CONSCIOUSNESS & EMFs
CONSCIOUSNESS & EMFs
by William Thomas
All animals are aware of their surroundings. Specialized critters conscious enough to recognize themselves in a mirror are called humans. Also, chimps, ravens, elephants and octopi. “I AM ME” is a huge deal. For homo sapiens, staying fully conscious moment by moment is the whole deal. Anything less is sleepwalking.
“Scientists do not know what consciousness is, how to measure it, what causes it, or what role it has in nature,” Tor Norretranders remarks in The User Illusion.
“The approach the majority of neuroscientists take to the question of how consciousness arises,” observe Kitchener and Hales, “is to ignore it.” When 100 billion neurons in the human cortex achieve some complex criticality, the brain boffins shrug, consciousness “just happens” — arising from brain mush like steam off mashed potatoes.
PONDERING THE PROJECTIONIST
Who hasn’t pondered the origins of those 3D movies continuously playing in their head? How can coherence possibly result from kaleidoscopic cascades of sensory stimuli, memories and longings? No neurons are labelled: “Red-haired Tess wearing her new blue frock is smelling a white rose.”
What is a redhead you have never met doing in your head right now? Just how is this mental configuration constructed? And why does your imaginary Tess look different from my Tess?
What if consciousness precedes and gives rise to everything that exists? What if “all mental and physical processes arise from another dimension of reality [that] does not separate mind and matter?” wonders philosopher-physicist Alan Wallace in Hidden Dimensions of Consciousness.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental, I regard matter as derivative from consciousness,” declared Max Planck. “Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
ทฤษฎีบิกแบง (Big Bang theory)
THE BIG BLING
Everyone “knows” how the entire universe somehow “spontaneously” emerged from the Nothingness Buddhists call the Void and scientists the Quantum Field. The resulting (soundless) “Big Bang” apparently lasted 1/00000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000001 second.
Human consciousness took another 13.6 billion years to inexplicably emerge. Give or take. How? Why? It’s “hard to explain,” Wallace wriggles. “Consciousness may exist by itself, even in the absence of matter, just like gravitational waves.”
What if that ever-amorphous, all-pervasive “mind” in its original “zero-point field-state” is pure awareness becoming conscious of itself through 3D embodied experiences?
Maybe “mind” emerges, this Buddhist cosmologist suggests, from the “unitary experience” our body/brain/spirit shares in the flux of the quantum void.
So to speak.
We look up at night and see “only a few thousand stars,” Wallace continues; 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns “remain hidden in the ‘subconscious’ of deep space.”
How cosmic is this? To parse the universal “subconscious”, astronomers must first become “star shamans”. And “historians of starlight” streaming from 2 trillion galaxies!
EVERYTHING VIBRATES
Thanks to Einstein, we know that energy and matter are different vibrational states of the same thing. “What thing?” asks the smartypants in back. (There’s always one.)
Information, of course.
“The universe is fundamentally an information-processing system from which the appearance of matter emerges at a higher level of reality,” Wallace figures. So if the universe is fundamentally information — and if we are information processors — then the universe is a participatory playground in which there are no detached observers.
Albert Einstein had almost as much trouble with this notion as he did matching his socks. “Physics is an attempt to grasp reality,” strangely insisted a man conversant with the Vedas — “independently of its being observed.”
Good luck with that, Albert. And would you care to define, “reality” in words we can all agree on?
EMERGENCE
Einstein’s wobbliest notion did not get past Niels Bohr, who swatted it back, declaring: “Any observation necessitates an interference with the course of the phenomenon.”
The old Big News is that nothing is separate from anything else. How can it be otherwise when energy and matter flow through each other as aspects of the same underlying reality at the speed of light-squared. (Which, is not supposed to be “possible”.)
In other words…
If consciousness “plays a crucial role in the formation and evolution of the universe,” the primary job of “God” — whether an old codger sitting on the sky, some Ultimate Machine Intelligence, or an emergent Consciousness discovering itself through each act of Creation — is to simply pay attention.
As active partners, we can assist Creation’s unfoldment by practicing right thoughts and helpful actions with conscious intent. Knowledge, compassion and creation form a “luminous space,” Wallace remarks, rekindling our original nature.
PLAY THAT AGAIN
Just ask Suzanne, down by that river…
Eventually, Leonard Cohen came down from the meditative mountain. And when he rejoined the world of men and especially women, he acted as if everything and everyone he was experiencing was a divine manifestation of the primordial quantum ground underlying all being and becoming.
And he continued doing that, because that’s where he permanently dwelt. And if this wasn’t enough, Cohen composed songs and sang about life’s joys and sorrows, loves and losses as if everything really is vibration.
What if, on the death and physical dissolution of our body/brain, our consciousness merges with ultimate undifferentiated “Big C” Consciousness? For the individuated drop of our brief existence to be subsumed back into this eternal cosmic sea, consciousness must be literally universal.
