Ok gotcha. 2 issues.
1) the EM field coupling has at least some empirical verification in the lab. I can cite the papers if you want although I suspect you know them. So there is your first glimmer of proof that the fields are strong enough to be causally active. 2) the effect is 'butterfly'. That is, 1:10^5 to 1:10^6 will, if persistent, rapidly involve themselves in entrainment of neuron firing. This occurs at the axon hillock poised right on the verge of firing. Hypersensitised. My own calc show that only certain cell densities will achieve this. Only certain bran regions and morphologies will do it. This is about state trajectories around complex time-varying stable and unstable equilibrium points where sensitivities are exquisitely high. That is where EM coupling comes into causal range... When 50000 cells all near each other cohere even briefly and create a 1 v/m field on top of the 10,000,000 v/m field in the initial segment/hillock. It only has to perstently shift (advance/retard) firing times by a tiny amount to cause a massive change in state trajectory. Such things as Hopf bifurcation points do this kind of radical state change with tiny changes. Finally, to go into the more esoteric end of my proposal.... Even when the fields are too small to do local change, they are vastly greater than all the chemical noise of cell componentry. And I hypothesise that they deliver consciousness from the 1st person perspective of being the fields. I am looking at how a 'virtual' feedback loop, at the level of whole percepts, can additionally impact the state. Imagine a visual scene that is expected and the actual visual scene superposed on each other and that mismatch. That mismatch is a distributed thing involving many neurons that may collectively be biased in the manner already described. What I am looking at is tissue elegance at a spectacular level. Tissue can contribute to conscious AND be/not be causally efficacious Or Tissue need not contribute to consciousness at all AND yet be causally efficacious. All based on cell density and morphology.... Once you see how this can work and then do the numbers, finding it possible.... Then you end up in my position, embarked on testing it inorganically. This is vastly more complex than any previous view of the brain. The overlapping, superposing dynamic interference patterns in millions of cells contains a vast amount of information that is currently thrown out. Imagine how much information there is merely to specify the exact morphology of a cell. Now imagine how the fields embody, literally, that information. Now imagine 10,000 cells near each other. 10,000 _factorial_ different field systems not counting any modulation by even 1 synapse. Just by the cell firing. Not including subthreshold oscillations. Can you see how vastly underestimated brains have been? Is it any wonder the story of the last half century of AGI might have underestimated brain tissue complexity? I hope you can now see this. The good news is that, if you stop using computers, accessing to the same complexity is straightforward. And ... To hark back to the Wright bros even tho I promised I wouldn't, if, in a hundred years we have a computer that could compute a model of it all .. It would be an AGI simulator, not an AGI. Because the fields are INPUTS. Just like a flight simulator traces you about flight but is not flight. That is how this could all turn out. Damn. Batteries. Gotta go. Cheers Colin -------- -----Original Message----- From: "Steve Richfield" <[email protected]> Sent: 10/05/2015 6:06 AM To: "AGI" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [agi] Restating Colin's Hypothesis Colin, I think you missed my point. I'll try again... The "information content" in the EM field is, except for that portion of the EM field that is generated by adjacent structures, VERY low-level - too low for it to be able to have much effect on ion channel chemistry **UNLESS** there is some sort of positive feedback mechanism. To illustrate, extracellular electrodes tend to only see what they are next to, with everything else being apparent "noise" superimposed on that signal. Hence, if your EM theory is correct, then there absolutely **MUST** be positive feedback to get enough gain to be able to make sense the "noise" subtleties in the EM field. However, positive feedback is fundamentally an unstable thing, unless there is some "clever" mechanism that sidesteps the complex stability issues. Automatic Gain Control (AGC) works well in systems that do NOT have positive feedback, but the sudden onrush to lockup as feedback approaches 100% makes AGC approaches unworkable for positive feedback systems. Super-regenerative (SR) approaches sidestep these problems AND exhibit properties well known in neurons, like spiking. SR operates just BEYOND 100% feedback, squelching high-level oscillation when it occurs, with the "output" being the rate of squelching (spikes in the case of neurons). Yea, people associate SR with glassical electronics, but it is still alive and well in modern devices now being manufactured, e.g. keyless security systems. A Google search finds more recent applications than glassical applications. The reason SR never really dominated the shortwave receiver market was that its operation only reflected its input over a small portion of its "cycle" of repetitive oscillations, so while it was able to produce full output regardless of how weak input signals might be, as input signals got weaker, the output got noisier FASTER than competing approaches like superheterodyne designs. Of course superheterodyne systems utilizing AGC were MUCH more complex, but people gladly paid for a few more tubes to better hear signals from