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This book is written to put forward a particular scientific hypothesis about the nature of conscious experiences, or qualia. It is aimed largely at academic readers, but because of the wide variety of professional backgrounds among academics interested in the nature of consciousness, I have tried to write so that the argument will be clear to anyone with a high school education in general science and an interest in one of the oldest questions of humankind: "what is mind?" Despite this good intention however, there are probably some parts of the text that will be incomprehensible to anyone without a reasonably solid background in neurophysiology. I have tried to help at these points by including a small amount of Beginner's Guide type material as appendices.
It should be said at the outset that at the time of writing, the hypothesis I advance here is not, as far as I know, accepted by anyone in the academic world of consciousness studies (with the obvious exception of myself). Therefore the book is organized as a polemic. First the basic hypothesis is introduced and its origins in ancient philosophy are shown. Then some ground rules for discussion are laid and a considerable amount of neurophysiological evidence supporting the hypothesis is given. In the light of this supporting evidence the hypothesis is expanded beyond its basic statement. Further empirical evidence is then given to show that the idea explains not only how the brain affects consciousness, but also how consciousness affects the brain. Next, a number of objections to the hypothesis are stated and refuted. Finally, some rather large implications of the idea are sketched briefly.
So what is this controversial hypothesis? The basic question it goes to is that most ancient of philosophical saws, the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem boils down to the question of whether consciousness (mind) is a physical phenomenon or a non-physical one. The position that consciousness is a physical phenomenon is known as materialism and the position that it isn't is called dualism. Almost all modern-day scientists are, at least on the surface, fierce materialists. Indeed in scientific circles these days the word "dualist" is so unacceptable that it tends to be reserved as a last-ditch imprecation, to be hurled only when all else has failed to dispose of an opponent's argument. However, to many philosophers, the materialist position that is so much an article of faith among scientists simply fails to satisfy. The argument against it is essentially an intuitive one - mind and matter just seem to be different classes of phenomena. In fact, even to many scientists this privately seems an intuition with much to recommend it, but the problem remains that those in the anti-materialist camp who bite the bullet and frankly espouse dualism do have a hard time explaining how something that is not itself material could affect matter in the brain (as consciousness must if it is to influence the behavior of those who possess it). This difficulty sometimes leads to the intuitively bizarre position that consciousness actually doesn't affect matter in the brain at all - that it is merely an epiphenomenon, with no causal powers in the material world. No wonder this is such a long-running debate. However, all is not lost - into this mess rides the hypothesis put forward here.
The essence of the present hypothesis can be stated in one sentence. It is that consciousness is identical with certain spatiotemporal patterns in the electromagnetic field.
Now if this hypothesis is true, it may not be overstating the case to say that it solves the mind-body problem at a stroke. If the hypothesis is true, then consciousness is not material in the usually accepted sense, but neither is it some kind of non-physical spook (which, being non-physical, is therefore not accessible to scientific investigation). Consciousness (or at least normal human consciousness) is a local, brain-generated, configuration of, or pattern in, the electromagnetic field. A brain-sized spatial pattern in the electromagnetic field is not matter as such, so the hypothesis escapes the main objection to materialism. However, the electromagnetic field does have the easily observed property of affecting matter, so the hypothesis also side-steps the main objection to dualism. Philosophically speaking, this looks like a winner.
But the question remains, is it just another philosophical speculation, or is this a hypothesis supported by the vast mass of presently available scientific evidence on consciousness? The major part of the present book is an argument that the central hypothesis is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence, and thus that it must be considered a serious scientific hypothesis, deserving of further experimental investigation.
The structure of the book is as follows.
The introduction introduces. Chapter 1 sets down some working definitions and a set of criteria by which to evaluate scientific evidence on the neural correlates of consciousness. Chapters 2 to 5 lay out a considerable body of perfectly standard and reputable neuroscientific data showing that both the different states of consciousness (i.e. waking, sleeping and dreaming) and the specific sensory experiences of waking consciousness (i.e olfactory, auditory and visual experiences), are indeed associated with identifiable electromagnetic patterns generated by the brain. Chapter 6 fleshes out the hypothesis in more detail and names it the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness. It also points out that sensible answers fall naturally out of the theory to at least two questions which have previously been intractable: the question of what distinguishes the tiny fraction of brain activity that is available to consciousness at any given moment from the large proportion that is not, and another widely bothersome philosophical question called the binding problem. The differences between the present theory and the psychoneural identity theory are also discussed, the main difference being that the present theory predicts biological neurons to be in principle not necessary for the generation of conscious experience. The electromagnetic field theory of consciousness predicts that the right sorts of patterns in the electromagnetic field will be conscious, whatever generates them. Some practical consequences of this prediction and a possible empirical test of the theory which follows from the prediction are noted.
