Bothered Skeptics Make a Toothless Attack on Parapsychology

The Skeptical Inquirer has recently published an essay entitled "Why Parapsychological Claims Cannot Be True."  The essay by Arthur Reber and James E. Alcock fires only blanks.  

The paper starts out by complaining at length that the American Psychologist (the flagship publication of the American Psychological Association) last year published a paper summarizing the evidence for psi effects such as ESP (extrasensory perception).  The paper (entitled "The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review") concluded the following:

"The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines, although there is no consensual understanding of them."

Reber and Alcock state that this paper "bothered us on several levels." We can understand why that would be true. Both Reber and Alcock have spent decades crusading against the overwhelming empirical evidence establishing psi phenomena such as extrasensory perception.  We can understand why they would be deeply irritated that this very solid scientific evidence is getting a little bit of the mainstream recognition that it richly deserves. 

Hard to judge fairly when you're this "bothered"

The authors then start off their attempt to discredit such evidence by stating, "It is not a matter of reviewing the existing database, scratching at the marginal and highly suspect findings of meta-analyses for something that passes the '< .05' cutoff point."  This statement clearly attempts to suggest that the evidence for phenomena such as extrasensory perception is only statistically marginal evidence that just barely passes the level of statistical significance.  Such an insinuation is extremely misleading. The laboratory evidence for psi is overwhelming, vastly greater than merely a marginal result. You can see extremely dramatic examples here,  here, here and here.  For example, in the Riess remote test of ESP, a subject scored with 73% accuracy on guessing 1850 cards, in a test in which the expected chance result was only 20%. 

We can excuse Reber and Alcock for being ignorant about such results, for they confess their refusal to examine the evidence on this topic.  The authors state the following:

"We did not examine the data for psi, to the consternation of the parapsychologist who was one of the reviewers. Our reason was simple: the data are irrelevant." 

I can only say that such a confession is completely consistent with the impression I got from reading Alcock's book entitled Belief. In reviewing that book, I noted that Alcock  "seems to show only a slight knowledge of the evidence for beliefs and alleged paranormal phenomena he criticizes."  But this is par for the course, since virtually no skeptics of the paranormal show any signs of having deeply studied the relevant literature. In this regard, they're like someone who doesn't know the difference between a fastball and a curve ball lecturing you on the impossibility of anyone ever hitting a home run.

There then follows the author's case attempting to argue that the effects so abundantly observed by parapsychologists in careful, controlled experiments cannot exist.  The authors say, "We identified four fundamental principles of science that psi effects, were they true, would violate: causality, time’s arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law."

Let's look at their statements about each of these things. 

Causality.  After a paragraph that merely evokes the principle that things have causes, the authors write the following:

'Within the study of psi, there are no causal mechanisms, and none have been hypothesized. Worse, there is virtually no discussion over whether the claimed effects have singular or multiple causal mechanisms or why the purported findings lack coherency. If psychokinesis affects the roll of dice in a psi lab, why not at craps tables? If telepathy exists, why are our brains not constantly abuzz with the thoughts of those around us? To maintain that the future puts in appearances—but only in psychology labs at Lund or Cornell—is to strain credulity to the snapping point. There are no patterns here. As we noted in our paper,  'It is as if actors from a dozen different plays have appeared on the same stage in a discordant farrago.' ”

The first statement is completely false.  Those who maintain that there is evidence for psi (things such as ESP) do not at all maintain that there are no causal mechanisms that might produce such a thing. A parapsychologist will typically maintain that we do not understand the causes of psi, but that is not equal to maintaining that there are no causes for it. It is also completely false to claim that "none have been hypothesized."  Parapsychology literature contains many speculations about possible causes of psi effects.  A simple hypothesis commonly made is that humans have a soul, and that psi effects are an aspect or capability of such a soul.   

The questions asked are simply unanswered questions. It is not at all true that something violates causality if we don't understand how it works. For centuries, people observed earthquakes, without having any understanding of what caused them; and for centuries people observed plagues without having any understanding of the microbes that cause them.  There was no valid causality argument against claiming that earthquakes or plagues existed prior to our understanding of them, and there is no valid causality argument in regard to psi phenomena such as ESP.  Such phenomena do have a cause, but we don't understand their cause.  It is very common in the history of science for things to be observed before we understand what caused them. As for the suggestion that parapsychologists claim that precognition only occurs in laboratories, it shows an ignorance of the literature, since there is much evidence suggesting precognition occurring outside of laboratories. 