around the world. So, how can a seemingly simple 2-tube radio possibly drive a speaker from micro-volt signals received from around the world? THAT is the sort of combination of operational simplicity combined with limitless sensitivity that ion channels MUST have to work as you envision. So, it seems to me that you must make up your mind here. If ion channels are able to respond to subtleties in EM fields then there MUST be some sort of positive feedback mechanism that operates more or less independently of input amplitude, or the presence of high-level signals that are NOT of interest to a particular ion channel. If you don't think it is SR, then what else DO you think it might be? I don't (yet) see any other candidates. Thoughts? Steve ================= On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 2:13 AM, colin hales <[email protected]> wrote: I remember those circuits.... You sometimes can find them in old books that also speak of the 'aether' It's not a route to brain-mimetic fields. All we really have to do is replicate the fields of the membrane. I already know how they are generated. They 100% consistent but non-uniquely related to all the familiar compartmental equivalent- circuit models. The potentials they express have complex Hodgkin -Huxley and Fitzhugh-Nagumo non-linearity. Paradoxically you can make these nonlinearities with old-school valves! But the fields are out in the space between cells and have complex power law spatiotemporal dynamics and vast information content. I'm concerned more with the system underlying action-potential signaling at the moment. Without the fields. Designed in a way that makes the addition of the fields a relatively simple thing. If only things were as simple as those old circuits! Cheers Colin From: Steve Richfield Sent: 7/05/2015 7:15 PM To: AGI Subject: Re: [agi] Restating Colin's Hypothesis Colin, Are you familiar with super-regenerative receivers? These are simple circuits - well within what we already know neurons can do, that extract subtle features of EM fields - like the energy at a particular frequency. This concept could be adapted to extract all sorts of subtle features from EM fields. These were in common use around WW1, and have returned in the form of various wireless devices. I thought maybe that understanding these might get your reverse engineering the brain "juices" flowing. Steve =================== On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 8:21 PM, Colin Hales <[email protected]> wrote: Hi all, I'm struggling to find time to attend here. My appearances will be patchy. Your restatement of where I am is heading in the right direction. That is, you're grappling with the beginnings of the right ideas. Which is good to see. My goal here is simply to get the general idea of AGI as a computer-less adaptive control system based on brain physics implemented in inorganic crystalline solid form. Artificial brain tissue. Imagine a cascade of intricately dynamically nested resonating loops each triggering downstream cascades that branch and converge ... a massive parallel state machine where the entire thing is intrinsically dynamic and its primary physics is EM fields. There are a virtually infinite number of ways that any dynamic cascade can happen. All because the of EM field physics. Whatever it does as a form of 'computation' is emergent. I actually don't care ahead of time what that 'computation' looks like. The only thing I know for sure is that it's a product of a massive quadrature resonance. 2 axes. Action Potential (is the main slow strong loop) and EM field coupling (that weakly links loops orthogonally through space at the speed of light). I am replicating both these axes, not computing any model of any computation it might appear to produce. The dynamic interaction between these two axes (both of which are actually implemented in the one single unified physical EM field sytem) and its self-modification of its own dynamics that is the reason why this is better classed as an adaptive control system. With respect, Feymann diagrams are irrelevant here unless you can tell me the science of 'what it's like to be a Feynmann diagram' from a 1st person perspective. It's just the virtual photon exchange diagram of EM fields. Nothing to it. There's no esoteric quantum states or other magic. Classical wave mechanics. Of course it's all ultimately quantised EM fields at the finest scales. But I don't care - as long as I recreate the brain's fields the way the brain creates them and uses them (causally) ....voila ....I get the QM/space deep structural fabric contribution for free. I am, in effect, involved in an experiment that this very fabric is important (indeed essential) and I am do it to find out why it is important without knowing fully how it works or what it is. Like we do in science. Building it to understand it. Make fire to understand combustion. Like that. The most important concept of all is that what we humans are, literally, is 'being' this field system. We are not 'being' any apparent computation that someone might characterise, by observing the fields. My hypothesis is that 'being' the field system in the process of complex resonances is essential and non-optional in cognition and intelligence in the same way that air/flight surface interaction is essential to flight and fuel chemistry is important in combustion. I do not claim to know the truth of this yet. But I also know that nobody else does either, including everyone on this list. If this hypothesis is upheld then it means that computer-based cognition has the same relation to AGI as a flight simulator has to flight - that is, it is a way of designing it and understanding it but it is not flight. It's just that it's obvious when flight is absent (CRASH!) or underperforming. A mature understanding of this underperformance is what I seek. Whatever it is that is in the brain, from a 3rd person perspective its just Maxwell's equations doing their thing. What no physics currently explores is the 1st person perspective of being the field system. I have worked out a way of viewing the 3rd person membrane-centric fields from the 1st person and how it might be ;like something'. I published it here by Trojan Horse in the last section of Hales, C. G. (2014). "The origins of the brain's endogenous electromagnetic field and its relationship to provision of consciousness." Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 13(2): 313-361 Using this technique it is possible to 'be' the membrane and 'see' a massive blizzard of highly structured interference pattern of 'virtual bosons'. Frome the 3rd person all it looks like is membrane and ion channels doing their thing. It's a perspective shift, nothing else. But to get my basic intent you don't have to bother with this idea. The brain goes to spectacular levels of trouble to create this massive unified EM field system and all we have done for 60 years is throw it away at the get-go with software and lumped-element electrical circuit models of voltages and currents. The existence of the brain's field system is as old as any measurement of any potential in any tissue. It blasts out the scalp as witnessed in EEG and MEG. It has 8 orders of magnitude of spatiotemporal structure. It has a causal role as verified in recent wet neuro experiments. Yet 'being' the fields is an aspect unexplored. That is what my experiment aims to verify. That the fields are not optional. Ion channels * in localised bundles called synapses -- chemical and electrical/gap junction * in localised bundles called the axon hillock or initial segment * in localised bundles called the node of Ranvier .... originate the EM field system in both supra-threshold and sub-threshold dynamics ... thereby cause transmembrane electric field dipoles AND a membrane-plane circulating magnetic field. The cascade of looping down the membrane is Action Potential signalling (longitudinal). The expression of field orthogonal to the membrane is the EM field coupling (transverse field). It is the Lorentz force action in the transverse axis that gets called 'ephaptic' coupling by some. So the bottom line is that I will throw myself at the mercy of the experimental test of this hypothesis and live with what it tells me. You just have to get used to the idea that I can't talk about computation or algorithms or software. This is AGI done without any such things. They are meaningless in the context of the experiment and the design, I can understand how the mainstream computer-based AGI movement may find their eyes bouncing off the idea. Culturally foreign ground. Maybe in time the two approaches will sit alongside each other in a more mature understanding of AGI. We'll see. Better go. cheers colin On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 6:07 PM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]> wrote: Colin, I'm going to take a shot at restating your hypothesis in a more physics-tractable form. The remainder of this posting are what I think you are trying to say: Colin in effect says that the computational unit is NOT the synapse, but rather is the ion channel. These are MUCH more numerous than synapses. While the voltages seen in extracellular recordings are quite low, the field GRADIENT near an active ion channel is HIGH - enough to have major effects on nearby/contacting structures. Brains are a lot like a bowl of spaghetti, and every place the "noodles" touch becomes a point of high field interaction. We don't yet know what those interactions do, but we DO know that there are a lot of synapses that interconnect contacting neurons, so at minimum such points of contact are probably capable of spawning synapses, if the "data" indicates a synapse would be useful. Then there is the far-field effects from neurons that are near but NOT in contact. The activity (or lack thereof) should be an important parameter to use in development, because it is an indicator of just how successful learning has been throughout the entire system. Where learning has been UNsuccessful, neurons should probably be more plastic in their functionality. Ion channels are capable of fairly complex computation, including memory (from ion accumulation and physical alterations), nonlinearities, etc. It has previously been presumed that ion channels are just "pumps" that keep neurons doing what neurons do, but the prospect for ion channel computation can NOT be ignored. When a neuron becomes active, its many ion channels radiates complex patterns of field-gradients, which could affect the operation of other nearby neurons, especially if the ion channels in the other neuron were to align themselves with a radiating neuron. While I now grok the importance of field gradients generated by ion channels, I still don't see how/why this should affect consciousness any more than it affects the many other functions of a neural systems. I am not yet even convinced that consciousness exists - except in our minds as a simplistic model for whatever happens behind our eyeballs. How do you link consciousness (over other neural functions) with EM fields? C'mon; help me put Colin's hypothesis into a solid physics form. Steve AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives <a title="RSS feed for AGI" style="color:rgb(102,153,51);text-decoration:none" href="htt [The entire original message is not included.] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