Chapter 7 moves on from the question of how the brain generates consciousness to a consideration of how consciousness acts back on its own brain. First the history of the idea that electromagnetic fields influence brain activity is given, and then current empirical evidence that they do so on a routine basis, as part of the normal operation of the brain, is presented. Chapter 8 then considers six different objections to the theory and provides answers to them. Finally, Chapter 9 discusses the relationships between this theory and the ideas of Charles Darwin, the experiences of mystics through the ages and commonly held notions about a universal consciousness, also known as God.
It is probably superfluous to say that I think the central idea put forward here is an important one, which deserves to be further investigated on a large-scale basis. My hope is that this monograph will convince you of the importance of the idea too, dear reader, and that it may even inspire some bushy-tailed young graduate students of the future to stake their careers on investigating the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness. However, whether or not the book succeeds in these lofty aims, I hope that you will at least find it a entertaining read!
The aim of this book is to lay the foundation stone for a scientific theory of the nature of conscious experience.
When I first started thinking seriously on this question about five years ago, I had no clue as to what such a theory would look like. All I did know was that in order to be counted as scientific, it would have to have certain characteristics. It would have to fit all the available empirical evidence on the relationship of consciousness to the brain. It would probably have to be potentially falsifiable by new experimental evidence (although the theory of evolution, which must be one of the most successful scientific theories of all time, sits rather uneasily with that criterion). And most daunting of all, it would probably have to involve some sort of new fundamental principle about the universe. These seemed fairly onerous requirements.
However, being a New Zealander and thus imbued from childhood with the notion that I was a rugged individualist who could fix anything with a piece of number eight fencing wire, I was not as daunted by these obstacles as a more socialized person might have been, and simply made a start somewhere. On the principle that successful strategies can often be generalized, it seemed that a useful way to begin might be to look at the development of a successful theory in another area of science. Perhaps this would afford some ideas about how to proceed in the present case. Since what I was trying to build was a theory of the nature of mind, I decided that the currently accepted theory on the nature of matter might be a good starting point. So I began by taking a look at the history of the atomic theory.
It turned out that the idea that matter is composed of atoms was first put forward by the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, around 450 BC (Whyte, 1961 [309]). These thinkers were concerned to explain the observed fact that material objects change, while at the same time preserving a certain faith in the permanence of things that are real. Their speculation was that the universe consists of ultimate, indivisible atoms, each of them hard, permanent and unchangeable, of one homogenous substance but of various shapes and sizes. The atoms of fire, for example, were postulated to be smooth spheres. Atoms were conceived as being in constant motion, vibrating and whirling, though sometimes fitted together in stable combinations. All the variety of the universe was seen as resulting from the differences in size, shape, position, order and motion of these atoms of a single substance.
It must be said that this was an inspired and brilliant speculation. However, since it was philosophical rather than scientific in the sense in which we now understand science, it was subject to defeat of an almost political nature by other philosophical ideas. Plato and Aristotle did not much like it and its popularity declined, until by about 200 BC atomism as a philosophy was pretty much dead. The writings of Epicurus (341-270 BC) were influential in preserving the idea however, as were those of Asclepiades, a Greek physician in Rome who ascribed disease to alterations in the size, arrangement and motion of atoms in the body. Lucretius (98-55 BC), whose poem "De Rerum Natura" eloquently expressed the Democritan doctrine, was another supporter.
Atomistic ideas arose again, a century or so later, in India. The notion was probably independently conceived, although Kanada (the traditional name of whoever wrote the Hindu Vaisesika Sutras, probably sometime during the first two centuries AD) might have heard of Greek ideas on the subject. In any case, Vaisesika philosophy is explicitly atomistic. Unlike the myriad of Greek atoms, however, Kanada's atoms were conceived to be of only four different kinds: earth, water, fire and air. They were imagined as uniting to form dyads, triads and so on, building up to give rise to the universe.
Indian ideas were probably not much known in the West at that stage, but over the next thousand or so years the atomistic ideas of the Greeks kept being revived by various Arab and European thinkers - and kept being vigorously opposed by the Christian church. In fact for reasons that are not entirely clear the Paris Parliament went so far in 1624 as to decree that any person maintaining or teaching atomism, or any other doctrine contrary to Aristotle, would be put to death! Despite this somewhat heavy-handed approach (or knowing scientists, perhaps even because of it) atomism became the dominant theory of matter from around 1630 onwards. Between 1646 and 1691 at least seven European scientists, including Boyle, Leeuwenhoek, Newton and Halley, made or discussed experimentally based estimates of an upper limit for the size of atoms. Huygens even put forward a comprehensive quantitative theory based on atomic motion, which he applied to gravitation, atmospheric pressure, light (as waves of particle vibrations) and cohesion. Newton also proposed a corpuscular theory of light, with the motion of the corpuscles being guided by waves (in somewhat stunning anticipation of the latest theories on the nature of light). However this enthusiasm for atomism waned again and the 18th century was a relatively quiet period in the history of the idea. It was not until the chemists of the 19th century appeared on the scene that modern scientific atomism was really born.