Time's Arrow.  The authors state, "Within parapsychology time is turned upon itself, most glaringly in precognition."  This argument is toothless, because it is completely inapplicable to ESP (extrasensory perception). ESP or telepathy does not involve any "knowing the future" effect.  As for precognition, there is no clear case to be made that most results we have got suggesting precognition violate anything we know about the nature of time.  We don't understand the exact nature of time, and a wide variety of different theories about it are advanced by theoretical physicists.  The authors veer a little into a discussion of quantum mechanics. I may merely note that interpretations of quantum mechanics are rather "all over the map," so it is not at all clear that anything we know about quantum mechanics rules out experimental evidence for precognition. Clumsily, the authors quote physicist Richard Feynmann as saying, "It is safe to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." That quote argues against the claim they are trying to establish, that physics rules out precognition.  The authors don't have any formal training in regard to the very deep, subtle and esoteric topics of quantum mechanics and the nature of time, so there's no reason why we should think their opinion on these topics has any weight. 

Thermodynamics.  The authors (who are not knowledgeable about thermodynamics) do not say anything in their paragraph about thermodynamics that argues the slightest bit against psi phenomena, precognition or extrasensory perception.  

Inverse square law.  The authors state, "In telepathy, the distance between the two linked persons is never reported to be a factor, a claim that violates the principle that signal strength falls off with the square of the distance traveled."  This generalization is not correct. Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception among family members living nearby are actually far more common than reports of extrasensory perception between people living in different continents.  So you do have a hint of a kind of an "inverse square" effect going on.  Since we do not understand how telepathy works, there is no reason why it has to follow an inverse square law.  The issue of "dropping off with distance" has received little attention by parapsychology researchers, so we don't have any clear verdict in the literature about whether ESP does or does not follow an inverse square law. 

We also know of physical effects involving quantum entanglement that do not follow an inverse square law.  The authors comment on this, but any attempt by them to assert any expertise on this very subtle and obscure matter is not credible. They are not physicists or mathematicians, and their opinion on quantum entanglement carries no weight.

Judging from their statements, the authors are apparently unaware that two of the four fundamental forces of nature do not follow an inverse square law.  While gravitation and electromagnetism follow an inverse square law, neither the strong nuclear force nor the weak nuclear force follow an inverse square law, as is made clear on this expert answers page. Since there is no rule of physics that effects have to follow an inverse square law, it is fallacious to argue that psi effects such as ESP or mind-over-matter cannot exist because they do not follow an inverse square law.

Closing their argument, the authors state, "In short, parapsychology cannot be true unless the rest of science isn’t." That claim is false, and the authors have done nothing to establish it.   They have not established that any single finding of science would be overturned if psi effects such as ESP exist. The authors then veer into some very weak reasoning:

"Moreover, if psi effects were real, they would have already fatally disrupted the rest of the body of science. If one’s wishes and hopes were having a psychokinetic impact on the world—including computers and lab equipment—scientists’ findings would be routinely biased by their hopes and beliefs. Results would differ from lab to lab whenever scientists had different aims." 

The existence of psychokinesis (mind-over-matter) certainly does not imply that scientists would be unconsciously influencing the machines or subjects they are working on by subconsciously using psychokinesis.  And it is actually largely true that the results of scientists are "routinely biased by their hopes and beliefs" and that results "differ from lab to lab whenever scientists had different aims,"  regardless of whether mind-over-matter does or does not exist.  So as a reductio-ad-absurdum argument, this argument fails completely.  A good reductio-ad-absurdum argument says, "X must be false because it implies Y, and Y must be false." In this case, the X does not imply the Y, and we know the Y is largely true.  So we have a double failure of the attempted reductio-ad-absurdum argument.

I don't know which is more lame, the attempts of Reber and Alcock to assert generalizations about psi phenomena such as ESP after confessing "we did not examine the data for psi," or their attempts to lecture us on physics, quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement (extremely subtle and esoteric mathematical topics they have never formally studied, and have never written about at any real length). We can find in Brian Josephson an example of a physics Nobel-prize winner who believes in both the possibility and the likelihood of psi phenomena. 

