Complex Numbers

Conscious

Well, today ends April. Tomorrow of course is May Day, or Beltane, or, if you must, May 1. I'm barely conscious, so here's an article about consciousness.

Controversial New Theory Says Human Consciousness Is ... Electromagnetic?  
It may sound crazy, but it's based on science.

At least it's an alternative to the unsatisfying theory of panpsychism.

Could the thorny question of human consciousness be answered by simple electromagnetic waves?

If the problem is hard, the solution is rarely simple. Elegant, maybe. But not "simple." And the problem of "What is consciousness?" is famously hard.

One improbably dualist scientist believes so, and he suggests the human mind is a combination of physical matter and electromagnetic field.

As the article notes, dualism is nothing new, but where does the electromagnetic field come from?

This is a big question, and the proposed answer here is controversial.

I want to note that "controversial" doesn't mean "a scientist said so, but Billy Smith with a high school education says it ain't common sense; therefore, it's controversial." No, it means "scientists are debating this."

The University of Surrey’s Johnjoe McFadden “posits that consciousness is in fact the brain’s energy field,” the university says in a statement, making McFadden’s dualism a question of matter and energy, the institution says—not the classic “body and mind” distinction.

Okay, but that implies that physical processes in the body power the energy field. Still not dualism, since the body is the power source.

Throughout history, philosophers around the world have tried to account for the special-seeming nature of human beings within the world or even, some fear, the entire universe.

The only thing special about us seems to be that we make tools to make tools. Some other animals make tools to do a task, and stop there. As far as anyone can tell, cats have consciousness too, and if this theory holds water, then it would also explain their mental processes.

Also, "fear?" More like "hope." And as I've said before, evolution doesn't necessarily produce technology-using beings, but it seems to favor consciousness.

From where does our robust self-awareness and sentience arise? People who believe everything is physically present and caused are called materialists, meaning there’s nothing extra that can’t be measured—what you see and touch is what humans are. Dualists instead believe there’s something extra.

I still don't see the dualism here. He's not postulating "something extra," but, basically, brain waves -- which, as the article notes, are measurable and quantifiable, at least to some extent.

That means as long as the human brain is alive, McFadden says, it generates an electrical glow in which the real nitty-gritty human stuff is happening. And the best part is that his theory is testable in the laboratory.

So, test it.

“There are of course many unanswered questions, such as degree and extent of synchrony required to encode conscious thoughts, the influence of drugs or anaesthetics on the cemi field or whether cemi fields are causally active in animal brains,” he explains in the paper.

It would be helpful if the article explained what he's calling "cemi," which it doesn't.

So, from my layman's perspective, it's a giant blob of nothing new. Perhaps there's more to it that the article doesn't cover (as with the "cemi" word), but my takeaway is: while a being is alive, their body generates energy, which is where cognition happens. When that being dies, the energy source shuts down. Classical dualism, as noted in the article, proposes a separate soul or spirit that lives on when the body dies, but this ain't that -- it's like, where does the light from a candle go when it's snuffed out? The light exists only in our memories, and echoes in the residual heat it generated.

And eventually those memories are snuffed out too.

I'm not saying the researcher is wrong, to be clear. This actually sounds more plausible than other ideas about consciousness, like (as I noted above) panpsychism. I'd like to see more work done on it. Solving the problem of "what is consciousness actually?" would be a Big Deal, but right now it's not even a theory; it's a hypothesis.