Diamond Mind
Science, philosophy, spirituality, technology, green energy, current affairs. Hosted by scholar, activist and author, Tam Hunt.
Diamond Mind
Diamond Mind #10: Can computers ever be conscious?
What if the most fundamental aspect of your conscious experience isn't found in neural firing at all, but in the electromagnetic fields those neurons produce? This mind-expanding conversation with Dr. Colin Hales, a pioneer in electromagnetic field theories of consciousness, challenges everything we think we know about how brains create minds.
For decades, mainstream neuroscience has focused on action potentials – the spikes of neural firing – as the foundation of cognition and consciousness. But this approach has failed to explain how billions of discrete neurons create our unified experience. Dr. Hales reveals how the electromagnetic fields produced by neural activity operate 5,000 times faster than neural signals and contain a staggering 125 billion times more information density. These fields aren't mere byproducts; they may be consciousness itself.
We explore recent breakthrough studies confirming that neurons can influence each other through these fields without any synaptic connections – what's called "aphaptic coupling." This phenomenon, once dismissed as insignificant even by prominent neuroscientists like Christoph Koch, is now recognized as a crucial mechanism that explains mysterious "too-fast" influences observed throughout the brain.
Dr. Hales also discusses his groundbreaking work developing electromagnetic field computing chips (neuromimetic chips) that could revolutionize artificial intelligence. Unlike current AI systems that struggle with novelty, these field-based processors might create machines with genuine intelligence and possibly consciousness – raising profound ethical questions about our technological future.
Whether you're fascinated by consciousness, neuroscience, physics, or the future of AI, this conversation will transform how you think about the most intimate aspect of your existence: your own awareness. Subscribe now and join us at the cutting edge where science meets consciousness.
The Diamond Mind Podcast with Talon. Okay, let's dive in. So I'm going to kind of just give you a little context of why I've reached out to you. I first discovered your work, I think maybe five years ago, when my colleague, marissa Erickson, sent me a paper by you which you published back in 2014, which is a really deep dive into the electrical functioning of the cell neurons in particular, and this paper has a lot of citations. It's quite well known now and it was a really nice entree to your work and to the notion of EM fields in cognition and consciousness. So we've been now collaborating for five years in various ways. We were co-editors on the EM field theories of consciousness special issue at Frontier Human Neuroscience and I think you'd agree that really was a pretty serious step in the progression of EM field theories becoming more mainstream. So let's start there, let's go ahead and dive in and if you can, give us a little background on how you came to this topic and where you see the field at this point in its development.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I'll drop in the personal stuff as I can as I go, without doing some elaborate intro. I'd like to bounce back that history between the two of us a little. It was 2019, wasn't it roughly I think so yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where I got this message? Out of nowhere, and it's actually a signatory thing for EM field theories of consciousness. There's a smattering of people around the world and they're all robertson, caruso and they're kept in a kind of bubble of silence by a culture of the norm, the normal way that science is actually working when you're trying to deal with consciousness, and so you've got this disparate group of enthusiasts in the background who are quelled. And then for the so, for the first time ever, I get this call and there's this little group centered on the university of california, santa barbara and yourself and jonathan schooler and stuff, and finally I had a little group of people to actually communicate my frustrations with this whole area. And to york, it was really great for you to take the initiative and put together this little special issue. He was driving it. And a shout out to marissa, by the way, my co-editor, the co-editor, co-editor and co-author on the one of the contributions I made to that. I haven't seen her since then.
Speaker 1:I think she's off being a mum now or something all, she's a mum at full-time academic, so yeah, very busy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, anyway, it'd be great to catch up at some point, and we've never actually met in person, which is another thing we probably should remedy. You've come a long way, but you've still got about six hours in a plane to get here. I'm in Melbourne.
Speaker 2:The field at the moment has had a big shake-up, essentially as a result of the special issue. It says here's a group of people who've been thinking about this and we're here, we exist and we've got something to say, and it was great to be involved in that. And I don't know, I really can't say what will come of it, but I think that there's going to be a turning point. We actually called the subtitle of our work, marissa and I. It was called the electromagnetic turn, which is a kind of philosophical terminology for a moment when things took a directional shift. And if I had to characterise it, I would say that special issue and the times themselves, for reasons we'll probably get into, are going to be responsible for this movement, a shift in thinking where EM fields they're going to naturally dominate and there's no way out of it.
Speaker 1:Let's back it real quick, and can you give a succinct explanation of what EM field theories are and why it matters?
Speaker 2:Why it matters. Wow, the reason it matters is let's take it back. I know I find it difficult to concisely draw the picture, but if you can stack the sciences up as a nested hierarchy, and so at the bottom you've got physics and you've got chemistry, and you go up through biology hierarchy and so at the bottom you've got physics and you've got chemistry and you've got through biology, cell biology, up to neuroscience. Essentially, there's a sort of a vector of stacked sciences and the EM fields, literally in the brain, go from that, like the atomic level, and they arise in the brain at roughly the scale of about five nanometers, so that's five thousandths of a millionth of a meter. And when having sources at that level, that then express a field six orders of magnitude bigger than that original source, and so the total field actually comes out of the entire organ.