The authors have done nothing to substantiate the claims that psi phenomena are impossible. In particular, the authors have not presented the slightest reason for thinking that the best-established psi phenomenon (extrasensory perception or telepathy) is impossible.  Their only comment relevant to ESP was their inaccurate suggestion that effects must follow an inverse-square law, a suggestion that is false because we know that two of the four fundamental forces of nature (the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force) do not follow such a law. 

Postscript: See pages 593 to 643 of the .pdf file here for other writers' rebuttals of Reber and Alcock. 

“Nature's Deepest Secrets” or Just Mist-Castles in the Clouds?

A new book by Graham Farmelo has a title brimming with triumphalist hubris. The title is The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets. The book is a reverent treatment of speculative physics in which mathematicians and physicists create intricate realms of conjecture that have little contact with empirical reality: things like supersymmetry theory and string theory.

It is rather misleading to be using the term “modern math” to refer to things like string theory and supersymmetry. Speculative and unverified theories in physics should not be called math or mathematics, since those terms have such connotations of certainty. Such theories should be called physics theories that use mathematics. There is no basis for claiming that such theories have in any sense “revealed nature's deepest secrets.” “Reveal” is a word to be used when an observational discovery has been made. There have been no observational discoveries made to support theories such as supersymmetry and string theory.  The universe has not spoken in numbers to give us string theory or supersymmetry theory.  It is merely speculating physicists who have spoken in numbers to give us such things. 

On page 174 Farmelo quotes the eminent physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow as saying, “In Europe, supersymmetry seems to be a religion.” This is a very revealing quote that Farmelo should have carefully pondered, but it seems to have gone in one of Farmelo's ears and out the other. He has no insight into the sociological and groupthink factors involved in the cult-like cliques of modern theoretical physics.

Farmelo admits on page 249 that there is no evidence for string theory, saying that “it is disappointing that the framework has not yet made direct contact with experiments.” But Farmelo still supports it. He says on that page, “In my view, it is both wise and prudent to trust the judgment of the overwhelming majority of the world's leading theoretical physicists, who are confident that this theory is well worth pursuing.”

This is the kind of very dubious ad populum argument that people use to try to get you to believe in theories for which there is little or no evidence. Such an argument will typically make some dubious claim about the popularity of some theory among some group of scientists, without providing any actual hard polling data showing that the theory has the popularity that is being claimed. Are there actually any polls of “the world's leading theoretical physicists” in which they assert that string theory is true or “well worth pursuing”? I doubt it. And since Farmelo has told us that a leading physicist said that supersymmetry (a leading physics theory) “seems to be a religion” in Europe, why should we not believe that the popularity of string theory is like the popularity of some religion, something based in sociology and groupthink rather than sound judgment?

On page 251 Farmelo says, “Some undeniably first-rate thinkers – including Gerard 't Hooft, Sheldon Glashow and Roger Penrose – worry from their different perspectives that theoretical physics has taken a wrong turn towards sterile, ultra-mathematical approaches, many of which have become divorced from reality.” But Farmelo ignores such criticism. On page 250 he predicts that supersymmetry will “sooner or later, be demonstrated experimentally to be a fundamental feature of the laws of nature.” He gives no reason at all for predicting this other than saying “such a discovery would help to justify the faith of many theoreticians that beautiful mathematics serves as a useful lodestar,” referring to a star that guides a ship on which direction to move. So we should believe in theories simply because they seem to have beautiful mathematics? That doesn't make sense.

We get a contrary view from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:

"And not only is there no historical evidence that beauty and elegance are good guides to find correct theories, there isn’t even a theory for why that should be so. There’s no reason to think that our sense of beauty has any relevance for discovering new fundamental laws of nature."

This year cosmologist Ethan Siegel had a post entitled “Why Supersymmetry May Be the Greatest Failed Prediction in Particle Physics History.” Referrring to supersymmetry theory under its acronym of SUSY, Siegel states, “No reasonable person can justifiably conclude that SUSY is supported by the evidence.” He also states the following:

"There's a large and powerful group of (mostly) theorists who will go to their graves as true believers in not only SUSY, but electroweak-scale SUSY, regardless of what the evidence says. Yet with every new proton the LHC collides, we see the same answer again and again: no SUSY. No matter how often we fool ourselves, nor how many scientists get fooled, nature is the ultimate arbiter of reality. The experiments do not lie. As of today, there is no experimental evidence in favor of SUSY."

