Field theories of consciousness - Scholarpedia

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Field theories of consciousness

Susan Pockett, University of Auckland

Dr. Susan Pockett accepted the invitation on 26 July 2008 (self-imposed deadline: 26 January 2009).

Introduction
The field theories of consciousness discussed in this article are theories of the nature of consciousness, in which consciousness is conceived as being identical with a field in the general sense in which the term field is used in physics. This means that in these theories, consciousness is seen as having not only duration, but also extension in space. In most of the theories discussed, consciousness is proposed to be identical with some aspect of a physical field i.e. a field in which the property that exists at each point in a particular region of the spacetime continuum is objectively measurable. However, in at least one of the theories, consciousness is proposed to be identical with a hypothetical non-physical field, which nevertheless still has extension in space. This article does not discuss the variety of sociological theories of consciousness stemming from the work of Kurt Lewin, in which the word field is taken to mean an abstract entity that includes not only each individuals conscious thoughts, emotions and desires, but also the various external and internal forces acting upon these. The field theories of consciousness that are discussed in this article can be further subdivided into two varieties, depending on the meaning of the word consciousness. For most of human history, the word consciousness was generally taken to indicate not the sort of individual awareness to which the word now refers, but rather a universal entity variously named Atman, Brahman, Allah, Jehovah, God, the Unmoved Mover (Aristotle), Absolute Spirit (Hegel), or any number of other names according to who was writing about it. However, during the late 19th century and all of the 20th century, Charles Darwins mechanistic explanation of how the biota of the world came to have their present form largely supplanted theistic creation stories, to the extent that by the early 21st century any discussion of a hypothetical global consciousness has become more or less taboo in academic circles. Hence a brief history of philosophical treatments of global consciousness and some recent attempts at experimental investigation of the matter are relegated to a sub-article called Field theories of global consciousness. The remainder of the present article deals exclusively with scientific field theories concerning the everyday conscious experiences of individuals, including the basic sensations sometimes known as qualia (colours, sounds, smells, tastes, various kinds of touch or somatosensation). Three such theories are described and discussed, in chronological order.

Khlers field theory

It is widely believed (e.g. Rose, 2006) that in the 1930s and 40s the Gestalt theorist Wolfgang Khler put forward an electric field theory of consciousness, which was tested and disproved by Karl Lashley and Roger Sperry in the early 1950s. The truth of the matter is somewhat different. First of all, Khler did put forward something he called field theory (Khler 1940), but he never once used the word consciousness in his written work, and never explicitly proposed that there might be identity between brain-generated electric fields and conscious sensations. Khler only ever referred to electric fields as cortical correlates of percepts (not sensations). His field theory was a theory of brain function. Secondly, Lashleys test of what he claimed was Khlers theory (Lashley et al 1951) actually did not adequately test even Khlers theory, let alone the modern electromagnetic field theory of consciousness as outlined later in this article. Lashleys test was to lay several gold strips across the entire surface of one monkeys brain, and insert about a dozen gold pins into a rather small area of each hemispheric visual cortex of another monkey. The idea was that these strips or pins should short-circuit the hypothesized figure currents, and thereby (if Khlers field theory was correct) disrupt the monkeys visual perception. Lashley

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did no tests to see whether his inserts actually did disrupt any vision-related currents in the brain, but simply performed one test of each monkeys post-operative vision, by asking the monkey to use its pre-operation training to distinguish between 4 pairs of visual patterns on plates covering dishes that did or did not contain food. The monkeys performed about as well on this task after insertion of the pins or strips as they had before (although the one with the inserted pins did occasionally fail to see a small bit of food in the cup) and Lashley felt justified in concluding from this that the action of electric currents, as postulated by field theory, is not an important factor in cerebral integration. Later Roger Sperry (Sperry et al 1955) did experiments similar to Lashleys, making sub-pial cuts and implanting tantalum pins into cat brains and reporting similarly negative results (but wisely remaining more circumspect about their interpretation). In fact the security of Lashleys conclusion is highly questionable, for two reasons: (a) With the 20:20 hindsight conferred by an extra 70 years of brain research, no present-day neurophysiologist would expect Lashleys (or Sperrys) slices, strips and pins to produce any significant changes in the field potentials that modern workers would understand as underpinning Khlers hypothesized figure currents. Field potentials are generated by the flow of current into and out of neurons, not across large regions of extracellular space. No major transcortical extracellular current flow such as might be disrupted by the insertion of macroscopic pins features in any modern understanding of brain function. (b) Lashley believed that the cortex was functionally homogeneous or pluripotential (Lashley 1950), so to him it didnt much matter where his pins were placed. But modern wisdom is that the cortex is not functionally homogeneous at all, which means that even if Lashleys inserted pins did disrupt or distort the passage of any hypothetical transcortical river of electric current, it would have been sheer luck if they were positioned in precisely the right place to affect the much more localised figure currents that Khler actually proposed as being associated with the percepts like those being tested.