Speaker 2:So what you actually got is a physical phenomenon that is originating, everything that the brain does and actually has an existence in space of the size, literally the size of the brain. It's a massive object, a single object, held together by fields and with a huge complexity at the depths of it. And if you ask the question, what's going on with EM fields and with a huge complexity at the depths of it. And if you ask the question what's going on with EM fields and why do they matter? It's actually crazy to say why they're not mattering. How can the very phenomenon that's actually doing everything in a brain, from the atomic level up, be ignored?
Speaker 1:in terms of when you're explaining the first person perspective, which I think we probably should qualify, by the way, yeah, explain a bit more about what you mean by there's an object in the brain that encompasses the volume of the brain, but is not the brain itself. That's probably confusing for a lot of listeners. What does that mean? Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:Fields are like that In a very real way. We're all familiar with the electric field and the magnetic field, the fundamentals of basic classic electromagnetism they we've seen the sparks in our hair at night when you're a kid. You get it all worked up and then we've all played with magnets. Now you've got this mysterious force of repulsion between two North Poles and there's nothing there. Yet those things resist each other and that's because there is a static field system in space. Now if you go through supplementary A of Marisa in my paper, you'll see I go to considerable detail as to where that electric and magnetic field system come from in excitable cell tissue. It's essentially my expertise, that's what I did my PhD on. And so what happens is you've got this gigantic object called the brain, an organ in space which occupies a considerable volume. We can all point at it, but it's made of atoms and the atoms are made of molecules. We've got the containment hierarchy that follows the sciences up. So you've got chemistry happening. The chemistry is organised into cells and the cells are organised into a network structure and patterned all over the surface of these cells are these field sources at the nanometer scale and they produce this invisible field and it permeates and sits on top of all the chemistry, it superposes on top of the chemistry and it also literally every single source. There are trillions of these things. Every single source contributes to the entirety of the whole and they all superpose and they don't just add up like the bill for your groceries, right, they add up directionally.
Speaker 2:It's called vectorial addition. So if you've got a field pointing that way and a field pointing that way, then this part here is the net field. That's vector addition. We're all familiar with it. If we're sailing a boat where the wind appears to come from where it's actually coming from, it's that kind of addition. So that's the field system that we're talking about. And when an electromagnetic field theory is posed for an explanation of consciousness, what you're actually doing is posing a hypothesis that being those fields, like literally being them, is the process by which a first-person perspective arises.
Speaker 1:Now I would, before we I go there, before we go there, let me continue with kind of fleshing out the EM field structure because again, I think a lot of people know the name, they've heard it, but they're like I don't get it what it is. So I have tried in my work to offer a metaphor and let me know what you think of this. I know we play far away. The metaphor I've used is looking at a tree in a forest I mean a kind of a jungly forest and the brain is analogous to the trunk and the branches of that tree and the en fields the brain produces are analogous to the small twigs and leaves of that tree and that forest canopy. So there's a lot more structure and complexity in the leaves and twigs but the gross anatomy is much more visible, meaning the trunk and large branches. But the information structure and the ability to actually coordinate perception and awareness and cognition itself would be far more in the high information content of the EM fields and in the forest metaphor.
Speaker 2:Does that work for?
Speaker 1:you.
Speaker 2:It's blurring my perspective in it a bit, because I've often wandered through the forest nearby. I walk up there all the time, thinking my thoughts, as we all do, and I look at the trees and I see a metaphoric connection between what's in here and what's going on out there. But if I had to describe it, I would say that the trees themselves are literally dendrite. Dendritic the Latin roots of the words are to do with branching structure, and if you took the whole forest and you compressed it into a single solid object, with all of the leaves and the brick twigs interwoven with each other, and then looked at the transpiration phenomena that's happening in the leaves, all of that is field system. There is no point where there's something that isn't a field system is becoming something that is a field system. The trees and the branches are a field system and the field the gross field expression impressed on space by the branches and the leaves and all of it is that becomes a single object from all these massively interwoven tree branches and the whole thing is literally field. I think we need to really stress is that atoms, like this object that is you and I, we're made of a single. Like you've all seen, everyone knows the table of the elements right. That's a finite list of a bunch of atoms and in the context of cognition, we're in a biosphere here, you and I sharing this world, and the entire thing is made from this library of atoms. And every single atom, all atoms, are essentially an electromagnetic field object. There is like, when this finger meets that finger, there's no, it's not like there's some kind of impenetrable object. What you've actually got is two electromagnetic field systems, the outer shell electrons of the, literally of the atoms in the cells in my fingers, hitting each other and repelling, just like the two poles in a magnet. And the space is largely empty, to about one part in 15,000.
Speaker 2:If you actually go to the structure of an atom and look at the electrons and you look at the nucleus and you go to the regions that most physicists would identify as the thing, what they're talking about is essentially the container of the mass. So if you go to an electron, it's 10 to the minus 15 meters. Roughly it's a femtometer. It's a really tiny thing, but that's the container. If you think of an electron as a thing in space, then sitting also attached to the mass that's in that little container, is a charge and the charge and there's also spin, those two things, that's in a magnetic half of the equation. Those two things are expressed at distance much bigger than the atom. However, when you've got n electrons and a nucleus with n protons in it, the net charge is zero. So at distance you get absolutely nothing. It's neutral.