I guess we can put down Farmelo as one of the true believers who will go to their graves believing that the supersymmetry theory is true. We should note the tendency of certain people in the world of physics to develop life-long attachments to dubious unproven theories, a tendency that also exists very abundantly in the world of biology.

There are several reasons why the “beauty” argument for supersymmetry is not convincing. One reason is that there are always millions of possible ways in which the physics of nature could be configured in a beautiful manner. So if you imagine some hypothetical configuration of particle physics that seems beautiful to you, you have no basis for saying, “This must be how nature really is, because it's so beautiful.” There will be always be a million other possible ways that nature could be configured on a fundamental level, that would be just as beautiful as what you imagined.

Similarly, I may imagine some very beautiful design that Heaven might have, but it would be foolish for me to say, “This is so beautiful, it must be how Heaven looks.” For even if we assume that there must be a beautiful Heaven, there would always be a million other beautiful designs that such a Heaven might have.

The other reason why the “beauty” argument for supersymmetry is not convincing is that supersymmetry isn't really very beautiful at all. The theory has a little symmetry, but it's not very beautiful because it isn't a functional symmetry. The hypothetical “superparticles” imagined by supersymmetry theory are not necessary for our existence. So while supersymmetry imagines a symmetry situation, the situation is not a functional symmetry, so it isn't particularly beautiful.

There actually exists a functional symmetry in the fundamental layout of nature, a beautiful exact symmetry that is very necessary for our existence. This symmetry is the fact that the electric charge on each electron in the universe is the very exact opposite of the electric charge on each proton in the universe. This is both a symmetry and a functional symmetry. If such an exact symmetry did not exist, the laws of chemistry would not work, our bodies would not hold together, and planets and stars would not be able to hold together (as the electromagnetic repulsion of particles in them would overwhelm the gravitational attraction that holds them together).

Our theoretical physicists virtually never talk about this very exact and functional symmetry that we know exists in nature. Instead, they spend a thousand times more time talking about imaginary, non-functional symmetries for which there is no evidence. Go figure.

Not really beautiful, because it's not a functional symmetry

One Day's Dubious Stories at a Science News Web Site

Major websites make money from online ads. So the more people click on a link to some science story, the more money the website makes. Nowadays science news sites have a tremendous financial incentive to hype and exaggerate science stories. If they have a link saying, “Borderline results from new neuron study,” they may make only five dollars from that story. But if they have a story saying, “Astonishing breakthrough unveils the brain secret of memory,” they may make five hundred dollars from that story. With such a situation, it is no wonder that the hyping and exaggeration of scientific research is at epidemic levels.

Part of the problem is university press offices, which nowadays are shameless in exaggerating the importance of research done at their university. They know the more some scientific research is hyped, the more glory and attendees will flow to their university.

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.

We can get a good idea of how bad the science hype problem has become by looking at misleading or dubious news articles available on a single day at a major science news site, www.sciencedaily.com. The day I found these articles was June 22, 2019. ScienceDaily.com is a site that gets revenue from ads. On this day I found three ads on the front page of the site, two peddling a car lease, and the other peddling a Samsung smartphone. The more sensational and enticing the claims made on ScienceDaily.com, the more money the site will make from people clicking on its ads. 

One of the misleading ScienceDaily.com stories on June 22 had this headline: “Two new Earth-like planets discovered near Teegarden's Star.” Until life is discovered on another planet, it will always be misleading to describe another planet as “Earth-like.” A planet is only like the Earth if life has been discovered on the planet. But no one has discovered life on these two planets near Teegarden's Star, nor anywhere else in space. They haven't even discovered water on either of these planets. The correct way to describe planets such as the two planets near Teegarden's Star is to call them “Earth-sized planets,” not Earth-like planets.

Another of the doubtful stories on ScienceDaily.com on June 22 had this headline: “Origin of life: A prebiotic route to DNA.” Prebiotic means “before life existed.” The concept of DNA existing before life existed is nonsensical, and the news story does nothing to substantiate such an idea. The story merely talks about a hypothetical pathway by which some of the chemical sub-units of DNA may have arisen, some chemical sub-units called nucleosides. Nucleosides are to DNA like individual characters (A, B, and so forth) are to a book. So the Science News article should have been entitled “A prebiotic route to DNA building blocks,” not “A prebiotic route to DNA.”