Libets field theory of consciousness

Like most of his contemporaries, Benjamin Libet swallowed whole Lashleys anti-Khler conclusions but he still liked the idea that consciousness is a field. Therefore Libet proposed in 1994 that consciousness is a field which is not in any category of known physical fields, such as electromagnetic, gravitational etc (Libet 1994). In Libets words, his proposed Conscious Mental Field may be viewed as somewhat analogous to known physical fields however the CMF cannot be observed directly by known physical means. A field that is not observable directly by known physical means is in some danger of remaining confined to the realms of philosophy, but Libet was able to render his hypothesis scientific by proposing an ingenious experimental test of its predictions. The test involved isolating a slab of cortex known to produce a particular conscious experience so that no synaptic transmission could occur between the interior of the slab and the rest of the brain, then asking whether the conscious experience generated within the slab could still be reported. Libets theory predicted that it could, by means of communication between the conscious field generated by the slab and the spatially contiguous larger conscious mental field. The technical difficulties involved with (a) actually doing this experiment and (b) interpreting the results are discussed in detail in Libets paper, but remain so formidable that no such experiment has yet been done. However, at this stage it is probably worth pointing out that even if the experiment could be adequately done, the success of Libets theoretical prediction in such a test would not distinguish between his theory and the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness as outlined below.

The electromagnetic field theory of consciousness

Partly as a result of Lashleys legacy, the modern electromagnetic field theory of consciousness struggled for many years to achieve publication at all, let alone any degree of acceptance. Susan Pockett started trying to publish it in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1995 (Pockett 2002). Around the same time Robert Charman (personal communication) independently submitted essentially the same idea to the same journal, with similar lack of success. Charman then published the idea as a short paper in the alternative journal Network (Charman 1997) and withdrew from the fray, while Pockett slipped it as a footnote into a review paper on something else (Pockett 1999), worked it up into a book manuscript which was

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similarly rejected by a series of academic publishers, and eventually put the book out using a demand publisher in the year 2000 (Pockett, 2000). By this time the idea had been doing the rounds for approximately five years and Johnjoe McFadden had also written about it in the final chapter of a book about something else (McFadden, 2000). Two years later, the Journal of Consciousness Studies finally accepted the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness as an original contribution from McFadden (2002(a),(b)) and Roy John suggested in a more neuroscientific forum that a resonating electromagnetic field might be the embodiment of mind (John 2002). The essence of the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness is that conscious perceptions and also conscious sensations or qualia, inasmuch as they can be said to have independent existence are identical with certain brain-generated spatiotemporal electromagnetic patterns. The detailed constitution of these electromagnetic patterns presently remains unspecified. The original statements of the theory had it that such conscious electromagnetic patterns act causally on the brain (Pockett 2000) or spinal cord (McFadden 2000), but later versions (Pockett 2002) question how widespread this effect can be, given that much of what we believe to be consciously initiated bodily movement seems actually to be initiated by preconscious brain function (e.g. see Pockett et al 2006). This issue presently remains unresolved. The safest conclusion is probably that if consciousness can cause brain events, the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness offers a physically plausible mechanism by which it might do so. With regard to the testability of the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness, there presently exists a great deal of empirical evidence supporting the theory (Pockett 2000, McFadden 2002(a), John 2002), but so far none of it really differentiates between the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness and its main competitor, the psycho-neural identity theory, aka Cricks astonishing hypothesis (Crick 1994). The psychoneural identity theory basically says that consciousness is identical with certain unspecified kinds of brain activity per se. Unfortunately the proposed experimental test which alone distinguishes between the two theories and renders the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness scientific rather than philosophical is almost as difficult in a practical sense as Libets proposed test it is to generate a putatively conscious field artificially, insert someones head into it and see whether the owner of the head experiences the sensation supposedly encoded in the field (Pockett 2000). This test cannot yet be done, initially because not enough is yet known about the neural correlates of consciousness and their associated electromagnetic fields, and secondarily because a practical method of artificially generating the relevant three-dimensional electromagnetic field configuration has yet to be worked out. However, this does not prevent the present discussion and refutation of a series of a priori objections to the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness. The objection that the theory was disproved by Lashley nearly sixty years ago has already been covered. Three of the more cogent further objections are discussed below. 1. Probably the most obvious a priori objection to the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness is that common external electromagnetic fields radio waves, mains voltage, the magnetic fields inside MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines demonstrably have no effect on consciousness. Surely they should, the objection goes, if the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness were correct. MacFaddens answer to this objection (McFadden 2000) is that the brain is surrounded by a protective Faraday cage of cerebrospinal fluid, which denies entry to external fields. This is easily refuted by the observation that such a Faraday cage would also deny exit to brain-generated fields, which would make it impossible to record EEG (electroencephalograms) from the scalp. Since thousands of reseach and clinical laboratories around the world routinely record EEG from the scalp every day, the proposed Faraday cage cannot be effective. More plausible refutations of the original objection are that (a) radio waves are of much higher frequency than the proposed conscious fields, so would not be expected to affect their relevant features (b) mains voltage is about the same frequency as the oscillations proposed as being conscious, but electromagnetic oscillations at these frequencies radiate so inefficiently that virtually no power is detectable a few cm from a wall socket (c) the magnetic field inside an MRI machine is powerful enough, but does not have the right spatial configuration to couple with the putative conscious field (as demonstrated by the fact that, once the technical difficulties associated with the recording apparatus are dealt with, the magnetic field generated by MRI machines does not affect EEG recorded within the magnet). 2. A second objection to the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness is that experiments with the early split-brain