IN THE NAME OF QGOC
Just to bring everyone up to date, God’s latest alias is “QGOC” — the Quantum Ground of Creation. If praying to QGOC feels too machinelike to ever replace “Our Dad in Heaven”, at least the Quantum Ground of Creation sounds more contemporary than “heaven”. And just as nebulous.
Why not the Quantum Ground of Consciousness? After all, uppercase Consciousness is where we came from and where we’re headed. Instead of asking whether our individuated consciousness continues after death, we would better ask how long our consciousness persists after birth.
WHO, ME?
Like the toddler protesting her innocence beside the broken cookie jar, we are not just bystanders to the realities we create. “The observer creates the reality,” observes New Physicist, RC Henry.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental, I regard matter as derivative from consciousness,” declared Max Planck. “Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
“We are what we think,” Gautama Buddha remembered. “With our thoughts we make the world.”
Repeat after Wallace: “Everything is energy. Nothing is solid.”
CEMI CONDUCTOR
Not content with such highfalutin abstractions, a professor of molecular genetics at the U. of Surrey decided to pin down the wavelength of consciousness. After some ponderation, the delightfully named, Johnjoe McFadden came up with CEMI.
Consciousness Electromagnetic Information Field Theory — or CEMI Field Theory — corrects Descartes’ disastrous “body/mind” dualism meme that swept us off the unified consciousness cliff into the flailing confusions of our current mistaken separation from Nazis looting Orthodox monasteries in Kiev and the robin singing so joyously outside your window.
Your body’s natural electric field is created by the metabolic flow of ions through 37 trillion cells. Consciousness is the brain’s energy field, Wallace enthuses.
“I realized that synchronous firing of neurons automatically generates strong local brain EM fields that would integrate the information in the firing neurons,” this molecular geneticist goes on. “I claimed that this field-integrated information is the conscious mind.”
Or as Wolfgang Köhler insisted about a century ago, “Consciousness integrates information.” In other words, only through coherent thought can the discrete, localized information encoded in all matter recognize itself in the mirror.
Physicist Rolf Landauer further suggests that this teeming universe of information can only exist in the brain within a substrate — “some kind of field.”
What kind of field converts information into energy and energy into information? Looking down at your phone, you’ve already guessed: an electromagnetic field. But only electromagnetic fields generated by trillions of brain synapses firing at 0.1 volts “can physically integrate information,” Wallace insists. [my emphasis]
“Our biosphere and everything in it is,” Johnjoe reminds us, “entirely electromagnetism.” Moreover, “the brain is entirely made of electromagnetism (EM) phenomena from the level of the atoms up.” [Prof. Johnjoe McFadden -Oxford Literary Festival]
ELECTROMAGENTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness may have been ripening within the expanding brains of starstruck hominids since the Serengeti. But here in Descartes’ derailed West, its formal consideration is only now entering its fourth decade of uneasy integration into the physical sciences. Once it was shown that brains comprising atoms driven by rapidly orbiting electrons produce measurable electromagnetic fields — just like everything else — the hard core skeptics had to give way.
Every time we use the words “material” or “physical,” Wallace reminds us, we’re referring to EM phenomena.
“Our biosphere and everything in it is,” Johnjoe concurs, “entirely electromagnetism.” Moreover, “the brain is entirely made of electromagnetism (EM) phenomena from the level of the atoms up.” Even fundamental physics has detected this “staggeringly complex system of electromagnetic fields” among the “neurons and glia in the brain.”
ELECTROMAGNETIC TOUCH
Active neurons are collections of electromagnetic fields. This means that the electro-chemical synapses in your brain as you read this sentence are electromagnetic field phenomenon. Therefore, to “touch something” with your finger is to engage in an interaction between the EM field of your skin and the EM field of whatever or whomever you touch.
Go find a willing partner and try this electrical experiment right now!
WHY ARE YOU?
But — and there is always a “but” — how does CEMI account for the self-conscious awareness of a chimp quizzically patting the electrodes on its head while gazing into a mirror?
Sure, we can record the electromagnetic potentials in our own monkey brain. But how does electromagnetism result in our unique 1st-Person Perspective? Faced with the quandary of self-awareness, standard physics remains slack-jawed and mute. “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” wonders physicist David Chalmers. “It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
“If everything the nervous system does is computation, and thus computation does everything, then there would seem to be no need for consciousness,” Johnjoe reasonably protests.
TIC TOC
Yet, Jj maintains that his electromagnetic Theory of Consciousness (ToC) offers “a plausible physics mechanism linking consciousness to brain causality.”
Really? What “mechanism” generates consciousness exactly? Unlike algorithmic Theories of Consciousness pursued by acolytes of computational AI, “an EM ToC is grounded in the fundamental physics of brain activity,” Johnjoe airily affirms.
Which is light.
Every metabolic conversion of food into energy, every synapse firing between neurons in your heart and brain produces a flash — jj points out and digital imaging confirms — that “generates an electrical glow."
Yep, you really are a light being! So it’s no surprise that all those photons blooming right now between your nattering neurons are where this information is!
Like remembering to meet Tess for lunch.
