Quote Originally Posted by Xei View Post
Your claims, which I believe I've stumbled upon before, inspired me to do some research. Turns out there is only one paper about this 'field theory' by this McFadden guy, who is not a neuroscientist but a molecular biologist who writes books which seem to be mainly about philosophy (the terms quantum evolution and quantum consciousness also popped up somewhere in his literature, the latter of which I know has no empirical basis). The paper itself is in fact mostly philosophy, and as far as I'm concerned, bunk philosophy. The claim that the electromagnetic field is the 'carrier' of consciousness is really completely meaningless and untestable. Consciousness isn't made out of anything and deciding on some random physical trait and labelling it 'consciousness' (and bizarrely disregarding other hugely important components such as the material ions which are the very basis of neural function) does nothing to solve the hard problem as the paper claims. With regards to the science, from Wired,

"No serious researcher I know believes in an electromagnetic theory of consciousness," Bernard Baars wrote in an e-mail. Baars is a neurobiologist and co-editor of Consciousness & Cognition, another scientific journal in the field. "It's not really worth talking about scientifically."

It's fairly easy to test these theories actually, by placing a subject in an electromagnetic field which overwhelms any effect that could be caused by intrabrain fields; nothing happens to these subjects.

No that's not what I was talking about, I was saying that with a standard digital computer you can create programs which emulate physics, including magnetic fields.

I saw on the very dodgy Wikipedia article that McFadden was claiming that a computer could never emulate a brain because transistors don't use spread out electromagnetic fields; it's this mistake I was adressing.

The current understanding is that neural nets and their impulses are what cause consciousness. There's plenty of evidence for this.

The computer need not be any different whatsoever. It's a turing machine. That's enough.
You missed the entire point of my post.

I didn't say anything about McFadden's interpretation of consciousness. I believe that phenomenon is much more complex and holistic than anyone seems to be willing to admit. The entire reason why I cited that article was to show his experimental evidence that shows a correlation between the electromagnetic field and the firing of neurons. If you'd like, I can link you to several other articles that describe experiments using electromagnetic fields to stimulate mice brains, which even show an increase in growth.

You seem to think that simulating the essential functions of the brain is the same as emulating them. You have no evidence for that and yet you make it sound like it is common sense. Serial processors can simulate parallel processing but it doesn't accomplish the same thing. The brain does not operate with logic gates, it operates with system wide patterns of activity. The processes in which computers and neural nets work are completely different. Breaking the systems down into some subjective view of their functions does not make them the same.