By 1807, a good deal of experimentation in the emerging field of chemistry had produced the rather grandly named Law of Definite Proportions, which stated that for any given chemical compound, the constituent elements are always combined in the same proportions by weight, however the compound is made. A hypothesis explaining this was now proposed by Francis Dalton (who thereby became known among chemists as "the father of atomism"). Dalton suggested (a) that there exist invisible atoms (b) that those of any given element are alike in weight and those of different elements have different weights and (c) that atoms combine in a simple whole-number ratios to form compounds. While these were not ideas of any great originality, they were a clear set of experimentally testable postulates about the existence and nature of atoms (which, in the light of another couple of centuries of experimentation we now know were not all completely correct). The postulates were generated to explain specific experimental observations and they were immediately tested against more experimental observations.
Now there is a great deal more to the history of atomism, but this much will suffice to make a couple of important points:
How can we use these insights in the construction of a theory of consciousness? It is probably fair to say that at the close of the twentieth century we are in rather worse position with regard to a theory of consciousness than were the pre-Dalton chemists of the nineteenth century with regard to a theory of matter. That is to say, we have a large volume of experimental data, but really no simple, universal idea that ties it all together in a satisfactory way. So, by analogy with the atomic theory, perhaps we should look to the ancient philosophies of India and Greece for such an idea.
On the nature of matter, we have seen that both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Hindus developed a very specific (and as time showed, substantially correct) theory. On the nature of consciousness however, it turns out that the Indian tradition has far more to say than the Greek.
The three basic texts in the Vedic tradition of India are the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-gita and the Brahma-sutra. Remarkably in view of their differing and sometimes fiercely argued views on other issues, all of these texts hold the same view of the nature of consciousness. This is that the world-ground - the sole and whole cause of the world and the universal Self, of which our individual selves are only parts - is an all-pervading pure consciousness or intelligence. This is called Brahman in the Brahma-sutra and the Bhagavad-gita (Maharishi, 1969 [179]) and either Brahman or Atman in those books of the Upanishads where it is mentioned (namely the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad and the Isa Upanishad). Pure consciousness - that is, consciousness without any object or subject - is held to be not an attribute of Atman/Brahman, but its essence. Various meditative techniques are presented more or less clearly in the various works, by use of which it is said to be possible to obtain direct experience of this field of pure consciousness, (as it is routinely translated from the Sanskrit). Such experience is reported to be the ultimate bliss, beyond which nothing else could ever be desired. Apart from blissfulness, the main characteristic of the universal consciousness is that it is all-pervading.
Let us move on now to the notions on consciousness propounded by the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato is uniformly regarded as being one of the greatest of these, and although as we have just seen he did get it wrong when it came to atomism, it turns out that he may have been more successful on the matter of consciousness. In fact it has been suggested, with considerable textual justification (Shear, 1990 [257]), that Plato independently discovered a technique which allowed him to experience what the Vedic tradition calls Brahman. This technique is poorly described in Plato's writings (as indeed are meditation techniques in the Vedas) and it has hitherto been regarded by modern philosophers as pretty much incomprehensible. The name given to it by Plato is generally translated from the Greek as "the dialectic". As a result of using his dialectic, Plato describes transcendental experiences of what he calls the Good, the Beautiful, or true Being, which bear a startling similarity to Vedic descriptions of the experience of Brahman. Plato's theory of Forms is tied to this transcendental or "after-death" realm, in which experience first of what he calls "an open sea of beauty" and then of "an eternal oneness", an "inviolable whole", simply pure, unbounded loveliness itself, is taken as being the experience of the Form of Beauty.
Plato's best-known pupil was Aristotle. While Aristotle was sharply critical of his teacher's theory of Forms in general and rejected their independent existence, he did make an exception in the case of the Form he variously called "Active Intelligence", the "Unmoved Mover", the "Good" and "God". Aristotle's doctrine of "psychological hylomorphism" (Modrak, 1987 [200]) posits the psuche (mind/soul) as being "the form of the body" and is presented by Aristotle as a genuine alternative to both reductive materialism and dualism. It can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but inasmuch as the modern notion of a field in physics is in some sense physical but not material, it is perhaps reasonable to suggest that Aristotle's hylomorphic notions with regard to consciousness could be read in terms of some sort of field. It must be admitted this is a tenuous interpretation and it is not clear whether it was the one intended by Aristotle himself - but then the whole idea of a field in the sense in which modern physics uses the term was unknown at the time. Aristotle's best known hypothesis about consciousness is that there exists a "common sense", which has the function of integrating information from the five specific senses into a unified perception of the world. Again, Aristotle did not specifically suggest that this common sense had the properties of a field (possibly because the concept of a field in this sense arose only with Faraday and James Clark Maxwell in the nineteenth century). However, as will be seen in later chapters, a field could certainly have the properties of the common sense.
