A neuron is like a transistor that selectively passes on data, but it is also an electro-magnetic oscillator like a Wi-Fi device. Brain areas then aren’t just wired together but also resonate together, so could the brain’s electro-magnetic field underly consciousness? Conscious electromagnetic field information theory suggests that it does:
“… the brain’s EM (electromagnetic) field is the physical substrate of consciousness.” (McFadden, 2020), p5.
It argues that if neuron electro-magnetic fields contain their information, merging those fields integrates their information, as nerves affect the brain’s electro-magnetic field like pebbles dropped on a pond, whose ripples interfere or add into one result. This solves the binding problem because:
“… EM fields are always unified, there is only ever one EM field in the brain.” (Ibid, p6).
In contrast, if the brain is just an information processor, some nerve must fire to recognize a face, the so-called Jennifer Aniston neuron (Quiroga et al., 2005), but that firing isn’t information integration, as it can:
“… only encode a single firing rate that cannot represent anything more than a tiny fraction of the information present in a conscious percept.” (McFadden, 2020), p3.
Data processing then can’t integrate information but the electro-magnetic field can. This theory also predicts that:
“… conventional computers, despite their undoubted computational skills, have not exhibited the slightest spark of consciousness, nor any signs of the general intelligence endowed by conscious minds.” (McFadden, 2020), p9.
However that a brain’s electro-magnetic field causes consciousness faces two problems. The first is that different additions to the field interfere as well as add. For example, if different radio stations broadcast on the same frequency, we hear none of them not all of them, so if different brain regions broadcast overlapping fields, they will interfere not integrate.
The second is that when an electro-magnetic field contains its data, something else has to observe it. For example, a Wi-Fi field can contain the data of a song, but a smartphone is still needed to download it. Data encoded by a field needs a receiver to download and decode it (Pockett, 2014), but the brain doesn’t have a central receiver, just as it doesn’t have a central processing unit. A field can’t be both the observer and the data observed.
Pockett and McFadden disagree on what the brain’s electromagnetic field does, but both agree that it is physical:
“… matter is not the only kind of physical entity. Electromagnetism is also an undeniable part of the physical world.” (Pockett, 2017).
“… consciousness is rooted in an entirely physical, measurable and artificially malleable physical structure and is amenable to experimental testing.” (McFadden, 2020), p11.
Yet light waves aren’t physical because they travel in a vacuum, which physical waves can’t do. And they vibrate in an imaginary plane that is outside physical space, which a physical wave also can’t do. The electromagnetic field of light is measurable, but it isn’t physical. Indeed, if it were, no observer would be possible because one physical event can’t observe another. Given these inconsistencies, another explanation for the relation between brain waves and consciousness is needed.