Electromagnetic Field Topology Consciousness

Hello and welcome everyone. This is Active Inference live stream, guest stream number 54.1. It's August 25th, 2023. Today we're going to be hearing about electromagnetic field topology as a solution to the boundary problem of consciousness. This is going to be a co-presentation followed by a discussion with our guests here. So I will leave it to everyone to introduce themselves and present and discuss however they prefer. And thank you again for joining, please. Thank you so much for having us, Daniel. Yeah, I'm Andres, co-founder of Qualia Research Institute. And yeah, I'm here with Chris and Libor. Chris, co-author of this paper, and Libor, a volunteer here and Wiki Extraordinaire for QRI. But yeah, go ahead, Chris and Libor. Yeah, no, no, no more to say that. That's plenty. Let's get into the detail. Yeah, I'm co-working with QRI and a lot into Active Inference. So I'm trying to unify QRI with Active Inference a lot. And yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, I mean, essentially, yeah, next, next slide, essentially, our outline of this presentation is going to essentially walk you through some of the key ideas of the paper, and kind of like trying to illustrate them or making them a little bit more intuitive, fairly high level, although we will actually present kind of the core argument. The main thing to point out here, next slide is that the theories of consciousness, you know, I guess, like, 20 years ago, they sounded like a total, total crackpot type of of the fact that the theory of consciousness is going to be a little bit more. Yeah, I've still got a good connection. So we can give them a moment or two. Yeah, if not, I'll pick up from what was the crackpot? If he reconnects. Oh, my gosh. Sorry, Andres, please repeat from crackpot. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Over the last 20 years, however, there's been an explosion of interest in electromagnetic theories of consciousness and serious peer reviewed publications about them, especially the last 10 and then five years, kind of like a variable exponential explosion in terms of a number of like serious articles published. And one of the very, very kind of like key amazing kind of like contributions that something like an electromagnetic theory of consciousness can offer to the overall ecosystem of philosophy of mind is that it provides a way to solve question for how information can be combined. I mean, essentially, when you have information distributed, how is it possible that it can be simultaneously part of some kind of like unified whole and electromagnetic theories of consciousness are just very proud to say, well, the electromagnetic field is ontologically unitary, it's already unified. So there's not much of a problem here. However, you know, once you kind of like have this this unity, then the question becomes, well, but how do you actually draw a boundary around it? So actually, you just traded one problem for another. So yeah, dig into the details there. Cool. Shall I take us through the literature review as context for this? And then Andreas will come back to kind of give you the solution that we think can fit with electromagnetic fields. So yeah, the boundary problem, let's say so binding problem you heard just now into a first approximation that is, whatever you think might make up consciousness, maybe it's neurons firing, maybe it's some sort of magical qualia at the bottom of the universe, whatever you think it is, these small things need to be bound together to reflect the complex phenomenology we have, we see lots of things all at once right now, I'm, I'm smelling the flowers outside, I've got the laptop screen in front of me, there's lots of stuff happening all at once in a unified way. So that's the binding problem, we won't do more on that here, we'll sort of assume some familiarity with it. But then the boundary problem is, well, once you've got a mechanism that creates the binding between these lower level entities, why would that mechanism ever stop? Because…