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Comment by uniqueusername7 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Presumably the network would learn to reconfigure itself to compensate.

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.

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