often because pursuing such lines of research would lead to results conflicting with existing dogmas.  So, for example, there is relatively little follow-up on a hundred previous research findings indicating the reality of paranormal phenomena (such as the phenomena described in these 43 posts). 

The result is that scientists spend huge amount of time on relatively fruitless research, and very little time on the type of research that might be really productive in the sense of leading to breakthroughs that overturn existing paradigms.  Probably speaking about psychic phenomena, the great technologist  Nikola Tesla once said, "The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” But our scientists haven't taken Tesla's advice, and continue to spend very little time doing research that might produce "disruptive" results, which is the type of research that really leads to breakthroughs. 

Reason #10: The Essential Mysteries of Nature May Take Thousands of Years to Unravel

At the core of the dubious triumphalist narratives told by many scientists is the underlying assumption that some of nature's central problems are fairly easy puzzles, that there are central aspects of nature that are fairly simple, simple enough for a single clever human scientist to figure out. An example of this is the idea that biological complexity arises because of a reason so simple that a nineteenth century naturalist was able to figure out this simple reason. Another example is the assumption that the human mind can be figured out by merely doing enough research on one little blob of matter inside the human body.

But what if nature's deepest workings actually involve unfathomable complexities and profound subtleties far beyond the ken of current humans? What if our chance of figuring out nature's key secrets in the next 30 years is like the chance of some Eskimo who has never seen technology understanding the electronics of Times Square if he is suddenly placed in it? What if the universe isn't so conveniently structured so that we can make titanic breakthroughs by coming up with simple explanatory principles or researching just one human organ? Then it may either take humans thousands of additional years of effort to figure out the deepest mysteries of nature, or perhaps such mysteries will never be understood by humans. In such a case, any progress we make in the next 30 years may be relatively tiny, and will probably not result in many dramatic breakthroughs in understanding.

When World-Class Scientists Saw Ghosts (Part 3)

In part 1 of this 3 part series, I defined a ghost as a human figure, full or partial, that mysteriously appears and mysteriously disappears. Let us now consider the case of the Nobel prize winner who saw a ghost (according to this definition of a ghost). Page 6-7 of Schrenck-Notzing's book  Phenomena of Materialization (discussed below) contains a quote from a work by Professor Charles Richet, who won a Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1913.  Referring to an observation near the medium Marthe Beraud (referred to as Eva C. in Schrenck-Notzing's book), the quote by Richet is below:

"I see something like a white luminous ball of undetermined outline suspended above the floor. Then suddenly there appears, emerging from this white orb of light as from a trap-door, the phantom 'Bien Boa.' It is of moderate height. He is draped in a flowing garment with a belt around his waist. 'Bien Boa' is halting and lame in his walk. One cannot say whether he walks or glides...Without opening the curtain he suddenly collapses and vanishes on the floor. At the same time one hears the noise of a body falling on the floor. Three or four minutes afterwards the same white orb appears in the opening of the curtains above the floor, then a body is seen quickly rising straight up and attaining the height of an adult, and then it again collapses on the floor...Before my eyes outside the curtain, a living body has been formed, which emerged from the floor, and vanished into the floor."

As I have personally photographed an astonishing range of inexplicable phenomena relating to mysterious orbs, including 600+ cases of speeding orbs and 500+ cases of mysterious striped orbs, with these striped orbs often appearing with dramatically repeating patterns, I find this Nobel-prize winner's account of an astonishing orb manifestation to be not terribly surprising. As Richet reported a “phantom” mysteriously appearing and disappearing, the account can be called a ghost sighting.

On page 466 of of his book Thirty Years of Psychical Research, Richet makes a similar claim, stating the following:

"A living being, or living matter, formed under our eyes, which has its proper warmth, apparently a circulation of blood, and a physiological respiration (as I proved by causing the form of Bien Boa to breathe into a flask containing baryta water), which has also a kind of psychic personality having a will distinct from the will of the medium, in a word, a new human being! This is surely the climax of marvels! Nevertheless it is a fact."

On page 505 Richet states the following:

"It is therefore established that there was no instrumentation and no theatrical accessories that the medium could use, and that no stranger could enter the room. The materializations produced were very complete. The phantom of Bien Boa appeared five or six times under satisfactory conditions in the sense that he could not be Marthe masquerading in a helmet and sheet. Marthe would have had not only to bring, but also to conceal afterwards, the helmet, the sheet, and the burnous. Also Marthe and the phantom were both seen at the same time. To pretend that Bien Boa was a doll is more absurd still; he walked and moved, his eyes could be seen looking round, and when he tried to speak his lips moved."

