by throwuxiytayq on 12/2/24, 7:33 PM
Consciousness is clearly hiding in the smells. Scientists just haven’t properly looked at the olfactory chemistry happening in the air around us all the time. The neurons do the raw computation, but the subtle chemical exchanges and releases are what actually drives cognitive qualia and the sense of smelf. This also explains why smell is so important to memory.
by bijant on 12/2/24, 7:05 PM
There is no indication of EM-Fields involvement in biological functions. The observation of EM-fields where voltages spike and currents flow seems to be another case of the meta-scientific phenomenon of researchers in one discipline re-discovering the results of their colleagues from a neighbouring discipline. In this case biologists "discovering" Maxwells Equations.
by proc0 on 12/2/24, 6:36 PM
This is interesting but I wonder if it just moves the substrate from neuron spikes to that EM field, if it is involved in cognition. Additionally I don't think it would offer anything new in terms of explaining the hard problem of C.
I think it's premature to dismiss figuring out the neural code architecture, which has a lot of evidence it is the probable cause (mainly through brain damage and its correlations), but it's good they are looking elsewhere.
by davorak on 12/2/24, 7:45 PM
What I see in this article is something like "ephaptic" effects in neurons are mysterious, consciousness is also mysterious so maybe "ephaptic" effects can explain consciousness.
Ephaptic coupling[1] sounds cool and interesting but the article did not convince me that it is linked it to consciousness.
The involvement of consciousness in the article is not a hook for me and I would rather it not be in the article at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephaptic_coupling
by thomasjudge on 12/2/24, 6:16 PM
I post this because I think the current neural-net hegemony of AI research underappreciates the importance of consciousness and implicitly assumes that it can just scale its way to AGI
by DonnyV on 12/2/24, 8:30 PM
Michael Levin has been doing research activating certain types of cell growth based on certain field frequencies. I wonder if this ties together.
https://youtu.be/p3lsYlod5OU?si=BY6DRnqUZtc12wFHI wonder if neurons are actually the hard drive and ephaptic fields are the software or network the software runs on.
by jacobdelong on 12/2/24, 8:23 PM
I'm struggling to understand the leap from ephaptic neurons to the explanation or location of consciousness. This assumes that consciousness can be located in the brain.
by nabla9 on 12/2/24, 6:39 PM
That should be easy to test. Not trivially easy, but still.
by keybored on 12/2/24, 7:39 PM
Are they (the writers or scientists) trying to find the 21 grams?