On the other hand, I've got cash in hand and itching to purchase McFadden's electromagnetic theory of consciousness. This is tacked on as the book's final chapter, but alone makes the book worth reading. McFadden proposes that an electromagnetic theory of consciousness.
This consciousness electromagnetic information field (cemi field) theory may sound far-fetched, but it rests on just three propositions. The first is that the brain generates its own em field, a fact that is well known and utilised in brain scanning techniques such as EEG. The second is that the brain’s em field is indeed the seat of consciousness. This is far harder to prove but there is plenty of evidence that is at least consistent with this hypothesis. Em fields are waves that tend to cancel out when the peaks and troughs from many unsynchronised waves combine. But if neurones fire together, then the peaks and troughs of their em fields will reinforce each other to generate a large disturbance to the overall em field.In recent years neuroscientists in many laboratories across the world have become interested in the phenomenon of neuronal synchrony. Experiments from Paris’ Laboratoire de Neurosciences demonstrated synchronous firing in distinct regions of the brain when a subject’s attention is aroused by a pattern that resembled a face. When the subject saw only lines then his neurones fired randomly but when the subject realised he was looking at a face, his neurones snapped into step to fire synchronously. In this, and in many similar experiments, neurone firing alone does not correlate with awareness – but the em field disturbance generated by synchronous firing, does. The simplest explanation is that the brain’s em field is conscious awareness - the cemi field.
The last cemi field proposition is that the brain’s (conscious) em field can itself influence neuronal firing. Like the first proposition, this is easy to prove and is indeed inevitable. Radio sets and TV’s are designed to be sensitive to the electromagnetic fields of radio waves; but in fact all electrical phenomena are sensitive to the surrounding em field. Neurones are fired by specific structures, known as voltage-gated ion channels that respond to the external em field. Mostly they are gated in such a way that only massive changes to the brain’s em field are likely to influence neurone firing. However, in a busy brain there will be many neurones teetering on the brink of firing and these undecided neurones may be exquisitely sensitive to the em field. The cemi field – our consciousness - will come into play when the brain is poised to make delicate decisions.
What strikes me is the theories resemblance to my own speculation in this blog that consciousness has wavelike properties, which I first presented in a science fiction story published in 2001 (I'd never heard of the cemi theory until a few weeks ago--at least not conciously--but nothing makes an idea seem like genius than its resemblance to our own thoughts!) Similar to my own speculations, McFadden proposes that simple electromagnetic fields, like those in a TV set, would not attain consciousness; only deeply convoluted fields such as are produced by the brain, and which potentially could be produced in a future computer, are conscious.
Article comments
1 - Evans
"If there is an observer, perhaps that observer is outside the system, like Bishop Berkeley's God."
I haven't read this book, but I'd like to point out that, if the author is truly invoking the many-world's theory of quantum mechanics, no observer is outside the system, and thus this is not a valid point.
An interesting point is that a DNA molecule can act as it's own observer, as an observer doesn't need to be conscious....