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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?

#121

Post by abeppu »

mjangle1985 wrote: post #22
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…

Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind? I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.

Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness?

My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop them?

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

#123

Post by analog31 »

DennisP wrote: post #92
captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We coul…

Something that might help laypeople like myself, would be to relate them to the colors of things. That's the third dimension in this puzzle. There are wavelengths, and we have nerve impulses, but in addition, things interact with wavelengths in different ways.

Talking about wavelengths and electrical impulses seems too abstract. Let's talk about a tomato. Do you experience a 450 nm (or maybe 550 to be fair) tomato the way I experience a 700 nm tomato?

Do we have qualia for empty and full? Do you experience an empty beer bottle the way I experience a full beer bottle?

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

#124

Post by micksabox »

I would be thrilled to hear somebody's theory of consciousness that takes into account the following axioms:

1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff.

2. Consciousness affects matter. The water crystal experiments by Masaru Emoto(b) are the simplest and least fringe example. Project love, hate, anger, etc. to water results in changes to the crystal structure of water when frozen.

I tried to keep it as non-fringey and simple as possible. If you consider these, it leads to the framework that consciousness is not emergent from the physical brain but is instead a field or carrier-wave from somewhere else and brains act like antenna receivers.

References a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project b. https://mitte.co/2019/10/14/the-curious-study-of-water-consc...

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

#125

Post by mjangle1985 »

abeppu wrote: post #121
mjangle1985 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind? I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.

Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness? My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop th…

>then why should physical life develop them?

The comparison I've always liked is the "steam whistle set off by a locomotive". The steam whistle has no causal efficacy on the locomotive but is a waste byproduct of a steam engine.

Consciousness shouldn't have any causal effect on physical processes (assuming a strictly materialist framework), if it's explained as a byproduct of functioning physical processes it tends to deal with the issues 'consciousness' has that are in inherently in conflict with strict materialism.

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

#126

Post by aeternum »

DennisP wrote: post #92
captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We coul…

If you consider a brain as a sparsely connected graph then it also explains these experiences. The nodes nearby to the color blue perception nodes are those that we think of as clearly related (sky, water, certain crayons), but also those that are less directly related: water, cold, sadness.

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

#127

Post by treeman79 »

thechao wrote: post #95
DennisP wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We coul…

> You get a pattern of electrical impulses. Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure. Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexi…

I like that idea that at a deeper level quantum computing matters in the brain. Add a few digits to the layers of complexity.

P I’m a Bnb

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

entitydc wrote: post #77
bigbubba wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by superkuh »

No. There's no evidence for that. There's an incredible mountain of evidence supporting the idea that neuronal action potentials are. The currents in neurons aren't even in the direction of the action potential propagation. They're perpendicular to it and only over a handful of tens of nanometers. Yes, the substrate of our macroscopic reality is dominated by electromagnetics but the brain isn't a very conductive place.

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

#130

Post by ajkjk »

micksabox wrote: post #124

I would be thrilled to hear somebody's theory of consciousness that takes into account the following axioms: 1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff. 2. Cons…

Sure, but... why would you consider them?
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