From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 21:58:08 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com
> <http://unisci.com/ticker.shtml>
> Our Conscious Mind Could Be An Electromagnetic Field
> Are our thoughts made of the distributed kind of
> electromagnetic field that.............
This has become the flavour of the month on the various consciousness and
psych email lists. Last month it was quantum mechanics and microtubules.
People are looking for some magic to explain something mysterious (to them),
rather than do the hard work of analysis of what's there. The unique 1st
person ontology of it boggles many people into all sorts of odd positions.
Max is dead right, IMO, - epiphenomenon status only. Except that my personal
bet is on a much less thrilling role for EMF in assisting learning through
massage of local ion flux around synapses. LTP and LTD of synapses may be
assisted in this fashion.
There is another issue: an EM based mind would be blown to bits by an MRI or
at least disturbed seriously enough during field establishment/shutdown to
have generated some sort of reportable effect. Charge contained
intra-membrane (axon/soma/dendrite) seems not to be noticably affected.
Extra-cellular charge mobility also seems not able to faciltiate any
noticable effects (say calcium ions eddying around).
I really don't think this theory is going anywhere except- I hope - into a
more detailed look at what MRI does to the brain when it scans. We may have
been missing something by holding it constant through natural usage of the
machine.
Bird migration navigation may actually use the effect of charge motion in a
static magnetic field, but that's the only reported real EM effect I can
think of.
In an earlier life I had some work on an aluminium potline that used huge
currents to smelt. There were >400 of these things, each with n x 10^5 amps,
producing massive fields that could erase floppy disks just though walking
some meters from them. The fields stopped my watch (oops, forgot about the
production floor SOP, oh well), but did nothing to my head.
A furphy from the desperate, I feel. Dennett is right - when we get a handle
on consciousness it's gonna be pretty ordinary. We'll be wondering what all
the fuss was about.
regards
Colin Hales
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