Seating Consciousness

This short piece by Tam Hunt in Nautilus asks whether the brain’s electromagnetic fields could be the seat of consciousness.

What does that even mean? Let’s start with a sensible answer. It could just mean that electromagnetic effects are an essential part of the way the brain works. A few ideas along these lines are discussed in the piece, and it’s a perfectly respectable hypothesis. But it’s hard to see why that would mean the electromagnetic aspects of brain processes are the seat of consciousness any more than the chemical or physical aspects. In fact the whole idea of separating electromagnetic effects from the physical events they’re associated with seems slightly weird to me; you can’t really have one without the other, can you?

A much more problematic reading might be that the electromagnetic fields are where consciousness is actually located. I believe this would be a kind of category error. Consciousness in itself (as opposed to the processes that support and presumably generate it) does not have a location. It’s like a piece of arithmetic or a narrative; things that don’t have the property of a physical location.

It looks as if Hunt is really thinking in terms of the search, often pursued over the years, for the neural correlates of consciousness. The idea of electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness essentially says, stop looking at the neurons and try looking at the fields instead.

That’s fine, except that for me there’s a bit of a problem with the ‘correlates of consciousness’ strategy anyway; I doubt whether there is, in the final analysis, any systematic correlation (though things may not be quite as bad that makes them sound).

By way of explanation I offer an analogy; the search for the textual correlates of story. We have reams of text available for research, and we know that some of this text has the property of telling one or another story. Lots of it, equally, does not – it’s non-fiction of various kinds. Now we know that for each story there are corresponding texts; the question is, which formal properties of those strings of text make them stories?

Now the project isn’t completely hopeless. We may be able to identify passages of dialogue, for example, just by examining formal textual properties (occurrence of quote marks and indentation, or of strings like ‘said’). If we can spot passages of dialogue, we’ll have a pretty good clue that we might be looking at a story.

But we can only go so far with that, and we will certainly be wrong if we claim that the textual properties that suggest dialogue can actually be identified with storyhood. It’s obvious that there could be passages of text with all those properties that are in fact mere gibberish, or a factual report. Moreover, there are many stories that have no dialogue and none of any of the other properties we might pick out. The fundamental problem is that storyhood is about what the text means, and that is not a formal property we can get to just by examination. In the same way, conscious states are conscious because they are about something, and aboutness is not a matter of patterns of neural or electromagnetic activity – though at a practical level we might actually be able to spot conscious activity at success rates that are relatively good, just as we could do a fair job of picking out stories from a mass of text even if we can’t, in fact, read.

Be that as it may, Hunt’s real point is to suggest that electromagnetic field correlates might be better than neural ones. Why (apart from research evidence) does he find that an attractive idea? If I’ve got this right, he is a panpsychist, someone who believes our consciousness is built out of the sparks of lower-grade awareness which are natural properties of matter. There is obviously a question there about how the sparks get put together into richer kinds of consciousness, and Hunt thinks resonance might play a key part. If it’s all about electromagnetic fields, it clearly becomes much easier to see how some sort of resonance might be in play.

I haven’t read enough about Hunt’s ideas to be anywhere near doing them justice; I have no doubt there is a lot of reasonable stuff to be said about and in favour of them. But as a first reaction resonance looks to me like an effect that reduces complexity and richness rather than enhancing them. If the whole brain is pulsing along to the same rhythm that suggests less content than a brain where every bit is doing its own thing. But perhaps that’s a subject I ought to address at better length another time, if I’m going to.

9 thoughts on “Seating Consciousness

  1. I suspect the appeal of looking for consciousness in EM fields is that they resemble the old interactionist ghost in the machine dualism. Except rather than a spiritual ghost, we’re talking about an electromagnetic one, so it’s all scientific and respectable, or at least it’s sold that way.

    I agree that if the brain uses EM fields, it’s just another part of the information processing substrate. But while the fields are almost certainly part of the stochastic perturbations of neural processing, there’s very little in mainstream neuroscience indicating they convey actual information. That could change at any time with new evidence, but people have been selling EM fields for decades without finding evidence that compels the rest of the neuroscientific field to give it much consideration.

  2. With theories like “the brain’s electromagnetic fields could be the seat of consciousness”, the theorist should be queried about how they generally think of consciousness. I suspect this would reveal that they regard consciousness as some sort of “magic sauce” sprinkled all over the brain rather than just a function of the brain much like any other. We all know where this idea comes from as we each experience our own consciousness. However, not all of us make the jump from this experience to consciousness being a global property of the brain. So many theories (eg, IIT) seem to depend on this jump that it should be examined by itself.

    I believe looking at the correlates of consciousness is important but mostly because it is the only way we have of looking at it right now. However, this kind of investigation can lead us astray. Our limited ability to look at the brain’s operation in real detail, and our complete lack of understanding on how it represents the world, leaves us with no alternative but to look at consciousness as if it was a global property but that doesn’t mean it is one.

  3. Thanks Peter, and I agree with your skepticism about this proposal. Good to see you posting again!

    “A much more problematic reading might be that the electromagnetic fields are where consciousness is actually located. I believe this would be a kind of category error. Consciousness in itself (as opposed to the processes that support and presumably generate it) does not have a location. It’s like a piece of arithmetic or a narrative; things that don’t have the property of a physical location.”

