Tag Archives: Tam Hunt

Seating Consciousness

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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.

Good vibrations?

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23

Is resonance the answer? Tam Hunt thinks it might be.

Now the idea that synchronised neuron firing might have something to do with consciousness is not new. Veterans of consciousness will recall a time when 40 hertz was thought to be the special, almost magical frequency that generated consciousness; people like Francis Crick thought it might be the key to the unity of consciousness and a solution to the binding problem. I don’t know what the current state of neurology on this is, but it honestly seems most likely to me that 40 hertz, or a rate in that neighbourhood, is simply what the brain does when it’s thrumming along normally. People who thought it was important were making a mistake akin to taking a car’s engine noise for a functional component (hey, no noise, no move!).

Hunt has a bit more to offer than simply speculating that resonance is important somehow, though. He links resonance with panpsychism, suggesting that neurons have little sparks of consciousness and resonance is the way they get recruited into the larger forms of awareness we experience. While I can see the intuitive appeal of the idea, it seems to me there are a lot of essential explanatory pieces missing from the picture.

The most fundamental problem here is that I simply don’t see how resonance between neurons could ever explain subjective experience. Resonance is a physical phenomenon, and the problem is that physical stuff just doesn’t seem to supply the ‘what-it-is-like’ special quality of experience. Hard to see why co-ordinated firing is any better in that essential respect than unco-ordinated. In fact, in one respect resonance is especially unsuitable; resonance is by its nature stable. If it doesn’t continue for at least a short period, you haven’t really got resonance. Yet consciousness often seems fleeting and flowing, moving instantaneously and continuously between different states of awareness.

There’s also, I think, some work needed on the role of neurons. First, how come our panpsychist ascent starts with neurons? We either need an account of how we get from particles up to neurons, or an account of why consciousness only starts when we get up to neurons (pretty complex entities, as we kee finding out). Second, if resonating neurons are generating consciousness, how does that sit with their day job? We know that neurons transmit signals from the senses and to the muscles, and we know that they do various kinds of processing. Do they generate consciousness at the same time, or is that delegated to a set of neurons that don’t have to do processing?  If the resonance only makes content conscious, how is the content determined, and how are the resonance and the processing linked? How does resonance occur, anyway? Is it enough for neurons to be in sync, so that two groups in different hemispheres can support the same resonance? Can a group of neurons in my brain resonate with a group in yours? If there has to be some causal linkage or neuronal connection, isn’t that underlying mechanism the real seat of consciousness, with the resonance just a byproduct?

What about that panpsychist recruitment – how does it work? Hunt says an electron or an atom has a tiny amount of consciousness, but what does ‘tiny’ mean? Is it smaller in intensity, complexity, content, or what? If it were simply intensity, then it seems easy enough to see how a lot of tiny amounts could add up to something more powerful, just as a lot of small lights can achieve the effect of a single big one. But for human consciousness to be no more than the consciousness of an atom with the volume turned up doesn’t seem very satisfactory. If, on the other hand, we’re looking for more complexity and structure, how can resonance, which has the neurons all doing the same thing at the same time, possibly deliver that?

I don’t doubt that Hunt has answers to many of these questions, and perhaps it’s not reasonable to expect them all in a short article for a general readership. For me to suspend my disbelief, though, I do really need a credible hint as to the metaphysical core of the thinking. How does the purely physical phenomenon of resonance produce the phenomenal aspect of my conscious experience, the bit that goes beyond mere data registration and transmutes into the ineffable experience I am having?