Speaker 2:But up close all you've got is these two apparently attractive objects being forced to not meet because of quantum mechanical constraints and the net result is that you get this flurrying, dynamic electromagnetic field that is quantized by quantum mechanics and it's stabilized and it becomes the atoms that we and the trees and the rocks and the flowers and everything are made of and what brains are made of. So until you, if you go down right down deep into the tissue of a brain and you penetrate and keep going right through the detailed structure and hit an individual atom at that point of contact, what you think is contact, all you're actually inserting your pointer in is a field system. There's no substance there, right, it's actually a field system. So when you and I sitting here, we're literally electromagnetic field objects. There's nothing else you can point at that there is in the space, except when you get down inside electrons and inside the nucleus, and there things are different.
Speaker 1:So I fully agree. Of course, we've been in agreement on this since the beginning of our five-year discussion. I guess what I'm trying to get at since the beginning of our five-year discussion, I guess what I'm trying to get at with the use of metaphor, is different levels of explanation, and so the metaphor I'm sketching and I'll we'll move on after this. I don't I'm not going to subject you to this further, please go on. This is, to me at least, why we can see the brain, but we can't see the em fields they produce. So when I analogize the brain itself to the branch, the large branch in the trunks of a tree or a forest, it's because we can see the brain. We cannot see the em fields they produce, but those em fields are very real, they are causal, they do things in the world, carry information. They are probably I think you would agree on this they're probably the primary locus of cognition and consciousness, not the neural firing that mainstream neuroscience focuses on. So does it? Does that make sense in that context?
Speaker 2:absolutely, and I regard it as probably a great part of the responsibility of you and I as communicators to try and get even people in our own sphere of activity, let alone the general public, to understand what amounts to a proper grip on the standard model of particle physics just as it is at the moment and how it's been for about 50 years. The stable part of it. It's pretty well known. But, yes, there are. We meet on multiple levels and we always converge on the same thing. You talk about information, the structure of this, the gross field structure. When you get a little bit away from distances, the size of the membrane, and you start measuring what's going on, the amount of information content, to specify what that field is spectacular, you're missing like six orders of magnitude. You, if you abstract it all away and turn it into a ping, which we call the firing, you've lost a gigantic amount of information and those fields are intersecting and influencing each other like the way the corona of the sun is influencing itself, and that content is at the scale just up above the cell is spectacularly complex. In fact it's formally complex as well. That's something we could probably touch on later. It's actually a formally complex system and it's the first thing we throw away in neuroscience.
Speaker 2:I'm in neuroscience, right, I'm at the University of Melbourne and I've been there for a very long time.
Speaker 2:I actually did my PhD in electrical engineering. I did my PhD in electrical engineering. As it happens, it doesn't mean anything really, but I know that the great majority of people who go into the biological sciences and head towards neuroscience and so forth are actually math and physics shy and they will grab anything which makes all their nasty physics go away and that grabbing. And I've got such a huge history or a sense of the history of this. The expulsion of the field system out of the narrative of neuroscience essentially happened in the early 50s and it's got three generations of reinforcement, and so when you actually go into neuroscience, the great bulk of the people have no real grip on what fields are and how they actually relate to the substance of us, and that has all vanished in a whole lot of amazing abstractions that have won Nobel Prizes. For people it gets rewarded and reinforced. If you come up with a good abstraction to make the nasty fields go away, then you'll end up with a Nobel Prize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's dive in a little bit before we head into the more philosophical side of the discussion. I've been, and I think you too have been, looking at what's called nowadays often the neurocode or the spike code and wondering at a very basic level how that approach, which is the mainstream approach in today's neuroscience, can even in principle explain consciousness. Now, it could in principle explain cognition because it is based on information flows and logic gates and envisioning neurons as essentially enacting logic gates. That was the whole point of the seminal paper oh, I'm blanking the paper right now. I think it was 43. Mcculloch and Pitts yes, mcculloch and Pitts, yeah, that created this notion of the neural code. And we're seeing now this kind of shift, albeit still a minority, toward what I'm calling now the field code, which is based on field computing and essentially non-digital analog approach to computing. Could you shed some light on those extensions between the field code and spike code, field computing, et cetera?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Here's a moment to touch on the personal history while we're here. My actual interest in all of this originates with a passion in my life for machine intelligence, so I'm actually coming at this from a machine intelligence perspective. So all of the things you just said resonate with me to a huge degree I'm actually originally an electrical engineer resonate with me to a huge degree. I'm actually originally an electrical engineer. So I've got all this knowledge of semiconductors and those things as electromagnetic objects as well, and that whole idea of distilling away all of the field content and focusing on the action potential, which is the first thing that won the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2:Hodgkin and Huxley. The work they did was just breathtaking science. It's hard to overstate the degree. I don't know how those guys did what they did. This was before there was even the idea of an ion channel. Right, they actually intuited the existence of these conductance-modulating molecular structures that created the field system that everyone now knows to stick a probe into. And you, yep, you've found the code, the spike, and everyone thinks that's the game. That's game over, it's only just beginning.
Speaker 2:That spike is evidence of the origins of an electromagnetic field system which was literally abstracted away in 1952 by the work of Hodgkin and Huxley in a spectacular lumped element equivalent circuit model, and it's pretty much imbued indirectly AI entirely, to bring it to the point it's in today. And meanwhile the brain itself is bursting with information content. When you say information content, what I'm thinking is that there is regularity in the field, system repeatability, there's some regular variability, resonating systems that are erecting a collective whole from myriad little parts that has structure and if you describe that structure, it's information. Now, it's not a story about anything, it's not software, it's actually literally a physical process in action. So that's what the brain is doing. And the problem is that most people hear the word information and they make this internal leap aha, the brain's a computer. They go there. That's been reinforced by three generations, especially in AI, and it's the wrenching apart of the computer metaphor into AI and the original matter that produces intelligence at that level of fields.