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patients (in whom the corpus collosum, the fibre tract connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, was cut to prevent spread of epileptic seizures), show that such patients apparently have two separate consciousnesses. The conscious field would (probably) still be unified in split-brain patients, so if, as proposed by the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness, a given subjects total consciousness is the totality of the conscious field generated by their brain, split brain patients should still have a unified consciousness. One reasonable answer to this objection is that to the casual observer, split-brain patients do still have a unified consciousness. Even when one does the clever experimental manipulations necessary to demonstrate that in such patients the non-verbal right hemisphere can be made aware of things which cannot be reported by the verbal left hemisphere, it remains true that interhemispheric transfer of information is not entirely absent in commisurotomised subjects. There appear to be two systems, one of which can be split and the other of which cannot (Corballis 1994, 1995). Perhaps the unsplittable system is subserved by the conscious field. 3. A third commonly advanced objection to the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness is that it has no obvious advantages over the widely accepted neural identity theory and therefore should not be adopted. Two answers to this objection are that (a) even if it were true that the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness made no significant predictions over and above those of the psycho-neural identity theory, it is not necessarily true that the first theory to appear is the right one, and (b) in fact the electromagnetic field theory does, in at least one major respect, deliver more than the psycho-neural identity theory ever could. The difference is that the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness predicts that in principle, consciousness could be generated using hardware instead of wetware. This single prediction not only renders the electromagnetic field theory testable where the neural identity theory is not it also opens wondrous vistas with respect to possible future technologies.

Field theories of global consciousness

This sub-article contains following sections: The philosophy of global consciousness: a brief history of God Modern field theories of and evidence for global consciousness 1. The unified field theory of consciousness 2. Other field theories of global consciousness References

References
Charman RA (1997) The field substance of mind a hypothesis. Network 63, 11-13. Corballis MC (1994) Perceptual integration following commissurotomy: a reappraisal. In M Sugushita (Ed) New horizons in neuropsychology : proceedings of the 9th Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Neuroscience (TMIN) Symposium New Horizons in Neuropsychology, Tokyo, 24-25 November 1993 pp139-158, Elsevier Amsterdam. Corballis MC (1995) Visual integration in the split brain. Neuropsychologia 33, 937-959. Crick, F. (1994) The astonishing hypothesis. Simon and Schuster John E.R. (2002) The neurophysics of consciousness. Brain Research Reviews 39, 1-28. Khler W (1940) Dynamics in psychology. Liveright, New York, 158pp Lashley K (1950) In search of the engram. Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology 4, 454-482. Lashley KS, Chow KL and Semmes J (1951) An examination of the electric field theory of cerebral integration. Psychological Review 58, 123-136. Libet B (1994) A testable field theory of mind-brain interaction. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1(1) 119-126.

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McFadden J (2000) Quantum evolution: the new science of life. Norton NY, London, 338 pp. McFadden J (2002a) Synchronous firing and its influence on the brains electromagnetic field: evidence for an electromagnetic field theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (4) 23-50. McFadden J (2002b) The conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field theory: the hard problem made easy? Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(8) 45-60. Pockett S (1999) Anesthesia and the electrophysiology of auditory consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 8, 45-61. Pockett S (2000) The nature of consciousness: a hypothesis. iUniverse.com, Lincoln Nebraska. 190pp. Pockett S (2002) Difficulties with the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (4) 51-56. Pockett S, Banks WP and Gallagher S (2006) Does consciousness cause behavior? MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 364 pp. Rose D (2006) Consciousness: philosophical, psychological and neural theories. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 452 pp. Sperry RW, Miner N and Myers RE (1955) Visual pattern perception following subpial slicing and tantalum wire implantations in the visual cortex. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 48, 50-58 Sponsored by: Anil Seth, University of Sussex, UK Category: Consciousness
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