Another of the dubious stories on ScienceDaily.com on June 22 had this headline: “Your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept.” The article discusses a scientific paper that presents no robust evidence showing that your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept. As Figure 3 of the paper makes clear, “Neither the RSA neural score a–b nor the univariate neural score c–d from the first fMRI run significantly differentiated the participants by group, and neither was significantly predictive of concept knowledge.” 

The study authors played around with three different arbitrarily contrived "neural score" calculation algorithms. The first two algorithms (consisting of 4 or 5 steps) failed to show any evidence that brains reflect a subject's knowledge, as we see from the line I just quoted.  The third algorithm was an extremely complicated and arbitrary 7-step algorithm, including various selections  and assignments in which scientists were free to choose whatever they wanted, and quite a lot of complex statistical manipulation and transformation.  This extremely convoluted algorithm produced a "statistically significant" difference between two study groups with different knowledge levels -- something that could easily have occurred purely because of chance data variations.  This smells like a case of "keep torturing the data until it confesses."  The authors give no justification for why we should accept this convoluted algorithm as a valid way of computing a "neural score" related to knowledge, rather than a million other possible ways someone could compute such a score. 

Here is how such a study should have been done. First, the study should have been a preregistered study that stated and justified a single simple straightforward method for computing the "neural score,"  decided on before any data was gathered.  Such a method should not have allowed any possibility for arbitrary selection. Then the study should have used a blinding protocol, in which analysts did not know whether the fMRI brain scans they were looking at were from a group of people with the relevant concept knowledge, or a group of people without such knowledge.  Then the study should have  reported the results only using the single pre-determined method for computing the "neural score,"  rather than giving the analysts freedom to play around with neural score calculation methods until the desired result was achieved. Also, the study should have used a minimum of 15 subjects per study group. Apparently none of these things was done.  

Another of the very dubious stories on June 22 had a headline of “Plate tectonics may have driven 'Cambrian Explosion.'"   When we examine the fossil record, we don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years ago. Instead, we see very little fossil evidence of life prior to the Cambrian era about 540 million years ago. But during the Cambrian era there is an enormous surge of fossils in the fossil record. This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is known as the Cambrian Explosion.

The major groupings of life are called phyla. There are about 35 animal phyla, and almost all of these phyla appeared during the Cambrian era. There is not a single animal phylum that has arisen since about the time of the Cambrian era, which lasted from about 540 million years ago to 485 million years ago. As one research paper states, “The youngest animal phylum is about 500 million-year-old.”

This creates quite a problem for Darwinian theory, as it is not what such a theory predicts. According to Darwinian ideas, what we should have seen is more and more phyla appearing as time progressed, as more and more branches appeared in a tree of life, like the tree of life that appeared as an illustration in The Origin of Species. In fact, Darwin said in The Origin of Species that the Cambrian Explosion “may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”

The June 22nd science news story about plate tectonics and the Cambrian Explosion suggests a laughable idea: that geological activity produced lots of oxygen, and that this oxygen caused the enormous burst of biological origins that was the Cambrian Explosion.  We should chuckle at this puerile idea, and ask those who propose it: is that all you got? 

You don't explain something by merely mentioning a necessary condition for it. For example, if you were puzzled by  extraterrestrial monsters suddenly appearing in the international space station, you wouldn't explain their appearance by saying that the oxygen in the space station was necessary for their existence.  So it is nonsensical to have a headline suggesting that some oxygen-producing geological event was the cause of a huge information explosion involving a vast burst of biological innovation that produced almost all animal phyla. 

The news story in question also made a claim about oxygen very inconsistent with a science news story earlier this year in which we read the following:

A study by University of California, Berkeley geochemists presents new evidence that high levels of oxygen were not critical to the origin of animals. The researchers found that the transition to a world with an oxygenated deep ocean occurred between 540 and 420 million years ago.

The Cambrian Explosion is dated at about 540 million years ago. 