Speaker 2:That essentially what this electromagnetic field theory is all about. In the end, it's about bringing it back and restoring it to its proper place in descriptions of intelligence and behavior. And even and now if you add an account of consciousness first person it's also to be brought to bear on mood, the visual experience, the smell, experience, touch, taste, all of the primary senses, the emotions mad, bad, glad, sad all of those things. They're all first-person perspectives. And where do they come from? If you like? My pointer is pointing right down and all the way through the skull, right down into the ion channel that's making the spike. There's nothing there but electromagnetism. So claiming that something else other than electromagnetism is responsible for the first person perspective is to me it's idiosyncratic at an extreme level. But it's an idiosyncrasy in science, which you can see happened in the culture, of the way the brain has been teased out in science. Um, for good reasons.
Speaker 1:But that happens a lot right where you get a simplification as a stage in the development of science. So the civilization for neuroscience was looking at the brain and neurons as logic gates right, yeah, mccall competes model. That was a simplification, it was a working hypothesis that has gotten us a long way in 80 years, absolutely many years. Many ways have hit a wall, and so how does the notion of analog computing and field computing help get us over that wall?
Speaker 2:I'm literally doing it. I can go through my own personal work in more detail later, but yeah, these reciprocating and recurrent networks and the oscillations between neurons that erect this amazingly complex field in space are are, in effect, you can call it an analog computation of a kind, but it is the processor, that is a brain, and it's the field system itself, is the action of the process of doing what it does, and so you can point at properties of the field system. In fact, all along throughout the entire period of neuroscience, when anyone stuck a probe into excitable cell tissue measuring a voltage, that voltage is a property of an electromagnetic field system. That's where it actually comes from. It's not that you're contacting something that isn't an electromagnetic field. The probe itself is inserting itself. It's a field system of its own and it's inserted into the field system that is the brain, and collectively, the net result is that the probe makes a voltage measurement and, as an action potential passes by and traveling along the surface of the membrane, you see the voltage ping and you go aha, there's an action potential. That's happened and there's an enormous amount of information that you can glean in models of the dynamics of those individual tiny events. But they've lost contact with the actual context.
Speaker 2:The action potential itself is an electromagnetic phenomenon. It's a traveling wave which goes longitudinally down the surface and up the surface. It's dromic and anti-dromic propagation. Most people don't realise that either. There's so many parts of this which are missing from the narrative. So the action potential not only does this travel down the longitudinal direction, down off the soma into the axon, and goes around and does its dance and affects all its neighbours at the very same time.
Speaker 2:The same field system sources that produce that travelling wave in the direction of the membrane, longitudinal propagation, also produces a transverse field orthogonal to the membrane, and that is the thing which has only come to the fore in the last what 15 years or something where it's pretty much nailed now it's called a faptic coupling. So the same set of originating sources in the membrane produce two different influences One that reinforces or is like a repeating system that keeps the propagation going down, the membrane heating system that keeps the propagation going down the membrane, but at the same time at distance over, on a scale of up to a millimetre depending on the context. Orthogonal to the very same field sources is an influence through the tissue at the speed of light or very near the speed of light, and that has a causal impact. It's now been verified in the lab and it's been nailed with the. Oh hell, what's the lab? The? What's that experiment where the poor guys got sent back to repeat it because none of the reviewers believed them?
Speaker 2:oh the durand, yeah, the durand, it was 20, 2019, 2019, yeah, yeah, I'd highly recommend it. I mean, that's a great story Not being believed. They actually, they actually air gapped a piece of I think it was rat hippocampus. They put up one millimeter like an enormous gap, just physically sliced that hippocampus and yet the two independent halves were influencing each other. In spite of that, there is no physical connection it's a bit closer than that.
Speaker 1:But by the time they got to 400 micrometers then the effect started to wane with a significant gap. Yeah, there was still really remarkable congruence of the field pattern. Let me dive into what you mentioned about affected fields and the fact that coupling so you described how, under the traditional spike model, you have longitudinal waves of current going down axons and dendrites. Those produce a transverse wave that we call coupling. But we've seen, of course, in recent years that there is. It's not a fully dependent system as far as I understand it.
Speaker 1:You may disagree on this, so feel free to push back on me. I envision and this is what I'm calling right now the strong EM field hypothesis is that the spike dynamics of neurons, maybe and I'm just describing this as a maybe to be a little interesting and controversial here maybe and I'm just describing this as a maybe to be a little interesting and controversial here maybe a little more than the energy that feeds the field system, that is the mind, that is cognition, that is consciousness. And so, even if you don't go as far as that, I think you might agree that the effect of field system, even though it basically arises from that, spiking throughout the brain, but it has its own almost independent existence, where it has its own causal structure that doesn't rely on spiking. Would you agree with either that weaker version or the stronger version?
Speaker 2:I would say look, put it this way, if you deleted those things that produce the action potential, there would be no aphaptic coupling, agreed Both. I know it's hard. This is a thought experiment. If you could get your magic wand and delete all the ion channel, all of a sudden, the thing would be nothing. The EEG at this level of the whole organ would just be gone.
Speaker 2:When you actually this is such a cultural problem you actually literally used the word current a minute ago there's this currents. There are no currents going down an axon, right, it doesn't happen. There are. If you looked at the charges actually on the intracellular side as the action potential went past, you would just go blip like that. The currents that everyone thinks are there are actually the result of half a century of the use of the Hodgkin-Huxley metaphor, a lumped element circuit metaphor. Use of the Hodgkin-Huxley metaphor, a lumped element circuit metaphor. Yes, you can make statistical aggregates of ion channel, sorry, ion movements in the intracellular and extracellular space that are predictable by these lumped element models. But what's actually happening is that the currents in the intra and extracellular space are essentially just noise. You can see a little bit of blipping going on, but what's actually happening is that there is a field system being relayed by these little blips. So the field system is travelling, not currents, they're handing it to each other as it travels.
Speaker 2:If not currents, you're handing it to each other if not currents.
Speaker 1:You're saying it's voltage spikes, and that is the field system the voltage spike is a property of the field system if it doesn't, isn't something independently existing. It is our conceptualization of the basic mechanics of what's going on. Absolutely yeah. I mean, what is the field system in this case is what is potentials going down the line?
Speaker 2:okay, it's when you stick a probing and measurement, measure it, you end up, say, a thousand probes. You measure and you can see the potentials appear to be traveling and you can see the potentials reflecting the activity of the field at the tip of the electrode. That's what's actually going on. So you can't. The idea that there's electricity that's driving it is actually unhelpful and I'd like to go to some length to actually undo that proclivity in the discourse, if I can. It's actually a traveling field system and part of the field system goes orthogonally to the membrane and part of the field system triggers adjacent sources to replicate the same activity. And it's actually the adjacent sources there there are transmembrane object that do the work.
Speaker 1:The field system of what Voltage potentials?
Speaker 2:It's a field system caused by the motion of ions across the membrane. So there's three fundamental eras in the involvement of ions. The actual charges in the power system all around us, the energy is being transported by the field system, just like it is in the brain. It's just that the charge basis of it is electrons and holes in crystalline solids. We don't have that. We have ions sodium, potassium, calcium, various other ions as well but they're the main ones. So there's three main areas, the main ones. So there's three main areas. There's an, let's say, there's a sodium channel, sodium ion inside the cell, and the cell is just about to fire, and there's an ion channel that's going to open and there's already a gigantic field system across the membrane, so it's already biased. With this huge electric field across the membrane, the, the sodium atom that we're about to traffic across the membrane, is sucked into this tiny orifice and it's the order of nanometers and prior to that, in the inside it's being battered at a hundred thousand meters per second, thermally agitated. It's noise everywhere, field noise, the ions everywhere. It's just they're all crashing into each other. They're hydrated with water molecules and it's a. It's somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million meters, a second of thermal bashing at 40 degrees c. So then, all of a sudden, the field system grabs the ion, sucks it into the input area, which is like a funnel, a containment funnel, and then the ion goes through this incredibly tiny hole, a pore, through the membrane about five nanometers. So you've got this sudden containment of something that was just froth, suddenly confined to a single part from one side of the neuron to the other, forced by an enormous electrical field that was established by the baseline voltage of the cell, the cell potential at rest. And during that process alone, what you end up with is actually a highly coherent current density. You've got to remember this is one of the other things which constantly frustrates my history as an electrical engineer. I'm constantly great with this.
Speaker 2:Maxwell's equations are driven by current, density and charge. Density, not charge and not current. It's about density. So all you've got a diffuse current in inside the cell, in the intracellular space, this hydrated ion zapping everywhere. All of a sudden, it's stripped mostly of all. The hydration, gets sucked into the pore and undergoes a transit across the lipid bilayer, through this empty space created by a large system of proteins, and during that time the current density goes from almost nothing to something huge. It's confined to a tiny tube.
Speaker 2:Now if you've had a thousand ion channels all next to each other doing that, sucking huge amounts of froth through a rifle shot, firing these ions across and then spewing it back out into the water where the whole current density goes, diffuse almost by about a factor of 10,000. It goes 10,000 times greater transiting the membrane from 10,000 times lesser being inside the membrane. So that's the history of our ion transit across the membrane and it takes roughly a microsecond for these transits to occur and during that time I just said, rifle shot. Right, it's about one centimetre a second. Here's where rifles go.
Speaker 2:It's not a great rifle, but compared to what, if you take a bullet at rest, a bullet travelling and then a bullet at rest, there's a factor of 10,000 or whatever in this relative within the different phases of the transit of the ions, and it's that current that creates an electric field and a magnetic field on its own, literally, because the ion is transiting now. So you've got two field systems going on. You've got the static field across the membrane, which is about 10 megavolts per meter. It's like the spot, the sparks that happen in your because of your combing your hair the air breaks down at around three.
Speaker 2:So as an electrical engineer I know that the the standard electronic components, the safety standards, are set around three megavolts per meter across the membrane, 10 megavolts per meter. Right, it doesn't spark because water is a brilliant insulator. Everyone thinks we've got this electrolyte, but the water, the bulk, is actually an insulator, so the thing doesn't spark or break down or carry on like that. But nevertheless, that tiny little event of a transit of an ion, writ large in large plaques of ion channels in the membrane and in the synapse, the postsynaptic density, where the target cell and the synapse are very closely opposed, in the receiving cell, the postsynaptic cell, the ion channels do exactly the same thing. It's a localized patch. It fires once the ions transit.
Speaker 2:And they're not the same ions, they're largely chlorine. As far as I know, it has a quite different set of circumstances, but Maxwell's equations don't care. Fields are fields. An electron did it or an ion did it, it's the field. System comes out the same. That's another unifying factor that we can use to great effect in coming up with an inorganic version of the whole thing, which alludes to my work let me jump in there.
Speaker 1:Obviously it gets very complex very fast when we're talking about the truly micro scale and what's going on in these EM field systems. I want to just go back a bit to this notion of a factic coupling in relation to synaptic coupling. Synaptic coupling, synaptic firing, is again the basis for what we call the spike code, the neural code, the notion that the brain is a system of logic gates, and that's how we explain, ultimately, cognition and consciousness. We are in agreement that that route has not succeeded and probably cannot succeed. I would say definitely can't succeed. So, again going back to the fact of coupling, we've got a number of remarkable papers in the last six, seven years. One we already mentioned from the Duran lab looking at, I believe, mouse hippocampus and finding that, lo and behold, there is a causal influence across a substantial gap with no synapses. That was a very big nail in the coffin for the spike code as the be-all, end-all of explaining cognition and consciousness.
Speaker 1:We had another big paper come out a few months ago Lee, anastasio and Koch, and Chris Koch has been a longtime friend and discussion partner of mine. I've interviewed him many times and back and I think it was 2019, I asked him about this notion of effective coupling and can't actually do anything in the brain, and at the time he was saying I think it's really. It's like the proverbial train whistle on a locomotive it makes a noise, but other than that it has no actual, it's a side effect. It's an epic phenomenon. He changed his tune very dramatically in his new paper, where he's a, I guess, his second senior author, along with Anastasio, and they say in his paper published, I believe, on neuron, if I get that correct that, lo and behold, there are influences in the brain that travel far faster than can be explained through neural firing, and this has been a longstanding mystery in neuroscience.
Speaker 1:What's this about? Is it a measurement error or is it really something pointing to a new kind of neuroscience? In this new paper they say we've looked deeper into this issue of effective coupling and, lo and behold, it can explain these influences that travel faster than neural firing. So to me, being a philosopher and not a neuroscientist, not an engineer, I can look at this and I can understand what's going on, but obviously I'm not equipped to comment deeply on these nuances. So do you agree with me that this paper is as important as the Durand lab paper back in 2019. So what does it suggest? Where we're going in the field more generally? Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's actually a great relief to have Christoph stop train whistling the haptic coupling the original word haptic coupling, itoupling they used to when it first was originally depicted, to explain problems in the battlefield where damaged nerves were coupling with each other and creating pain, and they called the connection an ephaps. So you had a synapse and an ephaps. So one of these things is a mechanical contrivance, an influence by closely opposed structural elements, and the other one, it is a field effect that happens at distance, by the line of sight, at the speed of light or very near it, and I think, overall, if you want to have an idea of the speed of things in a practical sense, I think your recent work focused in on what it's like 5,000 times faster or something on average.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I found that the speed of effective fields in the brain is 5,000 times faster than synaptic firing.
Speaker 2:It's a remarkable difference.
Speaker 2:So the way that I would like the listener to imagine this is I just spoke at length that I would like the listener to imagine this is I just spoke at length sorry about that at length about these co-located plaques of ion channels all firing together massive transmembrane ion migration, producing a field system, and that field system travels through the tissue orthogonally at the speed of light. Now let's say that field system encounters the exact same thing in another cell. So what I'm actually talking about in terms of somatic action potentials, these are action potentials originating in the soma of a neuron. So I'm talking about the zone called the axon hillock, which is a concentration of ion channels that actually does the initiation of the whole event of an action potential. So that field goes through at the speed of light. Now there are 50 000 cells per millimeter cubic millimeter in in the cortex, so they're very close to each other in the hundreds of microns apart.
Speaker 2:So let's say that the fields from one axon hillock zap through an influence no 50,000. Yeah, it's slightly higher depending on brain regions, but the hippocampus is far more dense, the cell density like somers per cubic millimeter, and it varies all over the organ. But the same idea is it applies now. In my phd work I had actually computationally explored this transmembrane current and the fields that are produced and I looked at the influence on the so and I looked at the influence on the remote. So it intersected with another axon hillock, so that other axon hillock is sitting there and it's charged up, it's quiescent but it's right near the threshold of firing. What happens?
Speaker 2:Fields superimpose literally in the space inside the membrane and they can either hyperpolarize, increase the field system or decrease the field system across the membrane and cause an action potential or make it more likely. So that's what vector superposition does for you. So, depending on the geometry, where they're located and the directions, if they're orthogonal to each other, like that, there's not going to be much influence. But if they're both together and one fires, then this one's going to get maximum effect and so you can get hyperpolarization less likely to fire in the remote cell or hyperpolarization, the likelihood can go up and down of a firing.
Speaker 2:That's the effect coupling that we're talking about Now. That happens simultaneously in all directions, simultaneously in space by the same system of original sources of field. The field comes out from these transmembrane currents and goes out in a kind of dipolar fashion like the bar magnet, with a north and south pole that rapidly changes direction. It's going in one way and then it reverses and then it dies down, and that pattern is incredibly complex. So one somatic axon hillock can actually influence multiple cells in different ways, in different directions.
Speaker 2:These are all couplings that never actually make it into neural modeling and yet they're intimately involved in the dynamics and, as you say, the computation that's being performed yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 1:Looking at computation, which in some ways is a kind of a crude notion, what's going on? But if we look at analog computing, I think it's fair to say that the brain is doing analog computing more significantly than it is doing digital computing. So if we go back to this figure you just mentioned of 5,000 times the speed of the neural firing in the brain, if we envision, as you suggested, the brain as consisting of various EM fields throughout the volume of the brain, and that being an information system by definition, and it's 5,000 times faster than neural firing we cube that figure to get the volume of the information density, we get 125 billion times more information density potential in that EM field system than in the neural firing of the brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Numerically alone alone.
Speaker 1:If you're looking at where is cognition and consciousness, it was surely seeing you'd want to look at the 125 billion times larger information density. Would you agree with that which?
Speaker 2:actually absolutely. That's harks back to what we said very early on in this, by the way. We're nearly up, our hour is almost up. We can feel like, yeah, I feel like I could go on and on, I probably will anyway, yes, that it's time for this to end. We can't really claim to be doing our job if we don't deal with this properly.
Speaker 2:It's a highly rigorously regular physical process. That's right in front of everyone and indeed throughout 70 years of neuroscience, we've been sticking probes directly into this structure and then throwing away and, as a result of paying only an attention to those probes, missing most of the structure, and there are a lot of reasons for missing it. It's very hard to do and expensive and time consuming. So mapping out the entire field system in real time, with 50,000 cells in one cubic millimeter, for example, is really just not going to happen. It's something you can really only explore computationally at the moment. Anyway, we're getting a lot better, we can put lots of probes in now, but it still can't. The resolution of the data in the field system is about. It's about, oh God, one part in 10 to the 8, I think it's that complicated. That's how detailed this three-dimensional electric and magnetic field structure is, and it's a regularity. It's repeating very highly predictable forms in space as a dynamical system and we're missing it all. Yeah, why Miller and co are getting somewhere with it. Yeah, earl Miller.
Speaker 1:MIT. Yeah, he's actually a keynote speaker at the science of conscious conference in Barcelona in July, which I will be at. Looking forward to that and hoping to have Earl on this show at some point. Cool, so I misspoke earlier because I misheard you. I thought you said cubic centimeter. You said cubic centimeter, 80,000 per cubic millimeter, 50 million or so per cubic centimeter. Anyway, let's shift to your work on creating EM field chips and rather than go into the details because you don't have too much time, I want to just ask you to engage in some speculation. So you've been developing now for a number of years, em field chips which would actually operate on these EM field computing principles, and your intention is to create true machine intelligence. So, again, due to lack of time, I want to just ask you to engage in a thought experiment. Let's assume, in five years you created early commercial stage EM field chips and they're now being used in simple robots. They're released out into the world. What would it feel like for a small robot based on EM field chips moving through the world?
Speaker 2:There you have it. You've just asked the question. If you talk, my colleague, peter Kitchener I think I mentioned Peter earlier. Hello to Peter, if you're listening. If you ask Peter and I about what we're doing, we're creating robots that have an inorganic brain tissue to drive them. We're not talking about a computer and we never talk about consciousness Because, frankly, we are not in a position to make any solid claims about the first person perspective of these robots. We're not in that position, and neither is anyone else. Right now.
Speaker 2:We're going to build these things and, like, just by accident, for reasons I don't understand, which are a bit disturbing, I happen to have left one of the prototypes on the bench here. It's an early one that's missing. It was one we built to as a test subject and I can wave it around. This is a 20 000 times scale prototype of a piece of neuron membrane. All right, it's made of copper and plastic and it's taken. It took two years to be able to do that. The assembly that does the ion channel that we're exploring isn't on this one. We built it without it for reasons of it's essentially a flat plate capacitor and we're testing leakage and capacitance, and we just needed to not have all the mess to do with the ion channel in there. That's the. That's a 20 000 times scale prototype.
Speaker 2:If you put billions of these things and shrink them all the way down, you end up with a three-dimensional chip based on standard silicon boundary principles that has this electric field, and that's what we're going to. That's what we're selling. That's what we would be selling, assuming we had enough money to do this in five years, which is never going to happen, by the way. But that's where I'm headed. All I want to do is get it started. That the claims about the first person perspective of these robots. I'm happy to be left to others, right, if anyone else wants to say hey, those chips you build. If we stuck, if could we possibly investigate what the difference between your robots and a computer-brained robot that's the same, how their behavior is different I'd be going. I thought you'd never ask and I would be really happy to give you those chips I've got to call out those chips.
Speaker 1:I gotta call you out a little bit because I feel like a lot of your writing has been on this exact issue of the one pp, the first person perspective and the notion that enfield computing is a basis for human consciousness. Therefore, if you create enfield computing chips, they should have some analogous consciousness. I'm not trying to call you out too much, but you want to know.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I'm right there with you, but it's so. Look, I'm in the department of anatomy and physiology, right, these? It's an it's old school and despite all the progress since Crick and Cock got the neural correlates paradigm going and stopped people walking out of seminars when you mentioned the C word consciousness it's still a showstopper funding-wise. I think we're going to people have to die before this really changes. It's a terrible thing to say, but I am absolutely there with you. This is all. You cannot deal with an artificial machine intelligence without dealing with the propensity, for whatever it is you've built, to have a first-person perspective, because it's absolutely driving everything, despite all the claims to the contrary that's an ethical issue too.