In summary, although there is some lack of clarity here and the above interpretations are not at this stage standard among contemporary scholars, Greek thought may in general terms be read as being similar to Vedic thought on the subject of consciousness, just as it was on the subject of matter. In both Vedic and Platonic thought, it is held that some gifted or well-trained individuals are capable of directly experiencing an unbounded field of consciousness that is (a) pure consciousness without any contents in terms of thought or sensory experiences and (b) essentially infinite in time and space - or at any rate larger than the normal waking individual consciousness, which seems to be confined inside an individual's head.
The closest modern physics comes to the idea of an all-pervading, non-dual entity is probably the notion of the unified field. Indeed, one contemporary commentator on the Vedas, Maharishi Mahesh, has already equated Brahman-Atman with the unified field (Hagelin, 1984 [117]). However the concept of a unified field is itself in a very preliminary stage of formulation at this point, so it may be more fruitful for our purposes to examine one particular manifestation of the unified field which has a quite direct, empirically-measurable relationship with working brains. This is the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field is just as all-pervading as the putative unified field, and it holds for us the distinct charm that its configurations are already routinely measured by both clinical and research neurophysiologists, throughout the world and on a daily basis. Consequently, we already have a huge mass of data on the relationship of various configurations of the electromagnetic field to the phenomenology of consciousness.
So perhaps the answer we have been looking for is that what has in the past been called the electromagnetic field is itself conscious. And perhaps our individual consciousnesses, which unlike the field as a whole are bounded in space and time, are identical with particular local spatiotemporal configurations of the electromagnetic field.
At first sight, this idea may seem outrageous or even bizarre. After all, every basic physics text lays out the properties of the electromagnetic field, and consciousness is not one of them. Manifestations of the electromagnetic field include radio waves, light, X-rays and gamma rays. None of these has anything whatsoever to do with consciousness. What are can we be thinking, to propose that the electromagnetic field is conscious? Surely this is nothing more than New Age mumbo jumbo?
On closer consideration however, the idea is not as upsetting as it may at first appear. All of the mentioned varieties of waves in the electromagnetic field (light, radio waves and so on) have frequencies above a thousand cycles per second (see Table 1) and there exists a whole spectrum of frequencies lower than this range for which no particular properties have been assigned. In particular, the extremely low frequency (ELF) range of electromagnetic fluctuations from 0 to 100 Hz has not attracted too much interest from physicists until now (probably because waves of this frequency do not propagate well and are therefore not particularly useful for transmitting information over long distances). Interestingly, 0 to 100 Hz turns out to be exactly the frequency range of the electromagnetic oscillations that are generated by biological brains.
So perhaps this idea does deserve further consideration. Perhaps it will even turn out to be the basis for an answer to the so-called Hard Questions (Chalmers, 1996 [52]):
"Why does conscious experience exist? If it arises from physical systems, as seems likely, how does it arise? Is consciousness itself physical, or is it merely a concomitant of physical systems? How widespread is consciousness? Do mice, for example, have conscious experiences? ... . Why is seeing red like this, rather than like that? Why ... do we experience the reddish sensation that we do, rather than some entirely different kind of sensation, like the sound of a trumpet?"
Perhaps it will answer the call of the same author, when he says:
"Ultimately one would like a theory of consciousness to do at least the following: it should give conditions under which physical processes give rise to consciousness, and for those processes that give rise to consciousness, it should specify just what sort of experience is associated. And we would like the theory to explain how it arises, so that the emergence of consciousness seems intelligible rather than magical. In the end, we would like the theory to enable us to see consciousness as an integral part of the natural world. Currently it may be hard to see what such a theory would be like, but without such a theory we could not be said to fully understand consciousness."
Let us see if we can show Dr. Chalmers what such a theory would look like.
| Table 1: Accepted and proposed properties of | |
| regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. | |
| REGION OF THE ELECTRO- | FREQUENCY (Hz) |
| MAGNETIC SPECTRUM | |
| Gamma ray | 1021 − 1024 |
| X ray | 1018 − 1020 |
| Ultraviolet light | 1015 − 1016 |
| Visible light | 4 − 7 ×1014 |
| Infrared light | 1012 − 1014 |
| Microwave | 1010 − 1011 |
| Radio wave | 104 − 1011 |
| Consciousness | 0 − 102 |