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: 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