Another of the very dubious stories on the June 22 “Science Daily” site had the title “Ultimate destiny: How undifferentiated cells commit to their biological fate.” The news article repeatedly tried to persuade us that cells make decisions. Here are some excerpts:

The human body is made up of hundreds of cell types exquisitely specialized to perform their jobs with great precision. This complexity, however, belies the fact that each of the trillions of highly specialized cells start out as a single primordial cell. How do these primitive, undifferentiated cells choose their ultimate destiny?...The findings....show that cells face multiple competing choices on their journey to adulthood and perform a series of binary decisions until they reach a final destination....The research reveals that neural crest cells' decisions occur in three phases: activation of competing genetic programs vying for the cell's attention, gradual biasing toward one of these programs and the cell's ultimate commitment...To retrace the decision making of these primitive cells as they diverge into different areas of specialization, the investigators used single-cell sequencing...As cells decide on a path, one genetic program becomes stronger, while the competing one gets weaker, allowing the cell to move toward its chosen path. The analysis shows that cells face a series of binary choices, with each subsequent decision further narrowing the choice of specialization.

Of course, this is mostly bunk and baloney. A cell never makes a decision, contrary to the frequent assertions of this news story. Only conscious agents make decisions. Also, there are no genetic programs offering different specialization paths for cells. Neither genes nor DNA specifies the structure of any cell. DNA does not even fully specify any of the proteins that are the building blocks of cells. DNA merely specifies the low-level polypeptide sequence (amino acid sequence) that is the starting point of a protein molecule, before protein folding occurs for unknown reasons.

So how is it that generic cells become different types of specialized cells? That's a great mystery that we don't understand. We don't even understand what causes cells to divide. We should not pretend that we know something we do not, by inventing mythological narratives about cells engaging in decision making and deliberation.  It is reasonable to suspect that the mysterious workings of cells (so inexplicable from a bottom-up perspective) are the result of some unfathomable top-down influence, but we have no understanding of how such an influence could work.  

Cell differentiation by Halleyfournier for Wikipedia Commons

Cell differentiation is simply one of a host of mysteries scientists do not understand. See here for 50 other such mysteries. 

There was so much error and doubtful hype on the Science Daily web site on June 22, 2019, with five dubious or misleading headlines or stories. This type of thing is partially the blame of university press offices, and partially the blame of headline writers who sometimes "sex up" science news stories that may have already been "sexed up" by a university press office. 

Similar problems occur at the Daily Galaxy site (www.dailygalaxy.com), which sometimes has misleading headlines with made-up quotes not matching the words of any person in the article under the headline. An example on June 26 was their story, "Non-Biological Origin of Life –'Ancient Proteins Embedded in Meteorites.' ” The story presented no evidence whatsoever that proteins have been discovered in meteorites, nor did it quote anyone who thinks that any meteorite ever had a protein. The story merely discussed chemical fragments a thousand times simpler than a protein.  

At least on www.sciencedaily.com the ads are clearly marked as ads (although in a grayish-white "Advertisement" announcement that is just barely visible). But on the very widely read www.reddit.com "subreddits" such as www.reddit.com/r/science,  we have ads that are blended in with the science news headlines.  Unless you are aware that the word "promoted" refers to an ad,  you are likely to be completely confused about which headlines are news stories and which headlines are ads. How can we regard any site following such a presentation policy as a trustworthy source of information? 

Postscript: The sciencedaily.com story here is an example of an extremely misleading story on that site.  The story had the title "Sound waves boost older adults' memory, deep sleep" and the subtitle "Pink noise synced to brain waves deepens sleep and triples memory scores in older adults." Such a thing would be a huge breakthrough if it were, but it isn't true at all.  The actual results are shown in Table 2 of the study.  The 13 subjects given the sound waves and the "pink noise synced to brain waves" recalled 52.1 percent of the words, and the subjects given a "sham" treatment without such waves recalled 47.8 percent of the words. Instead of doing 300% better with the sound waves, the subjects did only 8% better, a result that could easily have been due to pure chance with so few subjects tested. 

So Many Better Arguments Against Materialism Than the One He Uses

At the Aeon web site, we recently had an essay entitled “Minding Matter.” Under that title we read a subtitle or “teaser text” that reads, “The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics seems to rest on shaky metaphysical ground.” Materialism is actually a position in philosophy rather than physics. Materialism is the claim that matter or mass-energy is all that exists, and according to such a position your mind is purely a product of your brain (or perhaps just an aspect of your brain).

I was interested in what argument or arguments the author (the astrophysicist Adam Frank) would present against materialism. But the only argument Frank gave was one of the weakest arguments anyone could use against materialist claims about the mind. It was an argument that can be summarized like this: “We can't be sure that minds are produced by matter (or that minds are just some aspect of matter), because we're not really sure what matter is.”

