Mind

I am researching the origins and physics of intelligence and consciousness. 

Intelligence: Predicting causal relationships between symbols in order to perform thermodynamic work on a symbolic medium.

I hypothesize intelligence arises as an aspect of the thermodynamics of life and is present at the cellular level, or perhaps before.  Intelligence is an essential function of living beings and the proper objects for its study are the material and energy flows which organize the organism and its environment to withstand and reverse spontaneous entropic decay.  In a way of thinking, intelligence is a very real form of time travel that all creatures engage in.

There have been fruitful physical approaches to studying life in this way (Schrödinger’s “What is Life?”, Prigogine’s dissipative structures, England’s Lab@MIT) and I suspect there is little fundamental distinction between life and intelligence in this regard so I study intelligence with a similar approach.

Consciousness: A complex electromagnetic field capable of reflecting and subjectively experiencing a coupled EM system, like "the outside world".

Phylogeny & Anatomy of Intelligence

There is evidence of intelligent behavior in single-celled life forms (e.g. goal-directed movement in amoebas) and also that this behavior is later shared or centralized as complex organisms developed (e.g. maze-solving by slime-molds).  This is analogous to the development of other cell functions like respiration or locomotion, which exist in the single cell and are later shared and centralized in communities, tissues and organs. This calls into question conventional ideas about the locus (anatomy) of intelligence in an organism, as cells or mold communities have no brains or even an obvious neural analog.

I hypothesize that in the early stages of evolution, the locus of substantial intelligence is simply the whole organism, instead of a separable component or auxiliary function.  To the extent that an organism is communal, its intelligence must be understood as distributed amongst, and for the purposes of, the community.  Similarly for symbiosis or ecosystem interaction: understanding the scope of intelligent action must be concerned with total energy/material flows of the system.  Intelligence, being an aspect of the control of energy and nutrient flows, is an essential aspect of the general life process, articulated in various ways throughout the organism and into its living environment.

There is also evidence that intelligence is primary to other life processes, e.g. in Planaria, a starving individual will metabolize its own organs, including its digestive organs, in order that the nervous system is last to go, later regrowing fully if food again becomes available.  This resituates our conventional notions of intelligence.  Instead of a faculty which developed late, and rarely, in evolution and which is applied contingently when needed, it may be essential and even primary in the life process.

Extended draft notes: Chapter 1: Phylogeny & Anatomy of Intelligence.

Consciousness

The only example I know of shared consciousness is the conjoined "craniopagus twins" of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, currently living in Vancouver, who are unique in sharing a thalamus and also in reportedly being able to see out of each others' eyes.

How might that be possible?

The usual understanding of the thalamus is that it's at the center of the brain, quite old in evolution, and roughly, responsible for connecting everything. It is well-recognized that there is a cortico-thalamic circuit that is necessary for normal cognition, whereas large parts of the cortex (e.g. >90%) can be missing without causing noticeable problems [Sheffield,Marseille]. The thalamus is also directly related to control of conscious states, sleep and attention.

But nobody (who I've found) seems quite ready to say the thalamus is the seat of consciousness.

Updates
I've since studied this more closely and found this to be an existing hypothesis.  Here's some great teaching slides from 2011 about it by Lawrence Ward, Prof. Psych at U BC.

Here's some research reports over the years:
 2010: "It is reasonable to consider the thalamus a primary candidate for the location of consciousness, given that the thalamus has been referred to as the gateway of nearly all sensory inputs to the corresponding cortical areas."  - A thalamic reticular networking model of consciousness. Theor Biol Med Model. 2010 Mar 30;7:10. doi: 10.1186/1742-4682-7-10. PMID: 20353589; PMCID: PMC2857829.

2018: "All patients with severely impaired arousal (coma, stupor) had lesion extension into the midbrain and/or pontine tegmentum, whereas purely thalamic lesions did not severely impair arousal." - Thalamic Strokes that Severely Impair Arousal Extend into the Brainstem. Annals of Neurology,  U. Iowa, https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.25377

2020: "we stimulated CL in anesthetized macaques and effectively restored arousal and wake-like neural processing" M.J. Redinbaugh, et al. Thalamus modulates consciousness via layer-specific control of cortex, Neuron, 106 (2020), pp. 66-75.e12

2023: "Traveling waves of activity are a prevalent phenomenon within neural networks of diverse brain regions and species, and have been implicated in myriad brain functions including sensory perception, memory, spatial navigation and motor control ... at the brain-wide scale, cortical spiral waves were coordinated with subcortical spiking patterns in the thalamus, striatum and midbrain." - Brain-wide topographic coordination of traveling spiral waves - Allen Institute, U. Washington, bioarxiv,  https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.12.07.570517

So my first hypothesis is that the thalamus (maybe hypothalamus) is the seat of consciousness and that the cortico-thalamic circuit is functionally the intelligence-consciousness circuit.

My second hypothesis concerns the mechanism.

The non-neuron cells of the thalamus, the neuroglia (astrocytes and oligodendrites) are usually considered a support metabolic structure. But it's been found they form a "syncytium", which means they merge their cell bodies and/or establish gap junctions that allow a shared electrical field; not an ionic channel but a DC circuit. If so, an extended network of these would form a highly convoluted EM manifold, with very rapid electrical dynamics. That manifold could be modulated directly by the neuroglia and indirectly (or perhaps internally coupled) by the neurons.

There are neurons that extend from the thalamus up to the cortex where intelligent work happens (tho there are smaller syncytia dispersed in the cortical columns and elsewhere in the nervous system). In this approach, the neurons are doing the thermodynamic work necessary to encode and process information, but they're largely unconscious computers that perhaps are substrate independent (again, with the caveat about their syncytia distributed throughout the nervous system and maybe providing proprioception in general).

But that highly convoluted EM manifold.. is what I hypothesize is the most localizable physical correlate of consciousness. If so, it suggests panpsychism is correct and that the EM field somehow carries qualia in its primary essence, along with its essential electromechanical properties. I think our interior EM field is basically operating as a mirror of the exterior EM field that the creature finds itself embedded in. It's like the old "consciousness is the universe observing itself."

So, artificial consciousness would be achieved by creation a suitably convoluted electrical field. This may well be substrate independent, so long as the EM field has the right shape. Note, it's *not* simulatable, in the same way simulating gravity doesn't attract matter to your computer.

To achieve artificial consciousness, I think we need to create very specific, complex EM manifolds. I anticipate this will best be accomplished by creating neuroglia organoids, linked by neurons or DC circuit to other consciousnesses for subjective experimental observation, i.e. telepathy.

Thalamus in brain scan

Thalamus is in the center of the brain

Further

I am in the process of defining a multi-part thesis concerning these topics: