Book Review: We Are Electric by Sally Adee, Allen&Unwin 2023

Even for random quantum events just because its uncertain to an observer doesn't mean its not determined. I don't think we know that if we rewound the clock, these quantum events wouldn't go the same way. And if it is truly random then there is still no agency anyways.

 

Jonathan brought up a good point that its not just about the number of connections. Neurons have more signals that just open or close so there are probably many different components to complexity. Maybe silicone is limited in its ability to be complex in enough or the right ways. It could also be the case that complexity isn't required, but we don't seem to have ever encountered consciousness that wasn't complex.

 

It depends on how you define complexity. But I believe you description of the field is correct, although I recently read about a type of algorithm that feeds back into itself.

The main distinction between AI and neurons is that neurons seemingly can create and remove connections dynamically. I don’t believe we’ve done that with AI yet, although I’m not up to speed on the last 3+ years.

 

Sounds like this is another area we disagree on. You seem to think the richness, aka qualia, is the result of the complexity of the input signal whereas I think it comes from internal invocation of other circuitries and memories. Computers can have gazillion inputs of all sorts too; it's only a matter of scale.

I'm calling it an illusion in the same way that mirage is a reflection of something rather than something itself. Since qualia is association of the input signal with stored meanings, it's not something by itself.

Perhaps you are thinking of lower level of digital logics and computation. In a neural network AI, there is. It's actually called "weight", or w.

Again, I'm not familiar with them. But maybe great minds think alike!

Pain is a signal that invokes a region of the brain that responds to that signal to stop you from doing what causes the signal. It may not be a learning but certainly is a programming (that we are born with). Pre-wiring could be considered a learning passed down through genetic memory through evolution. Does that make it a BPS? I don't think so.

Back to the regularly scheduled program of qualia: if the fire alarm goes off because smoke is detected, is it a qualia? Or, are you saying that there is something special about the pain signal that is fundamentally different from fire signal that makes the "experience" rich?

Aww, rest in peace. You will have to do then

 

I'd consider that electric field communication, but not EM field communication. That's what I mean by misapplying theory: using what people understand about radio communication to mislead them about electric communication. I wouldn't be surprised if the author (mis)used long distance radio communication to push a belief that cells would communicate the same way. There's a vast difference between a megawatt transmitter and antennas that are large compared to the wavelength, and tiny EM signals with "antennas" that are tiny fractions of the wavelength.

Yes, that's why I pointed out "observations that can't be explained by present theories". If cells are doing something that appears "magical", it needs more study, and maybe new technologies. All too many people come up with a magical theory, such as an unknown force or particle, and invent a theory that explains something ... with no supporting evidence. Germ theory was unpopular, but it had statistical evidence once they looked, and physical evidence once the technology arrived to see the germs. Does cellular EM communication have that sort of evidence to support it?

Okay, I'm not up to date on quantum theory, but entanglement might be as useful for laymen as Newton's theory of gravity.

 

Electrical signals, not radio waves (EM). Yes, every electron movement also generates a magnetic field, but electrical power flowing through a wire isn't considered EM communication.

I don't have a problem with electricity being part of biology. Electric fields are the basis of chemistry. Evolution didn't "discover" electric fields; it's part of the environment, and molecules react to them, so they would affect survival of a species. If random chance had resulted in a piezoelectric molecule that resulted in increased survival, we might have organisms with piezoelectric muscles, mechanisms to zap prey (eels aren't piezoelectric) and maybe organic conductors rather than nerves.

 

In that case, there are probably multiple theories, none of which managed to pass tests yet. For my PEM's consistent 24 hr delay, my theory was that IFN-g was involved, since that rises 24 hrs after exertion. The lack of a proven theory doesn't mean we need to propose theories that amount to "magic". Dark matter or energy is fashionable these days, but there's no reason to propose that as a cause for ME.

If cells are affected significantly by EM fields, then that should show up by people 's severity being affected directly by external EM fields. While some people do claim that they are sensitive to EM fields, I'm unaware of any proper studies that verify it.

 

@Creekside I suppose if the book made all the claims you're guessing it makes it would be a bad book! I asked chatGPT though and it said guessing at what's inside a book is not in the top few ways to find out what's in a book.

 

Yes it is conveyed on the signals. The key point is that an individual neutron receives maybe 100 or 1000 signals all together as a pattern and responds electromagnetically to that pattern in what appears to be a more or less indivisible event of integration. The situation for a computer gate is quite different. There are only two signals arriving at a semiconductor, one facilitating the effect of the other.

What could mean ' to be invoked and internally generated' other than by convergent physical interaction? Some sort of magic gene process? Some mysterious vital potion? We need an explanation that provides a real causal path, and post-synaptic dendritic integration provides the perfect substrate for a single indivisible rich input.

 

This is important but it needs to be fleshed out precisely.

All physical events are partially indeterministic at the fundamental single dynamic unit or field excitation scale. There are always several possibilities. Moreover, probabilities are weighted so there are preferences that can give the local field domain choices. Physics is entirely compatible with 'free choice'.

Events become more deterministic in ordered solids at larger scale and that is the basis of Newtonian mechanics. Computer chips are designed to produce very reliably deterministic outputs by makings of enough ordered solid to give one output option for a given input with probability of >0.0000009ish. If they didn't computers would constantly produce gibberish since the do so many computations per second.