Frank discusses at some length the fact that while nineteenth century scientists regarded atoms as being solid little balls of matter, we now know that atoms are made of smaller particles such as electrons, protons and neutrons; and a particle such as an electron has a kind of “fuzzy” nature , so we can't be sure exactly what it is. This is partially because of quantum mechanics, the modern theory of subatomic reality. There are different interpretations of quantum mechanics that disagree with each other, so we cannot be sure of the exact nature of matter on the lowest level. Frank states this: “We know that matter remains mysterious just as mind remains mysterious, and we don’t know what the connections between those mysteries should be."

This is one of the weakest arguments I can imagine against the materialist claim that brains make minds or that minds are just an aspect of brains. The argument does nothing to provide evidence against such a claim, but merely raises a kind of weak question mark suggesting that maybe such a claim isn't certain.

The weakness of Frank's argument can be shown by the fact that what he mentions can be used (with equally weak force) in a way exactly opposite to the way he has used it. For example, a materialist could argue like this:

“Now, it may seem impossible to believe that matter could produce minds if matter consists of hard solid atoms that are like little billiard balls. But quantum mechanics clouds the waters. For example, we don't really know what an electron is. Since we don't really have understanding at the lowest level of what matter is, who is to say that it could not be producing mind?”

If Frank had actually wanted to argue against the claim that minds are merely the product of brains, or an aspect of brains, there are many arguments that he could have used far stronger than the “weak tea” argument he has used. Such arguments are presented in my blog site www.headtruth.blogspot.com. Below are some of these arguments, but not all of them:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.
2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.
3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.
4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.
5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.
6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.
7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a mental effect. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.
8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 
9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.
10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.
11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.
12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.
13. The very strong laboratory evidence for psi (most notably extrasensory perception) shows that humans have abilities that cannot be explained by neural activity, and that must involve some higher consciousness reality beyond the brain.
14. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head.
15. Well-documented evidence for apparitions provides evidence that the human mind is not merely the result of brain activity. Such evidence includes (1) more than 100 cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, only to very soon learn that the corresponding person had died (as discussed here, here, here and here); (2) many additional cases of apparitions seen by multiple observers, contrary to the explanation of hallucination (discussed here and here); (3) many other cases of death-bed apparitions as discussed here and documented by researchers such as Haraldsson and Osis. 
16. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.
17.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

These things all indicate that our minds and memory (or paranormal phenomena) must be the result of some spiritual or immaterial aspect of man or some soul aspect of man, in direct contradiction to the position of materialism that such a thing does not exist. 

Postscript: Discussing hemispherectomy operations in which half of a brain is removed to stop seizures, the paper here states,  "Others, (Ogden, 1988; Riva & Gazzaniga, 1986; Vargha-Khadem et al., 1997a; Verity, 1982) have reported excellent, even normal linguistic abilities after hemispherectomy of either side" of the brain. An interesting scientific paper is entitled, "When only the right hemisphere is left: Studies in language and communication." The study gives us an in-depth analysis of a subject named BL who as a child had half of his brain removed (the left half) in a hemispherectomy operation to reduce seizures.  The paper tells us that BL has "above normal intelligence" and that he graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in business and sociology.  In a battery of tests of memory and language, the subject showed normal results, with only slight, subtle defecits. He scored above-average on a few memory-related tests, such as the Boston Naming Test and the Famous Names and Faces test.  We are told, "Regarding speech, language, and communicative function, BL's performance appears grossly normal in pronunciation, grammar, semantics, and usage." 

A study such as this helps to debunk dogmas such as the dogma that the brain is the source of our minds.  You can read about many similar cases by following the links above.  Referring to patients who had half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations, the paper states, "The numerous observations on cognitively intact persons hemispherectomized in childhood bring to mind the report of Lorber (1983) on hydrocephalic adults, whose brains are constituted of only a thin layer of cerebral tissue, and yet who enjoy normal or superior motor and cognitive abilities." Talking about the small effect of hemispherectomy operations in which half of a brain is removed, a doctor states, "When you take out half of their brain in one sitting it’s as if they weren’t touched." When will our neuroscientists start putting two and two together to reach the conclusion that is taught by such observational facts?