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The EM field theory of consciousness

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/does-consciousnes...etic-field

EXCERPTS (Johnjoe McFadden): . . . Every time a neuron fires, along with the matter-based signal that travels down its wire-like nerve fibre, it also projects a tiny electromagnetic (EM) pulse into the surrounding space, rather like the signal from your phone when you send a text. [...] These pulses flow into each other to generate a kind of pool of EM energy that’s called an electromagnetic field – something that neurobiologists have neglected when probing the nature of consciousness.

Neurobiologists have known about the brain’s EM field for more than a century but have nearly always dismissed it as having no more relevance to its workings than the exhaust of a car has to its steering. [...] However, I also had enough physics to know that there was a crucial difference between a million scattered neurons firing and the EM field generated by their firing. The information encoded by the million discrete bits of information in a million scattered neurons is physically unified within a single brain EM field.

The unity of EM fields is apparent whenever you use wifi. [...] Remarkably, all this information, whether movies, pictures, messages or music, is instantly available to be downloaded from any point in the vicinity of your router. This is because – unlike the information encoded in discrete units of matter such as computer gates or neurons – EM field information is encoded as immaterial waves that travel at the speed of light from their source to their receiver. Between source and receiver, all those waves encoding different messages overlap and intermingle to become a single EM field of physically bound information with as much unity as a single photon or electron, and which can be downloaded from any point in the field. The field, and everything encoded in it, is everywhere...

[...] Locating consciousness in the brain’s EM field might seem bizarre, but is it any more bizarre than believing that awareness resides in matter? ... Both are physical, but whereas matter encodes information as discrete particles separated in space, energy information is encoded as overlapping fields in which information is bound up into single unified wholes. Locating the seat of consciousness in the brain’s EM field thereby solves the binding problem of understanding how information encoded in billions of distributed neurons is unified in our (EM field-based) conscious mind.

It is a form of dualism, but a scientific dualism based on the difference between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit. Awareness is then what this joined-up EM field information feels like from the inside. So, for example, the experience of hearing a door slam is what an EM field perturbation in the brain that correlates with a door slamming, and all of its memory neuron-encoded associations, feels like, from the inside... (MORE - details)
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
If we ARE the EM field of our brain, then that speaks to a sort of epiphenomenalism of consciousness. The changes in our frequency or wavelength would account for the altered states of consciousness from alert awareness to deep theta dreaming. And that's what research shows. It's abit humbling to be, in our fundamental being, little more that a weak energy field consequential to our brain's synaptic firings. Consciousness just seems so much more THERE and impactful than that! But nobody said the truth is a particularly ego-boosting experience--the self an evanescent and flickering phantom haunting the dim intertices of matter.


[Image: i-stock-2.jpg]
[Image: i-stock-2.jpg]

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