Some neurons appear to be tuned almost as precisely - the neurons that control LukeLittler's darts arm, for instance. But other neurons are presumably tuned to have a wider range of options. The main option is likely to be response time - whether 1.3 milliseconds or 1.9, perhaps. Banks of neurons are setup so that they compete on a speed basis so the quickest to respond provides the answer - which is of course completely different from a computer. A brain always responds with the 'best fit' answer, not an 'exact' answer.

If neuronal firing time depends on shifts in individual field excitations, as it could these are higher order excitations like acoustic Goldstone modes then indeterminacy with preference can be very open. An analogy would be the sound that comes out of a Fence horn when certain keys are opened or closed. The preferred note might be G# but with slight shifts in air dynamics made by the player you may get an octave higher G#' or even another note like C#or slightly sharper flat G# or a muffled 'split note'.

 

There is no reason why complexity of a system should be needed to create a thought as far as I can see. I thought must be based on an event occurring at some particular place in a brain and with adequate biotechnology you should be able to set that event up on its own 'in a vat'. But thoughts are rich events. They are rich in a sensory or input sense, so they must be events with complex inputs with many degrees of freedom (which nerve cells have and computer gates do not).

However, you do need, somewhere else, a system that can set up patterns of inputs for such events that are usefully interesting if you want thoughts to be of sunsets rather than random kaleidoscope showers. That is why you need a brain. 99% of a brain is busy getting data ready to input to somewhere else to set up a thought there, like the kitchen in a Michelin restaurant.

 

I believe I somehow didn’t include ‘doesn’t’ there. So I meant to say the opposite. Apologies!

 

This is the old Dennett behaviourist chestnut. Einstein says it differently. Indeed, there are no things, just events you want to predict the nature content of. And ultimately those are always events of experience. An 'observation' is an experience. In the 1960s a lot of scientists wanted to bracket out the messy experiential nature of the gold standard but subsequent perception physiology has sown us that you cannot do that for ever.

If all you can predict is the position a pointer on a spectrophotometer for a 'wavelength' how do we have a science for predicting pain and nausea? Or flavour? We all think colours are fixed because most of us have the same three cones. But there is considerable variation in olfactory receptors (there are lots). Genetic studies in mice show that flavour is not a property of any chemical. It is a property of a nervous system that is wired up to distinguish chemicals using apparently arbitrary internal codes. Biomedical science wants to know how that works in physics terms.

I used to think the way you do when I was 35 but I listened to a lecture from a UCL geneticist who systematically unravelled all my behaviourist preconceptions about these things.

 

But if you think about it all those wavelengths are calibrated by people's qualia. Most of the time brains work very similarly so we can assume that we can bracket out all the internal events that allow that calibration, but there are instances like flavours where you cannot.

Interestingly, photons probably do not have wavelength and are not waves. You will never ever find several maxima or minima in any dimension for a photon along a 'course'. And to get a clear understanding how that makes sense I am pretty sure you have to stand back and appreciate just how much of physics is based on metaphors that are base on our brains' internal codes. We think a photon must 'go from here to there' because our brains describe the world like that. But photons don't do that in any coherent sense. To understand the pure dynamic language of physics I think you need to understand just how important qualia are in distorting our working models. People say that quantum theory is weird but it is only weird if you do not appreciate how much our models of it are distorted by our qualia language.

 

This is an interesting argument that has been going the rounds for at least a century. I think it obscures something important. A completely random event makes nonsense as agency. But every event physics is partly determined and partly stochastic. Sort is not just 'anyhow'. In between randomness and determinism is not just a halfway house, there is something new, which is preference. Certain probabilities are greater than others. Preference is the basis of what we call choice, which is the essence of agency.

That may sound unconvincing but there is at least one further layer involved in biological agency. That is that events which involve preference involve representations of other future events. Once you have that I think you get what we intuitive call choice. Which is why we don't think preference in a chemical reaction in a test tube is a 'choice'. It is a preference about itself. We can have preferences about events to happen elsewhere, via representing them internal events.

 

It is very simple. Consciousness is rich input. Silicon gates never have more than two input bits.

 

Strictly speaking there is an electron field and an electromagnetic field of which the electric component is probably all that is relevant for Levin and nerve cells, although that may not be entirely true for neurons. Levin's electrical physics is good. I don't know about the book but I suspect it goes beyond the reasonable only in the way Levin does - to talk about organismal sentience. You are right that people make hideous mistakes about waveforms and information transfer in brains. EEG oscillations are not even travelling waves but there is a popular view that they can send information from place to place in brain.

Entanglement is very real and useful physics but it does not involve any spooky action at a distance. If laymen think it does they are likely to get seriously mislead - and in consciousness research they are being mislead like millions of lemmings falling off a cliff!

 

Was anyone suggesting that? I have rather lost track.

Not necessarily. As you know electromagnetic field effects can be very frequency dependent. I am not sure where the magnetic bit came in to this discussion to be honest. We were talking about the effect of electrical potentials.

 

Yes, but tests can be made at any or all frequencies. If I have an electronic lock that opens only on a 1.00386 GHz signal, I can apply a signal varying from ULF to UHF and watch for a response. If cells respond to a signal at a specific frequency, they can be tested the same way.

That's the problem: the discussion is supposed to be about electric fields, but someone used the term "EM", confusing the issue. Conflation leads to confusion and mistaken analogies.

 

Yes, I did, because the 'electric field' is a component of the EM field. I don't see any reason for that to cause confusion. Whether or not effects are mediated purely by the electric 3 vector or the magnetic component they will involve passage of photons - excitations of the EM field.

I don't think anyone has been suggesting that effects between cells are mediated by tuned radio photons inducing voltages as in an antenna. Levin certainly does not suggest that.