OK. Xmas is behind us. Let's dance! On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 2:44 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote:
> Colin, you haven't answered my question. I don't understand how electrical > noise from neurons magically makes intelligence possible. > The last thing that the EM fields are is noise. None of it is noise. LFP, ECog, fMRI, EEG, MEG ... these are the brain-EM-based signals that have literally been used for defining brain operation for 65 years and over. ALL are EM field measurements. "Chemical" refers to EM fields. Chemical potential is an EM field phenomenon. "Quantum" means quantised EM fields. >From DC to daylight. The diffusion that happens in the brain is EM objects (atoms/molecules) thermodynamically flying about, hitting each other. There is spectacular and beautiful chaotic scale-free emergent complexity behaviour *in the EM field signalling* and it has an empirically proved functional significance (read the references in suppl 2). It is not noise. This signalling starts out as energy stored in the static cell membrane ....~5,000 m^2 of 10^7 V/m in an adult human brain. A massive electric field. Spatially and in intensity. It is emergent in the collective behaviour of cell membrane chemistry. *Your question's premise is wrong.* I don't have to justify the EM field basis of brain function - you have to point at *anything* in the brain that is *not *EM field based. I can think of 2 things but they have no evidence of being directly involved in cognition/intelligence. They merely determine the behaviour of atoms and therefore ions and therefore EM field generation. Can you think of them? The EM fields are everything that is relevant to brain function. There is literally nothing else there but space and EM field impressed on it by systems of charge/current sources (with a little mass attached to the charges). EM fields literally make the signalling behaviour of neurons. What do you think creates it? You are the one believing in magic. Not me. It's physics: The fundamental physics of the brain is EM fields Maxwell's equations combined with diffusion within the Lorentz force equation. Look at the computational study in the paper (my PhD thesis result). Those that peer reviewed it do not dismiss the fields like you do. So please get your facts straight. If you want to understand what a brain is doing. Start at EM. Then we can engage with the actual message of the paper, which is NOT primarily about EM per se. It is about a malformed science (neuroscience) and what physical scientific behaviour we would be doing if we corrected the science. That correction takes the form of finally paying attention to the EM fields instead of ignoring them on an industrial scale or speciously dismissing them as if they aren't at the center of it. Please read the paper and focus on the real message. Happy to see it soundly refuted. Not happy to be arguing about irrelevant misinformation. Colin ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tf319c0e4c79c9397-M77c3a4634334e49bce1a9f6d Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
