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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?

#71

Post by musingsole »

FrameworkFred wrote: post #56
argomo wrote: post #13

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…

^This...exactly. This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...) is a very real thing that has been used for inducing behavioral modification effects.

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

#72

Post by musingsole »

fifnir wrote: post #52
hackinthebochs wrote: post #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 br…

>Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. That's not necessarily true. We experience vision as a unified whole as well, but we have a blind spot as well. How would you argue that consciousness is a seamless whole and not just the illusion of one?

You also have an argument with saccades, not just the eye's blind spot.

And in looking closely at electrical currents, is there really an entity or is it just a of collection independent electrons acting on each other?

Still, to look at the current and imagine that collective action creates a higher order entity (like the water in a river) is really poetic -- even if it doesn't turn out to be the case.

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

#73

Post by shrimp_emoji »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31
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…

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…

What would constitute "unconscious"?

Having your performance degraded to the level of a chaotic, finite state machine? (Or is one of those also conscious?)

Inability to pass the Turing test? (But then "unconscious" [???] machines can pass that.)

Consciousness is such a meme.

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

#74

Post by lukeplato »

lokimedes wrote: post #48
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…

Even as a physicist (sorry) I can see a clear evolutionary utility of consciousness. If all organisms as a rule are guided towards an optimal state (survival, reproduction, etc.) based on sensory input and a learned world model, then the second order evolutionary trait that would help an organism the most is executive access to the optimizer itself or the ability to synthesize a phase space of possibilities through i…

This was really well stated. Are you actively doing any work on this theory?

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

#76

Post by TheHideout »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #32
TheHideout wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I absolutely agree. It might open some doors for further testing though.

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

#77

Post by entitydc »

bigbubba wrote: post #59
hackinthebochs wrote: post #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 br…

> Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole I disagree, it seems to be totally disrupted by general anesthesia. Having experienced it, from my perspective it was time travel in a way that normal sleep never is. When you wake up from sleep there is some perception of time passed, and therefore a sort of continuity. Not so under general anesthesia. The time spent under is simply gone without even leaving a sensa…

There are some interesting hypotheses around microtubules and their potential role in consciousness; this directly ties in with your comments around anesthesia - I've certainly had a similar subjective experience under anesthesia, when compared to other forms of consciousness disruption (sleep, psychedelics, and seizures).

This talk is definitely out on the fringes, but I find it interesting for stimulating thinking about a lot of this: https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/video/a-brief-history-o...

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

#78

Post by amarte »

captainmuon wrote: post #58
DennisP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve."

I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.

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

#79

Post by raducu »

captainmuon wrote: post #58
DennisP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

The problem with qualia, as I understand it, is that we can build machines that process images, and in the future let's say, can exceed what cat is capable of, but that machine will never actually have sensations.

So there are two issues: what sensations actually are and why was it necessary for life to have those sensations, after all, a robot cat would do just fine without any sensation, just processing the inputs and reacting to those inputs.

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

#80

Post by glial »

laborat wrote: post #54
glial wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FYI, there's a paper that claims exactly this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20658859/

Thanks!
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