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Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

My hypothesis:

Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.

I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.

One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”

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What would you expect to happen of a brain were "unfolded" in some complicated way? Surely that would significantly change any structure in the em field. This hypothesis doesn't sound immediately wrong to me like many other non-materialist/non-physicalist ideas, but it does sound like a suspiciously convenient way of excluding non-biological entities from ever possibly having a human like experience.

I don’t think it would exclude non biological entities. If neurons are simply the way for such a structured field to be generated, sustained, and modulated, then presumably any physical apparatus that produced “that type of field” would produce experience.

Or a hybrid. We already know there’s a long range binding problem in neuroscience: how do physically separated neuron assemblies construct what we report as a gestalt experience.

This is a non spooky answer that also points to possible applications like cybernetic EM field modulators.

All of this is complete fantasy, of course, but the hypothesis at least has the virtue of not getting too far over its skis.

An unfolded brain works fine.

There are complex proximity interactions, the Robert Sapolsky biology course introduces the subject well (guest lecture by Nathan Woodling.) Best of luck =3

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqeYp3nxIYpF7dW7qK8Ov...

Neat, thanks!

An unfolded human brain works fine? Still sentient? Still has qualia?

Brains are surprisingly resilient. There are documented cases of people losing half their brain and living seemingly normal lives afterwards.

The remaining half is still folded though, so the resilience angle doesn't really disprove if folding might be important.

Presumably the network would learn to reconfigure itself to compensate.

One of the requirements for a random thought to be an hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable with some kind of an experiment.

What would falsify this?

You can seamlessly replace EM in your paragraph with something quantum and it'd still be sort of a reasonable thought.

Well, GP would have to define "EM fields" a little more precisely, in which case for a subset of such definitions, there would be some experiments possible - strong enough EM fields, or EM fields calibrated to specific frequencies, would then wipe out consciousness (possibly unrecoverably) without seemingly damaging the physical substrate of the brain.

This would finally validate the tinfoil hats! :)

To be fair, I have a room that is a bit of a faraday cage (almost no 5g and really atrocious wifi) and I get much better sleep there than other rooms.

It'd need to be calibrated to a specific frequency, likely some sort of resonant frequency of the cells or their machinery. Someone should run an experiment over the entire frequency band to see what happens.

Such a completely baseless speculation doesn't even warrant being called a hypothesis.

> “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”

Absurd handwaving that ignores everything that we actually know about "experience".

There are things like magnetic stimulation of the brain, but there's no EM-field equivalent to Propofol.

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