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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

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 brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.

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> 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 sensation of a missing gap.

It's seamless to the experiencer (you don't experience the moments or the objects unexperienced), but not necessarily at a 1 to 1 correspondence with properties of the world. Discontinuities in time is a good example.

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...

That seems like useless hair splitting. It's similar to pondering whether, in the cell of a DRAM chip, it is the electric field of the stored charge that is representing the 1 or 0 meaning, or whether it is the presence or absence of electron particles which is doing the representing.

In the case of the DRAM chip, the only relevant feature is its functional behavior. The stored charge and its electric field are isomorphic, i.e. have the same functional properties. So the difference is meaningless. But the question of what constitutes consciousness isn't merely about functional equivalence. If we took away the brain but left the dynamics of the electromagnetic field in tact, would there still be consciousness? Or vice-versa? The distinction I point out points to different answers to this question. This is a relevant philosophical difference, although no practical difference.

>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?

Our awareness of the outside world isn't seamless, e.g. our blindspot. But our experience of the outside world is seamless. This experience is normally what consciousness refers to, i.e. qualia.

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.

The neurons, chemicals and electrons flowing through them are the electromagnetic field too (and the other 3 fields). Its a useless definition, we could literally say everything is the interaction of the em field, that would be correct but doesnt give us any information.

Nonsense. Your DNA is made of atoms. Those are parts. Your cells are made of proteins and fats. Those are parts. Your computer is made of transistors and wires. Those are parts. Cities are made of people, buildings, and streets. Those are parts.

What premise of my argument are you objecting to? Nothing you have said appears to contradict anything I have said. I obviously agree that the body is made out of many individual parts at all levels of analysis.

Cars, when driving, have speed that is a continuous, seamless "whole". Therefore, the driver, engine, and wheels have nothing to do with speed because they are parts? Or, the driver must be connected to the wheels via magickal electromagnetic fields?

It is meaningless even to say.

Your points are not analogous to my argument which suggests you don't really understand it. Wheels can have continuous angular velocity which cashes out the continuous speed of a car. I don't preclude collections of parts from correlated behavior, which is what a rotating tire is. A road in contact with a tire is interacting with the complex of correlated parts and so the road's perspective of the tire is that of a unified whole. Similarly, our perspective of a table is that of a unified whole due to electromagnetic forces that keeps the dynamics of the constituent molecules highly correlated and our inability to perceive the seams between the parts (without the aid of tools). But when it comes to consciousness, there is no perceiver distinct from the perception, and so you cannot rely on such a distinction to cash out the apparent unified whole of consciousness.

None of that has the slightest bit to do with how brains work to weave the activity you have chosen to noun as "consciousness". Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform. To imagine that mind can't come out of brain cells being brain cells is woolly mysticism that is pointless even to write: rejecting reason, you reject language and communication, and there is nobody to talk to and nothing meaningful to say.

You could equally well say that, being in the car, you can't experience the motion. But that is also nonsense: you do.

There is nothing profound about noticing yourself noticing. Brain activity is not distinct from other activity, just because it can react to itself. Individual, nanoscopic transistors do it all day long.

>Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform.

This is a contentious claim, for which you have provided no arguments. Unsupported assertions are entirely useless in this discussion. My argument is very clear and straightforward. If you disagree, you should point out which premise you disagree with and why. Unspecific incredulity does not make an argument.

Note that my claim that consciousness supervenes on the dynamics of the EM field generated by the brain does not make it "mysticism". The EM field is a perfectly kosher physical property of the universe. The core claim of my argument is rather mundane in fact. If you feel compelled to resist the argument at all costs because it strikes you as mysticism, you simply didn't understand it.

You appear to imagine that something you think of as "EM fields" can achieve things that cannot be done with wires or axons and transistors or nerve cells.

EM fields are linear. That means you can't get any information out of EM interactions [except in ferromagnetic materials] that you didn't put in. It makes them useful for communication, but not for computation, or "consciousness", whatever woowoo you imagine that to be. That you don't understand electromagnetics utterly fails to endow electromagnetics with divine powers.

Information processing with nonlinear computational elements such as transistors and nerve cells is stuff we (like every living creature, and your thermostat) use all day, every day. Magickal "consciousness" processes that don't depend on nerve cell operations are an extraordinary claim that demands actual, you know, evidence, which would require words that have actual, you know, definitions. If you imagine that you have this "consciousness" magick that bonobos, ravens, and elephants don't, it is on you to demonstrate it. Good luck.

I find "consciousness" mysticism actively disgusting, overwhelmingly worse than Martian UFO fantasies, homeopathy scams, claims of quantum-based ESP powers, or even Ayn Rand objectivism. Even to bring it up is an insult to thinking persons.

Again, your comment completely fails to demonstrate comprehension of my argument. It's not a complex argument. I don't know why you fill it in with nonsense and then disparage your made up nonsense. What a waste of effort!

The specific thing that EM fields can do that axons or transistors cannot do is provide "intrinsic unity", the seamless cohesion that underpins the unified whole of conscious experience. This is because the EM field is itself a unified whole. The computational aspects of consciousness are still found in the dynamics of neurons.

Again, I was very specific in the argument about what property of the EM field I'm referencing. I'm not sure why you insist on battling strawmen. But increasingly obtuse and indignant responses do not make an argument. So you should really abandon that shtick.

"Intrinsic unity" is woo. "Seamless cohesion" is woo. "Unified whole of conscious experience" is woo.

There will never be a theory of undefined term. Seeking a scientific blessing for your religion is barking up the wrong tree. Science doesn't issue blessings.

These aren't undefined terms. It might help if you read even a little bit on philosophy of mind so you can be familiar with the common usage of such terms before dismissing them. But that's really not necessary as these terms aren't jargon heavy.

"Philosophy of mind"? Thank you for the warning, I will steer clear. BS is not a thing I seek out.

No one is conflating consciousness with mysticism other than you here. It's not about feeling special like I'm sure you think it is. It's about a phenomenon that science cannot explain, and to think that it is explained by some low-resolution correlations or "intuitive" associations is indeed damaging what science stands for. This attitude is religious faith at its best (or worse).

Next you will be saying termite mounds aren't really built by termites, and that we only imagine they are because we often find termites all through them. ("Even more often, we don't! Explain that!")

Of course I am not going to say that. There is a precise, empirical, causal account of how mounds are built by termites, we can actually see them during the build process, and we don't have to do any category jump in order to understand that process. It's definitely not a good analogy for the absurd category jump which posits that an electron jumps to a different potential orbital and I experience redness.

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