EMF THEORIES OF THE MIND
None of this is newly new. Wallach, Kohler and Held, John, Libet, Pockett, Jones and other wise guys have each proposed electromagnetic theories of thought over the past two decades. Mostyn Jones’ 2013 paper, “Electromagnetic-field theories of mind,” provides an overview of this mental jungle. Shelli Joye’s Electromagnetic Brain is a more recent arrival.
Hacking our way through thickets of acronyms, we find that life operates at both the quantum and classical levels. “And has thereby evolved to take advantage of both realms,” another mental safari guide named Hunt explains, pointing from the infinitesimally small to the machete in your hand.
Spoiler alert! Because all matter is “made up of atoms and molecules that are separated in space, it could thereby never give rise to our unified conscious experience,” Johnjoe points out. “In contrast, fields are intrinsically unified: that is what we mean by a field. Information in the brain is encoded in both matter and fields. But it is only in fields where it is unified.”
This explains how so many separate sensations can result in the single unified “experience” of a flesh-and-blood Tess waving from her doorway.
BRAIN STORMS
So watt? you might be thinking.
Our brain’s strongest electromagnetic fields, “those generated by synchronous neural firing, should represent our thoughts,” Johnjoe figured. (This hypothesis, he adds, was tested and shown to be true.)
It’s no surprise that all those photons blooming right now between your nattering neurons are where this information is “encoded as overlapping fields,” Jj reiterates. And as every sleepless, befuddled and chronically forgetful wireless addict discovers, all those silently jackhammering “external EM fields should be able to interfere with our thoughts.”
Every time you activate your cell phone or walk within range of a cell tower or wireless router, it’s helpful to recall that we are EM field objects. So we ought to be particularly careful about inducing exponentially more powerful electromagnetic fields into our subtly humming body/brain.
We know that 1 in 3 persons is sensitive to WiFi and electrosmog; 3 in 100 are hypersensitive.
We also know that wireless radiation messes with sleep, while synergistically intensifying toxic exposures like experimental mRNA injections to significantly increase cancer risk and other adverse reactions.
In fact, EMFs open the blood-brain barrier and rupture brain cell membranes, causing them to leak calcium ions needed for neuronal intercommunication. Could it be that allowing your everyday environment to become saturated with increasingly powerful electromagnetic pulses — artificially modulated billions of times every second — is disrupting those whispering 60-100 millivolt fields of consciousness sparking in your heart and brain?
CHECK THIS OUT
Your whole body’s resonant frequencies tick over between 62 to 68Hz (hertz = cycles-per-second).
Nearly ubiquitous, everyday 4G electrosmog frequencies ranging from 600,000 to 3.7 billion hertz, hurts! (600MHz to 3.7 GHz)
If this seems an unfair contest, 5G “junk” millimeter-wave frequencies continue on up to 39 GHz. That’s 39 billion cycles-per-second continuous jackhammering v. your body/brain’s mellower rate of 4 to 70 cycles-per-second.
At least until 5G eventually maxes out at 52 billion cycles-per-second…
HERE’S THE THING
Both consciousness and behavior are affected by natural and unnatural electromagnetic signals. Because electromagnetic signals travel through your brain much faster than electrical signals travel along neurons to handle routine biological activities, “magnetic signals play an important role in managing states of consciousness,” writes Dr. Kingsley Dennis.
But don’t take his word for it. After pioneering experiments involving the induction of electromagnetic fields into the brains of volunteers at Laurentian University in Ontario, pioneering neuropsychologist Michael Persinger found the brain to be “highly sensitive to information and when magnetic fields are irregularly pulsed,” or modulated to carry data. These spurious, artificial fields “can begin communicating with the brain, altering its information flow and the way the individual perceives himself and the environment.”
Particularly affected are the amygdala, responsible for regulating emotions as powerful as fear and anger; and our memories in the hippocampus. Both regions, Dr. Dennis reports, “are highly unstable electrically” — and thus highly susceptible to unnatural electromagnetic interference from 4G and 5G.
So why is 5G being rushed into cities and rural communities everywhere, with zero testing and no understanding of short- and long-term effects?
Have we experienced this same scenario recently? Are these Big Pharma and Big Wireless experiments conjoined?
Klaus Schwab says Job #1 of the godless globalists is to eliminate all human connection with the transcendent. Because “only energy fields are capable of integrating information in space,” will AI-directed mass stimulation of humanity caught in a globe-girdling 5G wireless “net” finally sever our innate connection to the divine field of Ultimate Consciousness some call God?
Just asking…
Photo Captions:
EM Consciousness -Kateryna Kovarzh//Getty
Electromagnetic Field creates energy flow in body/mind & environment -YouTube
Scientists Uncover a Higher State of Consciousness -trendintech.com
Flux density at any point in an electric field -engineeringslab.com
Quantum Flux Capacitor by cmptrwhz on DeviantArt
Scientists Uncover a Higher State of Consciousness -trendintech.com
Messing with your electromagnentic field of awareness -tabublog.com
Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe? -livescience.com
'Seneca in discourse -Arte Ole