The linking of an extra dimension to electromagnetics in the Kaluza-Klein theory and the linking of electromagnetics to consciousness in McFadden’s cemi theory creates an intriguing hypothesis that consciousness has a location where its stuff exists but it is not in the three dimensional space of the brain but rather in an additional physical dimension. Consciousness itself may be a sort of folding of 3+1 spacetime as information embedded in an additional dimension mediated by an electromagnetic field. The spatial patterns of neural firings essentially encode the qualia into the additional dimension.
JJFinch wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 7:06 am
Is this argument with this stuff that EM itself is conscious?
Nope.
Consciousness itself may be a sort of folding of 3+1 spacetime as information embedded in an additional dimension mediated by an electromagnetic field. The spatial patterns of neural firings essentially encode the qualia into the additional dimension.
This isn't a bad question and maybe I wasn't totally clear. I think of it more like a hologram of information about the external world carried in an EM field and rendered in an additional dimension.
Also, keep in mind this is speculation and I regard it as such.
But what is information? My understanding of Shannon is that basically everything is information. I fail to see what is special about the information in IIT
JJFinch wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 6:28 pm
But what is information? My understanding of Shannon is that basically everything is information. I fail to see what is special about the information in IIT
Information about the external world. For example, information that there's a snake hiding in the weeds. To generate this information requires senses combined with prior learning.
This has little to do with IIT except for the word "information". IIT has no mechanism or infrastructure for it to generate consciousness. It simply asserts integrated information is by itself consciousness. This has a mechanism - information encoded in the brain's EM fields rendering qualia in an extra dimension.
If you go to my post, I have expanded my original post in response to comments from readers. That may be helpful to you.
Jim Cross wrote: ↑Sun May 01, 2022 7:32 pm
I've put something on my blog that relates to this post on the Institute of Art and Ideas
Jim what is your view on the place of wave phenomena? I'm asking in the following sense. Seen classically, wave phenomena are simply the macro picture of particle interaction (usually depicted as small balls connected to each other with springs. This is based on locality, where actions propagate from ball to ball. Thus, wave phenomena isn't really anything special because the 'real stuff' is only the movement of the individual parts.
With this in mind, when you speak of consciousness as EM field, do you imagine that it experiences and wills the wave patterns in some holistic manner, which necessarily implies nonlocality? Or consciousness is just awareness of locally propagated effects - from ball to ball, neuron to neuron or even at speed c through EM photons? But if that is the case, where should the signal reach in order to become conscious? It seems we either have to experience certain spatial volume of waves simultaneously as a whole or we should pinpoint a single point for consciousness which is affected through local interactions.