Now, the claim of Nobel-prize-winner Richet to have seen a phantom produced by the medium Marthe Beraud might be dismissed as bunk were it not for the fact that the same medium underwent years of exhaustive testing under controlled conditions, and under such scientific scrutiny, countless similar paranormal phenomena were observed countless times. The main record of such experiments is the book "Phenomena of Materialization" by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, a physician who made lengthy scientific studies of the medium Marthe Beraud (referred to in the book as Eva C.). Filled with relevant photos, the book can be read online using this link.

Schrenck-Notzing spent four years investigating Beraud under controlled conditions, and produced an extremely detailed book describing a vast assortment of inexplicable phenomena he observed in her presence. The book includes more than 50 clear photos of the paranormal. Schrenck-Notzing makes frequent reports of things such as "spirit hands" appearing and disappearing, "materialized heads" appearing out of parts of Beraud's body, and equally astonishing things. Schrenck-Notzing took careful precautions to prevent fraud, such as placing the medium in a small "cabinet" (actually just a small corner of a room with a curtain in front of it) that was always carefully checked, and even often arranging for a full body examination before the phenomena were produced. Under conditions that should have prevented all possibility of fraud, the most inexplicable phenomena were produced on many different days.

You should be impressed by the book's photos when you understand the conditions under which they were produced. The medium Marthe Baraud was placed in a small corner of a room, with a small curtain in front of her. Both the area behind the curtain and the medium herself were always checked to exclude the possibility of magical apparatus being sneaked in.  Observers sat a few feet from her. The photos often show "materializations" the size of heads or half a human body, and in the text Schrenck-Notzing says such things were often seen to slowly appear or disappear. The photos typically show the curtain opened, with the medium's hands clutching the curtain (or observers) while the mysterious "materializations" are above her hands. The photos show many such "materializations" behind the medium or above the medium's head. Given such observations, skeptic explanations (such as something hidden in the medium's vagina) don't work, as the photographed "materialization" is often way too big to be something that could be hidden in a vagina. There is always the possibility of a gigantic fraud conspiracy involving multiple persons, but such a thing would have had to have been one of the most elaborate frauds in history, given the huge book with so many details and seemingly paranormal photos (all produced long before Photoshop existed). Schrenck-Notzing stated that in four years of such experiments he never saw any sign of trickery from the medium Marthe Baraud.

On page 270 of the book Schrenck-Notzing summarizes why his observations cannot be explained as a fraud by the medium, referring to body checks of the medium, and to a body tight she was put in to hinder any chance of extracting something from her body:

"The counter proof to these considerations is given by the mode of production of the photographs (simultaneous exposures on five to seven cameras, within and without the cabinet), by the rigorous initial and final examinations, by the dress of the medium, by the sittings with the nude medium, by the occurrence of curious forms and fragments which cannot easily be produced by commercially obtainable figures, by the numerous plastic products, by the artistic character of certain portraits, which cannot be imitated in this way, by the repeated photography of features of deceased persons recognised by their families, by the growth and recession of the teleplastic phenomena, by their movements, proved evidentially through the sense organs {e.g., materialised hands which make touches or grasp objects, etc.), by the lightning-like appearance and disappearance of the phenomena, while the medium's body is visible and motionless, and, finally, by a class of phenomena which cannot at all be imitated artificially, as, for instance, the creation of an amorphous, living and moving substance, leaving a residue of decomposition products of organised matter, and the penetration of the substance produced through textile fabrics and veils {see Figs. 152 and 153). To this we must add the progressive development, advancing from simple to complex performances, the elementary character of the forms and phenomena, and the consideration that a fraud, which would require at least a laboratory for producing the most varied assortment of pictures and utensils, and would presuppose the use of considerable sums of money for procuring them, could hardly have been practised for four years, in spite of the constantly varying and continuously intensified precautions and photographic methods, and could not have been carried out without the slightest failure, in the face of the acumen of numerous learned observers."

On page 275 Schrenck-Notzing states the following:

"Not one of the observers, during these four years, has ever found on the medium's body, or in the seance costume, anything which could have been used for the fraudulent production of the phenomena. The importance of this negative result can hardly be emphasised too strongly. The author was a witness to the thorough performance of this task on no less than 180 occasions. The honesty of the medium is therefore not a 'probability, but a certainty placed beyond all question. She has never introduced any objects into the cabinet with which she could have fraudulently represented the teleplastic products. The various seance rooms, in different houses, had no secret passages or trap-doors, and were regularly examined, both before and after every sitting, by the savants who took part in the sittings...In some sittings the curtains were not closed at all, and the phenomena were often observed from beginning to end, while the medium's body was motionless and visible."