Speaker 1:Right, there's ethics involved if you are creating systems that have qualia and can experience pain and pleasure, then there's an ethical obligation to understand what you're creating and how you're treating it there's all the analogous fields and using brain organized organoids. Human brain organoids are thought to be already by people like Christophe Koch, who's written this, to have some kind of primordial experience, in a way that can be thought of as pain or pleasure. So there is an ethical duty, I think, to treat these creations in ways that respect those actual feelings.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I've been thinking. I've been at this for 22 years now and the ethical side has never been far away from me in terms of that very issue. The problem is, we have to build it to prove it. So it's one of those things where you have to cross the line to see whether you should have crossed the line. There are so many precedents for this in science. They're everywhere. The worst one is nuclear fusion or whatever, or fission rather, and the atomic bomb. How do you prove that it's?
Speaker 2:not very pretty, but this one is at least controllable and nobody can claim anything at the moment. So I see that the process of constructing these chips is actually pivotal in the end will be pivotal in sorting out the origins of consciousness. I note with some chagrin that very recently, tononi and Koch have just come out and said intelligence and consciousness are orthogonal and you can bring them up to human level independently. You don't have to be conscious to be intelligent. Now I'm going to call out Christophe Koch and Tononi on that regard. I think that's going to call out Christophe and Tononi Christophe Koch and Tononi on that regard. I think that's going to prove in the end to be proven to be rubbish that there will be a behavioural deficit which will be permanent. That will result from the loss of the first-person perspective. But that's a whole other argument. We could have an entire podcast on that. Someone else get me on it. I could go an entire podcast on that. Just someone else get me on if I go on and on about that. But building chips like this is going to have to happen in order for this issue to be resolved.
Speaker 2:What's happened for ever since ai? I just turned 69. I've been alive for just slightly longer than the entirety of what's called artificial intelligence. And what happened in the 1950s was okay, intelligence, forget about it. Brains have nothing to do with intelligence. We can throw all that physics out completely. We can put it in its place, the physics of a general purpose computer, and everything will be wonderful.
Speaker 2:And I think we're finding out, to our considerable cost, that everything ain't wonderful.
Speaker 2:These machines have a failure you can trace back to the beginning of the invention of the computers and it has one characteristic and it's always the same throughout all the different flavors and kinds of artificial intelligence, and that's an inability to handle novelty, everything that the machine doesn't know how it handles those things is the true definition of intelligence. And at the moment, if I had to quantify it, I would say that the amount of intelligence and at the moment, if I had to quantify it, I would say that the amount of intelligence in ai is actually numerically zero. It's it's got absolutely nothing to do with a capability, it's got to do with it autonomously acquiring a new capability. And the grounding, in a first-person perspective, is the way nature found to allow autonomous critters to handle new things and survive. So I think that there's a definite argument for the absolute necessity for consciousness that can only be resolved by building an artificial version of it. Whether I'll be live long enough to see that, I don't know yeah.
Speaker 1:No, it's an interesting discussion but probably can't go down that rabbit hole today. Maybe next time we we talk we can. Yeah, so I've got some yard work back here, so I'll keep my question brief. I want to close by asking you to share with us what makes you most excited about the next 10 years in neuroscience the prospect of getting em fields up into their correct place within ai.
Speaker 2:That's the thing that I see. It's tantalizing and we're so close. We just gonna have to push it over the line. It's like it's been Sisyphus' boulder Push it up the hill and then some collection of people will talk it down. I think we've amassed enough knowledge, brain knowledge and capacity to articulate it that deserves more than what it's got for the last 30, 40 years. We've got to get this thing over the line and that's the thing that's really. The prospect of the machines that can come is what gets me out of bed every day. That's why I love what I do, and it's been very hard to do because I've ended up in a bubble of silence, basically for 22 years.
Speaker 2:So I'm looking forward to breaking the bubble now not now yeah, yeah maybe the beginning is some part of that breakthrough where we just burst that bubble, get it over the line, let's get people talking about it. So it's hard to avoid now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been at this less time than you in terms of being full-time in the field I'm still not full-time, but I have been following this field now for over 30 years and I'm seeing some really promising trajectories, and so I share your excitement. The AI stuff I'm actually terrified of, but I'm also equally fascinated by it. So I'm also equally fascinated by it. So I think we'll leave it at that, and I do want to give you a little shout out and say I really appreciate working together. You've been really inspiring and helpful for our work and really helping to ground us with your deep knowledge of electrophysiology and what's actually going on inside the brand.
Speaker 2:Back at you, but you're coming across. Your little group has been a ray of hope for me and it's been more than a little part of my motivation to that. This thing can actually get up and go. We just need the quorum of people like christoph koch and miller and people like that to get together as a voice and say look, enough of this, we we have to dig this out and put it in its proper space, center stage, until it can be definitively thrown out, which I think is just never going to happen. It's going to come in and it's going to stay. It's physics, you can't ignore it. Never even got to talk about the standard model of particle physics. There you go, saved from that experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we'll maybe get you on for a part two in a few months or so and look forward to that. And actually I have been doing deep dive lately into the standard model myself, so I'm looking forward to sharing that, those ideas, with you and we can do that deep dive in a few months.
Speaker 2:So thanks again and I'll talk to you soon. Much appreciated. See you everyone. Bye, okay, are we done?