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

nautil.us

31–40 of 172 posts

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

#31

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…

That doesn't sound right to me at all.

To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still be capable of seeking goals, and of abstract thought. They would still have moral standing and personal dignity - it would be immoral to mistreat them, and we would consider that human rights still apply to them.

We are deeply social animals, and this is integral to our sense of self as we usually see it, but I'm not convinced it's integral to consciousness.

I have a similar objection to your second point. Lacking a sense of personal narrative and timeline would constitute a serious disability, but would not render a person unconscious. If you had total retrograde amnesia, you would still be conscious.

I see the same problem with your third point. I'm confident that, under the right concoction of psychotropics, my mental function could be degraded to the point that I would be unable to reason effectively about my future, or to make decisions, while still keeping me conscious. Someone suffering something akin to shell-shock might be unresponsive, but still conscious.

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

#32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how will you test your belief?

While not a test for the belief directly nor a test of consciousness, I would start with making a sufficiently advanced embodied reinforcement learning agent that can do each of these things on a super basic level, then test for emergent goal setting and seeking.

That would be an interesting exercise in computer science, but wouldn't show us that you'd correctly determined the criteria for consciousness.

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

#33

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…

This sounds similar to claims I've heard that consciousness arises from language. Taking a component of our cognition which is heavily intertwined with the rest of it and taking its ubiquity to imply some sort of primacy.

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

#36
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness:

The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness.

The brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.

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

#37

A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The br…

That seems like useless hair splitting. It's similar to pondering whether, in the cell of a DRAM chip, it is the electric field of the stored charge that is representing the 1 or 0 meaning, or whether it is the presence or absence of electron particles which is doing the representing.

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

#38
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…

> "Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke? " This suggests a common bias that you feel like the human species is the only one on this planet that has attained consciousness. Many other species are conscious, sentient, we just happen to the one that have gone into space. Regardless of it's a fluke or not it's clearly an advantage used by many species on the earth.

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

#39

A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The br…

Nonsense. Your DNA is made of atoms. Those are parts. Your cells are made of proteins and fats. Those are parts. Your computer is made of transistors and wires. Those are parts. Cities are made of people, buildings, and streets. Those are parts.
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