Interesting! What does this theory entail?
So, obviously all signal communication involves the electromagnetic force, both in the brain and in computers. But in computers, we only want it to act in very local, well-defined ways. Since electric fields naturally extend outward into all directions, computers actually have mechanisms that suppress those "global" effects. They're considered a potential source of error that needs to be prevented.
The EM hypothesis says that the brain doesn't suppress these but instead is structured around those global effects and uses them for computation. This explains a long list of things, the split brain thing being one of them, another being the general phenomenon of brain waves, which is that groups of neurons tend to fire in sync. If the brain were like a digital computer that would just seem like unnecessary redundancy, but if you care about global fields, then the strength of the signal matters. And it is known in physics that the EM field can give rise to mathematically complex phenomena, it's just not applied to the brain.
In essence, it's like each neuron is treated as a small antenna rather than a discrete piece in a wire. Someone I talked to called it the "radio brain" idea. Or I should say, it's
also treated like a small antenna. I actually do think that there is still a substantial portion of the brain that does work based on discrete units. It's a mixture between discrete computation and global effects.
What prevents strong EMP's from messing with consciousness, incase it exists in the electromagnetic field,
I think the brain is just very well insulated to protect it from outside effects. But if I had to make one argument against the thesis, the fact that outside fields don't have any measurable effect would be it. The insulation seems suspiciously perfect.
and how do you explain the fact that electric stimuli in the brain seem unable to affect some integral parts of the conscious experience? "There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or decide" - Wilder Penfield, Mystery of the Mind, as quoted in part one of Irreducable Mind.
In my model the entire cerebral cortex is completely unconscious and basically a digital computer with neuromorphic hardware, and the holistic EM field is maybe instantiated by the thalamus, though that's speculative. So electric stimulation to the cortex not affecting consciousness would actually fit with the model. Afaik you can also have substantial parts of the cortex damaged and have consciousness remain remarkably unaffected. And that also goes with the insulating thing since the cortex is like the spatially outer shell of the brain. (The lobes are all parts of the cerebral cortex, except the limbic lobe.)
I do think electrical stimulation of the cortex should have indirect effects on consciousness since like the two halves communicate a lot. But the model would say that messing with the thalamus should have far more direct and drastic effects.
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Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 466423 times)