I have to feel that the late John Walker would have had something to say about this article.
Physicists have made “fields” the go-to explanation for many things, from electrons to the Higgs Boson. Why not add one more field for consciousness to that plethora of postulated fields? The question is – Does this hypothesis explain anything (Yes, if you believe the Swedish lady) and does it make testable predictions (Aye, there’s the rub).
“… Consciousness does not emerge from human brains, according to Professor Maria Strømme, a professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University. Instead, she claims that it exists as a fundamental field - a ‘building block’ of the universe. …
Professor Strømme told the Daily Mail: 'In the model, individual consciousness is understood as a localised excitation or configuration within a universal consciousness field — much like a wave on the surface of an ocean. …”
As for what any of this might mean for Artificial Intelligence? Now, there’s a question!
The field theories are used to explain interactions, e.g. attraction/repulsion of electric charges, magnets. The theories start with an assorted set of well-known observable interactions and try to unify these for the purpose of making future predictions.
I think this theory of the field of consciousness is pre-mature for the lack of these key pre-conditions:
well-known interactions (e.g. I have never witnessed telepathy, nor anyone I know have)
need for consciousness-related predictions in our daily lives or engineering
The authors should have started with a good catalogue of repeatable experiments clearly showing some form of consciousness-related interactions and only then worry about a unified theory for that.
If I understand the lady’s universal field idea, it means that you live in my head (unfortunate for you!) and I live in your head … but I will try to be quiet.
To be serious for a moment – I cannot track it down but I recall John Walker once drawing attention to a phenomenon in his random number generator that showed measurable deviations when issues of world-wide importance occurred. That was not proof of the lady’s consciousness field hypothesis, but it might suggest there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our current philosophy.
While telepathy is an interesting field of research what is more interesting to me is the hypothesis that the suppression of that research is itself a psychic phenomenon.
More clear data leading to the hypothesis that materialism is a religion. It has most all the attributes of medieval Christian churches. Odd to see the same dogma and practices (including excommunication) among so-called “scientists”.
Precisely. The “two magisteria” notion seems weirdly conspiratorial in that both are highly suspicious of, shall we say, “independent” manifestation of phenomena outside of sanction. The early minutes of Sheldrake’s presentation talk about eusocial insects as one of the exemplars of telepathy. Shall we “conspiracy theorists” proceed to “connect the dots”? Like I keep telling people, the origin of the word “conspiracy” need not involve conscious collusion since its literal meaning is “breath together” or “being of the same spirit” – and the imposition of conscious intent as a necessary condition places an unfair burden of proof on the individual who merely notices what Sheldrake does – that there is something going on whether we posit conscious intent of the individual “workers” or not. What if this burden of proof amounts to is a barrier to “noticing” since, of course, the individual is in no position to prove conscious intent. That this would make individuals easy pickings for group organisms seems an almost inevitable evolutionary consequence.
