Materialism › Electromagnetic
Hunt and Schooler’s General Resonance Theory
Consciousness as Resonating Electromagnetic Fields
Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler hold that all matter has rudimentary experience and that shared resonance (matched oscillation frequencies) is what combines simple experiences into complex minds. In mammals the main medium is nested electromagnetic fields, which they say constitute conscious experience rather than merely correlating with it.
Tam Hunt, Jonathan Schooler
What consciousness is
Consciousness is a nested set of interacting electromagnetic fields, unified by resonance into macro-conscious wholes.
Mind and body
Experience is a basic feature of all physical stuff, as fundamental as mass or charge. In the brain, electromagnetic fields are the conscious experience itself; neurons and synapses are necessary but not sufficient.
Mechanism
Shared resonance produces a phase transition in the speed and bandwidth of information exchange among constituents, merging micro-conscious entities into a macro-conscious one. Its spatial extent follows x = v/f (extension = wave velocity divided by frequency).
Core claims
- Shared resonance combines micro-conscious entities into macro-conscious ones, offering panpsychism a solution to the combination problem.
- The boundary of a conscious entity is set by its slowest shared resonance, calculated as x = v/f.
- Anastassiou and colleagues (2011) showed that endogenous fields can causally affect neurons through ephaptic coupling, and later studies (Chiang et al., Lee et al., Cunha et al.) support this.
- Consciousness and field synchrony appear and vanish together in sleep, seizures, and anesthesia.
- Gamma-band synchrony and cross-frequency coupling track conscious perception and levels of consciousness.
Criticisms
Most scientists resist the panpsychist foundation, and correcting misunderstandings about panpsychism is unlikely to change that. Critics also ask how conscious field dynamics can be empirically told apart from non-conscious ones.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Conditional
- Hunt argues that artificial systems with the right resonant electromagnetic field dynamics would be conscious, whatever algorithm they run; digital computation alone would not suffice.
- Survival beyond death: Unlikely
- Since a person’s macro-consciousness depends on the brain’s resonating fields, it should dissolve when that resonance stops, even though rudimentary experience in matter persists.
- Meaning and purpose: Uncertain
- Hunt and Schooler see degrees of experience throughout nature, which could change our ethical relation to the biosphere, but they do not claim a cosmic purpose.
- Virtual immortality: Unlikely
- Software simulation lacks the physical field resonance the theory requires, so uploading a mind would not carry its consciousness unless hardware reproduced those fields.
Related theories
- McFadden's Conscious Electromagnetic Information Theory (Overlap)
- Whitehead's Process Theory (Influence)
- Integrated Information Theory (Contrast)
- Ephaptic Coupling (Foundation)
Sources
- The easy part of the hard problem: A resonance theory of consciousness, Tam Hunt and Jonathan W. Schooler (2019)
- Kicking the psychophysical laws into gear: A new approach to the combination problem, Tam Hunt (2011)
- Calculating the boundaries of consciousness in General Resonance Theory, Tam Hunt (2020)
- Where's my consciousness-ometer? How to test for the presence and complexity of consciousness, Tam Hunt, M. Ericson and Jonathan W. Schooler (2022)
- Fields or firings? Comparing the spike code and the electromagnetic field hypothesis, Tam Hunt and M. Jones (2023)
- Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons, C. A. Anastassiou, R. Perin, H. Markram and C. Koch (2011)
- Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead (1929)