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Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

nautil.us

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Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#11

Post by CarelessExpert »

naringas wrote: post #7
CarelessExpert wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique. This explains, for example, the complexity of language. But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our…

> Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims [...] makes us unique. counter-example: thermites, ants, bees.

Good point!

I feel what humanity is capable of is on a whole other level, though, as we combine collective action with shared goals, novelty/intelligence, etc.

But I won't claim that's a well articulated argument.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#12

Post by usrusr »

everdrive wrote: post #5
bserge wrote: post #2

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and…

>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex

Yeah, I think it's as simple as you start modeling entities in the world around you, for making predictions when deciding on behavior, then include a self in that model.

Start simple, "there's delicious food lodged between those fingers and if the fingers relax the food will fall to the ground, falling food is bad, don't relax those fingers", then add depth. Eventually you reach a point where you also model peer animal entities ("if food falls because fingers relax, that guy will take it") and from there it's only a very small steps to also model a "self" to go with all those "others". That's basic consciousness. At this point you are only a few linguistic principles away from diving into philosophy.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#13

Post by argomo »

Yes, let's move the soul from being an emergent property of the staggeringly complex arrangement of billions of neurons to their electromagnetic byproducts. It's cool because instead of grappling with the consequences of material reality we can satisfy our dualists instincts by ascribing consciousness to mystic energy despite it being equally mechanistic in the eyes of modern science.

I want to see the college debate where the negative position fires a HERF gun and asks the audience if they feel like they just lost their souls. (Given our mobile phone addictions, many might say yes.)

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#15

Post by lordnacho »

bserge wrote: post #2

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and…

Apparently be models are improved by adding a kind of attention to them. I thought that was a good way to think of it.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#16

Post by svachalek »

naringas wrote: post #7
CarelessExpert wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique. This explains, for example, the complexity of language. But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our…

> Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims [...] makes us unique. counter-example: thermites, ants, bees.

These insects are pre-coded to fill a certain niche in their society. A human is born into a role to some degree but can use intelligence to change that role as well. This requires some ability to reason about the self, and to some extent being able to reason about the self improves the ability to reason about others.

I often see the question asked as "what if there was something that behaved just like you, but without consciousness, isn't it just as evolutionarily fit?" But it presupposes that such a creature could exist, and a creature that behaves like a conscious one without consciousness seems like a bizarrely inefficient solution to me.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#17

Post by DennisP »

TheHideout wrote: post #8

Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contrib…

There are actually two problems, that people often mix up. One is how we get a sense of self, which I think is what you're talking about. Another is how qualia, like the perception of color, arise at all. Nobody seems to have any idea how that happens; we have no way to map some arrangement of atoms to a perception and prove from first principles that one leads to another.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#18

Post by glial »

TheHideout wrote: post #8

Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contrib…

Thanks for sharing. My own pet theory is very similar to yours: humans evolved consciousness in order to ‘observe’ our cognitive and emotional state, so that we can build models and apply them to reason about other people’s cognitive and emotional states. It’s hard to have ‘theory of mind’ about someone else when you don’t have access to your own mind to start with.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#19

Post by ordu »

bserge wrote: post #2

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and…

> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious.

But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#20

Post by rzodkiew »

bserge wrote: post #2

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and…

It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future.

Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.

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