alt Hacker NewsMy hypothesis:
Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.
I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.
One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”
Replies
There are things like magnetic stimulation of the brain, but there's no EM-field equivalent to Propofol.
What would you expect to happen of a brain were "unfolded" in some complicated way? Surely that would significantly change any structure in the em field. This hypothesis doesn't sound immediately wrong to me like many other non-materialist/non-physicalist ideas, but it does sound like a suspiciously convenient way of excluding non-biological entities from ever possibly having a human like experience.
One of the requirements for a random thought to be an hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable with some kind of an experiment.
What would falsify this?
You can seamlessly replace EM in your paragraph with something quantum and it'd still be sort of a reasonable thought.