    The claim that consciousness can’t be located in the 3-D physical world counts against physicalism, so will be stoutly resisted by physicalists, but it’s certainly true that consciousness isn’t obviously visible to observation and thus locatable in that sense. If it were, there would be no problem about consciousness. Whatever theory wins the day will have to account for the categorical privacy (subjectivity) of conscious experience, along with its qualitative nature.

    What might fill the bill here is representational content. As you say, conscious states are usually *about* something, whether specific (my experience of the blue chair over there) or nebulous (my depression, elation). Content isn’t something we can observe in representational systems: we only see the vehicles that carry content (logic gates, neurons), so this is consistent with the privacy of experience: it’s available only to the instantiating system, not observers of the system. That experience is qualitative is perhaps a function of there needing to be irreducible primitives of representation that are cognitively impenetrable for the representational system – posits taken as unquestionable givens. There have to be such primitives to prevent an epistemic regress that would paralyze the system in wondering about whether it really had the world right. Survival requires guesses that are in the main good enough.

    “I doubt whether there is, in the final analysis, any systematic correlation [between experience and neural states/processings] (though things may not be quite as bad that makes them sound).”

    I think the evidence now increasingly suggests that there *are* systematic correlations between experience and neural goings-on, and theories will have to take these into account by seeing what functions the NCC are performing. I suspect these will involve representing the body, the world, and their interaction. Whether magnetic field participate materially in this remains to be seen.
    Another recent paper on the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) hypothesis is out in the Neuroscience of Consciousness, see https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853

  4. A relatively massive particle homunculus would be conscious with free will because the universe is conscious with free will and the particle inherited it. Basically the particle is a child of the conscious universe that takes billions or trillions of years to mature into a new universe.

    A homunculus would solve the binding problem, the neurons send/receive the electromagnetic homuncular code by using the microtubules of neurons as antennas. It is a lot easier to believe that libertarian free will is in fact real in a quantum coherent homunculus since it is so unified.

    If all this is true it would be extraordinarily good news — the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will walk and even the dead raised! The blind will see and the deaf hear because when the wireless code the brain sends to the homunculus is decoded then all that would be needed to be done is to mount a camera/microphone on glasses that have a chip that converts the images/sounds to the homuncular code and an electromagnetic emitter to send the images/sounds to the homunculus! The lame would walk and the dead can be raised because when we know where the homuculus is and the wireless interface code, a new industry will be possible, the artificial body industry! Simply move the homunculus to an artificial body and power up, the homunculus will receive all the sense information and control the body with its free will! I think the artificial body industry will be the biggest industry and because of mass production available to all! I think eventually artificial bodies will be better than natural bodies and they can be designed for the environment of many planets, moons and the vacuum of space!

  5. Smolin had a theory that universes that have a lot of black holes reproduce more and are more likely to support life, making universes subject to evolutionary theory. I thought then why not go all the way and suppose universes are life and particles are baby universes which is also life — then of course life would exist in all universes that are reproducing.

    Traditional definitions of life would just be a way for the Universe to provide advanced education for the most advanced particles.

    I agree that the brain constructs a complicated EM field but only to communicate with the homuncular particle, a high mass particle with the highest de Broglie frequency in the brain that inherited its conscious and free will ability from the conscious universe.

  6. Well, I understand why some people could feel inclined to see EM produced by the brain as an eligible physical substrate for counsciousness because of their continuity. It has an intuitive appeal. Brain matter from tissue, to particles through cells, molecules and atoms is discrete, which makes it cumbersome to match it with the smooth continuity of conscious experience, while the fields are continuous and ghostly and amenable to accomodate consciousness. To me, the big mistake is to decouple the matter from the fields as if they were independent entities. Whether the EM are epiphenomenal or the play an active role in the brain physiology (TBC) it is irrelevant for the correlate analysis. Neural activity and EM fields are one single system in what to NCC respects, because sources and fields are intimately united by the system/fields equations, one correlates to consciousness as much as the other.
    If we are talking about the EM fields really reifying consciousness, then again it is simply this continuous aspect that tricks us. There is no reason to favor fields over matter, on the contrary effects like anaesthesia would suggest the opposite.
    If I were to look somewhere, I would stick with Penrose and Hameroff that inner structure and tubules are the best candidates, with a holographic architecture in which each neuron basically represents the whole system, and the big number of them improves “definition”. Or maybe not….

  7. Without at least some sort of hypothesis about how electromagnetic fields bring about consciousness, this is as fanciful as Thales’ “all is water” or the four classical elements, and no more useful. The same can be said for claims that consciousness is some sort of quantum thing, or arises from microtubules – they are all just complicated yet unsuccessful ways of avoiding admitting that we don’t know.

  8. Peter has affectingly told a story about effects in experience…
    …Is it philosophy is often an affect in its effectiveness…
    And is it science is often an effect of philosophy…
    …Like layers, fields and consciousness are products of a brain…

    …direct vs affect and effect…thanks

  9. Not one aspect of what we call, “consciousness”, doesn’t have its degrees of variation. The annals of neuropsychology tell the tale. One person’s measure of moment of this or that alleged piece of sentience is another’s blind spot, so to speak. This surely tells us something about the concept of consciousness so blindly conceived.

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