Corroborating testimony is given both in Richet's book quoted above, and in the book "From the Unconscious to the Conscious" by physician Gustave Geley, which can be read online here (it's another case of a large book that is best downloaded as a PDF file and then opened from the .pdf file using Adobe Acrobat or a web browser). On page 53-57 Geley states the following, referring to Marthe Beraud by the same "Eva" pseudonym used by Schrenck-Notzing:

"I had the honour and privilege of studying Eva with her for a year and a half, at bi-weekly seances, held at first in her house, and afterwards, for three consecutive months, exclusively in my own laboratory....I have been able to see, to touch, and to photograph the materialisations of which I am about to write. I have frequently followed the event from its beginning to its end; for it was formed, developed, and disappeared under my own eyes. However unexpected, strange or impossible such a manifestation may appear, I have no right to put forward the slightest doubt as to its reality....In the more complete cases the materialised organ has all the appearance and biologic functions of a living  organ. I have seen admirably modelled fingers, with their nails; I have seen complete hands with bones and joints; I have seen a living head, whose bones I could feel under a thick mass of hair. I have seen wellformed living and human faces! On many occasions these representations have been formed from beginning to end under my own eyes. I have, for instance, seen the substance issue from the hands of the medium and link them together ; then, the medium separating her hands, the substance has lengthened, forming thick cords, has spread, and formed fringes like epiploic fringes. Lastly, in the midst of these fringes, there has appeared by progressive representation, perfectly organised fingers, a hand, or a face.  In other cases I have witnessed an analogous organisation in substance issuing from the mouth."

An example of such an "an analogous organisation in substance issuing from the mouth" is shown in the photo below taken by Geley, and reproduced on this page of Schrenck-Notzing's book.  The caption states, "This head (enlarged) was seen to form from a mass emerging from Eva's mouth."  Schrenck-Notzing's book contains quite a few photos of what looks like strange radiant blobs emerging from the mouth of both Marthe Beraud and another medium named Stanislava.

To summarize, we have three different biomedical professionals (Schrenck-Notzing, Geley and Richet) who stated in print that they were convinced that paranormal phenomena were being produced near Marthe Beraud, after each did separate investigations of her. 

See here for an in-depth modern article on Marthe Beraud. An excellent scholarly paper on the work of Schrenck-Notzing and its unfair treatment by an opponent is the paper “Policing Epistemic Deviance: Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and Albert Moll” by Andreas Sommer. Sommer details the defamatory treatment that Schrenck-Notzing received from a skeptic named Albert Moll, who pulled many a dirty trick in his efforts to discredit Schrenck-Notzing, acting with all the fairness of a prosecutor at the Salem witch trials. Some comments of Sommers at the end of his paper are well worth reading:

"Paul Feyerabend, the great enfant terrible of the philosophy of science, once cautioned that western science, which is said to have started as a movement of liberation to overcome ideological suppression by religion, was turning into an institution with problematic power structures not unlike that of the medieval Church itself: ‘The very same enterprise that once gave man the ideas and the strength to free himself from the fears and prejudices of a tyrannical religion now turns him into a slave of its interest.’ In support of Feyerabend’s concern there is strong evidence that the pathologisation of ‘paranormal belief’, and the defamation of parapsychological researchers and other scientific heretics as intrinsically incompetent, fraudulent or otherwise intellectually or morally deficient, is a dominant academic tradition that still goes strong.....Nowadays, the heirs of Moll have institutionalised themselves into popular ‘sceptics’ organisations, several of whose activists make a comfortable living as self-appointed watchdogs of science..... Analysing popular ‘sceptics’ organisations, several of whose activists have been shown to engage regularly in intellectual dishonesty in the name of ‘science’, ‘reason’ and ‘civilisation’, sociological studies raise concerns regarding the embracing and support of self-styled popular guardians of science by major scientists and philosophers....Stirred by the above observations, the aim of the present historical case study has been to show the historical and current relevance of certain forms of scientific dogmatism as a problem that deserves focused academic attention. For to tolerate its (very real) effects is not only to risk the destruction of careers of potential scientific innovators, it also threatens to undermine basic ideals and requirements for science to maintain and fulfill its role as an intrinsically progressive rather than ideologically regressive project: self-criticism, epistemic pluralism, and intellectual freedom."

Juliette Alexandre-Bisson participated in the long experiments involving Marthe Beraud. She wrote in French a 400-page book on the topic: the book "Les phénomenès dits de matérialisation : étude expérimentale," which you can read using the link below:

https://archive.org/details/lesphnomensd00biss/page/n5/mode/2up

As in Schrenck-Notzing's book, the medium Marthe Beraud is referred to as Eva C. or Eva Carrière in Alexandre-Bisson's book. The book has photographs as remarkable as those in Schrenck-Notzing's book.