Integrating information in the brain's EM field: the cemi field theory of consciousness

Nagel famously asked us to imagine what it is like being a bat and insisted that we never can. The cemi field theory asks us to imagine what it would be like to be an EM field with inputs from oscillating electrons in neuronal membranes and outputs to oscillating electrons in neuronal membranes. Our tendency is to view this from a third person perspective looking down on the EM field and asking what its properties are. However, we must instead imagine moving to the frame of the brain’s EM field. This will be very different, analogous to how an EM field may be experienced as magnetic, from a stationary frame, but electric, from a moving frame, and vice versa. Einstein came up with special relativity through his gedanken experiment of considering what the universe would look like from the frame of a photon. Understanding awareness requires a similar shift to the frame of the EM field of the brain. We can, for example, consider what it would be like to be one photon in the cloud of photons (the cemi field) that travel from emitting to receiving electrons in neuronal membranes of the brain. From their frame, since they are massless particles that travel at the speed of light, they experience neither space nor time between emission and reception. Between these points, they may carry, say, up to 10 bits of information encoded in the photon’s energy, spin and direction (Tentrup et al. 2017). However, between emission and absorption, photons are more properly considered as delocalized waves that obey Maxwell’s laws. The cemi field is then the superposition of trillions of photon waves whose information is encoded in their ensuing pattern of constructive and destructive interference.

That information is present at all points in the field, in the sense that the information encoded in a single photon emitted by an oscillating electron, say in the hypothalamus, can materialize—be absorbed by—any charged particle in its light cone, though with probability subject to the inverse square law and attenuation due to absorption events between emitter and receiver.

Nevertheless, within the brain, the light cones of all the trillions of emitted photon will almost entirely overlap. Any charged particle in the brain (or outside, but with rapidly diminishing probability) can potentially be the receiver of any of the trillions of emitted 10 bit packages of information available in the entire field. So, each point in the field represents the integrations of trillions of bits of physically encoded information instantaneously present at each point in the field. I previously proposed that ‘Nearly all qualia—the sound of C minor, the meaning of the number seven, the image of a triangle, the concept of a motor car, the feeling of anger, etc.—are similarly complex … conscious states [that] integrate parallel information streams to form a model that is both complex and physically unified within the cemi field.' That is, the qualia associated with hearing the musical note middle C is what an a EM field perturbation in the brain that correlates with the sensory input of middle C feels like, from the inside. IIT theory has also proposed that qualia are the experience of integrated information (Balduzzi and Tononi 2009); although Barrett argued that IIT cannot capture intrinsic (independent of an observer’s frame of reference) integrated information yet that could be captured by an EM field-based consciousness (Barrett 2014).

In this sense, the cemi theory incorporates Chalmers’ (Chalmers 1995) ‘double-aspect’ principle that information has both a physical, and a phenomenal or experiential aspect. At the particulate level, a molecule of the neurotransmitter glutamate encodes bond energies, angles, etc. but nothing extrinsic to itself. Awareness makes no sense for this kind matter-encoded information: what can glutamate be aware of except itself? Conversely, at the wave level, information encoded in physical fields is physically unified and can encode extrinsic information, as utilized in TV and radio signals. This EM field-based information will, according to the double-aspect principle, be a suitable substrate for experience. As proposed in my earlier paper (McFadden 2002a) ‘awareness will be a property of any system in which information is integrated into an information field that is complex enough to encode representations of real objects in the outside world (such as a face)’. Nevertheless, awareness is meaningless unless it can communicate so only fields that have access to a motor system, such as the cemi field, are candidates for any scientific notion of consciousness.

I previously proposed (McFadden 2013b), that complex information acquires its meaning, in the sense of binding of all of the varied aspects of a mental object, in the brain’s EM field. Here, I extend this idea to propose that meaning is an algorithm experienced, in its entirety from problem to its solution, as a single percept in the global workspace of brain’s EM field. This is where distributed information encoded in millions of physically separated neurons comes together. It is where Shakespeare’s words are turned into his poetry. It is also, where problems and solutions, such as how to untangle a rope from the wheels of a bicycle, are grasped in their entirety.

There are of course many unanswered questions, such as degree and extent of synchrony required to encode conscious thoughts, the influence of drugs or anaesthetics on the cemi field or whether cemi fields are causally active in animal brains. Yet the cemi theory provides a new paradigm in which consciousness is rooted in an entirely physical, measurable and artificially malleable physical structure and is amenable to experimental testing. The cemi field theory thereby delivers a kind of dualism, but it is a scientific dualism built on the distinction between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit. Consciousness is what algorithms that exist simultaneously in the space of the brain’s EM field, feel like.