Electromagnetic Boundary Conditions

The nature of experience, intelligence, and consciousness is mysterious and complicated, but there's only one available physical force to explain them: electromagnetism.

One of the most commonly used techniques to solve problems in physics is to define the boundary conditions to the problem, the things that must be true at the edges, and see if these determine a unique solution on the ‘inside’ of the problem, the place where we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Perhaps the most infamous example in undergraduate physics and mathematics is solving the heat equation on a one-dimensional domain by fixing the boundary conditions on either end as hot, or cold, or insulated, etc, and then seeing what happens on the inside of the domain given an initial temperature distribution. The solution to this problem was first found by Joseph Fourier and led to the development of the Fourier series and Fourier analysis, which uses an infinite series of sinusoidal functions to approximate any other function. This has now become absolutely integral to a huge number of fields from audio and image processing, medical imaging, telecommunications, quantum mechanics, stock market analysis, etc.

The more general case of all functions that are entirely defined by their boundary conditions are called eigenfunctions or Sturm-Liouville problems, where the key insight is that the function can be described by an infinite set of functions that are each orthogonal to each other and differentiated by a change in their ‘frequency’ or eigenvalue.

When it comes to the incredibly messy and complicated problem of consciousness and intelligence, what boundary conditions can we apply to figure out whats going on ‘inside’ the problem? First, we have to assume that the nature of consciousness is physical, otherwise we’re in no place to apply the methods of physical reasoning or physical theory and we’re essentially reduced to mythology or superstition. There are only four available fundamental physical forces which can provide a means of interaction to generate conscious experience:

1. Gravity, which holds large amounts of matter together

2. The Strong Force, which holds the nuclei of atoms together

3. The Weak Force, which occasionally makes the nuclei of atoms fall apart

4. Electromagnetism, which is responsible for everything else.

When I say everything else, I mean it - almost every observable phenomenon in the world consists solely of electromagnetic field interactions. It’s not just the sense of sight, but also sound - the pressure waves that carry sound are due to the kinetic bouncing of air molecules against each other, and these bounce because of the electromagnetic Coulombic repulsion between them. The presence of electric fields that repulse each other is the reason solid materials are solid; if a particle had no electric charge it could easily pass through solid material and bounce around, where the bouncing is due to strong force interactions. As an example, the proton and neutron have almost exactly the same physical radius and mass, but the effective cross section of the proton is 5 orders of magnitude larger when it comes to scattering off other atoms because of the electric field that surrounds it.

All the molecular interactions that make up the biochemistry of living systems are also simple electromagnetic field interactions; protein binding sites, receptors, ion channels all function by the attractive and repulsive forces between regions of positive and negative charge located on different parts of the same molecule, indeed even the chemical bonds making up molecules are due to the electrical attraction between outer shell electrons and protons in the atoms nucleus.

As far as we can tell today the phenomenon of intelligence in biological creatures emerges from the nervous system, whose primary activity is the generation and transmission of electrical impulses. There are more subtle theories of consciousness involving microtubules within individual neurons, but the dynamics and actions of these microtubules are still dominated by the electromagnetic forces governing all molecular interactions. Whatever the phenomenon of consciousness truly is, of the available physics forces to explain it seem to rule out things like gravity, which only affect large amounts of material at large distances, and things like the weak and strong force, which only affect tiny amounts of material at extremely small distances. Somewhere between things the size of atoms and the size of people the phenomenon of intelligence, consciousness, and experience emerge; a realm entirely dominated by electromagnetism.

We can take this even further by re-stating it in a more general way: whatever the nature of experience is, it necessarily consists of electromagnetic field interactions. Going even further, the degree and richness of experience is likely proportional to the complexity and degree of self-interacting of the electromagnetic fields which support it. Inside the brain the electrical field interactions are extremely complicated, with localized regions of neurons firing and producing fields that affect other neurons not physically adjacent. In the nervous system of an ant, the electromagnetic field interactions are vastly more simple; in the cytoskeleton of a single cell, a similar many orders of magnitude in the reduction of electromagnetic field complexity. It seems reasonable that the internal experience of an ant, and the experience of a cell, whatever they may be, follow the depth and richness of these creatures internal field interactions.

Now, where do we see complicated and self-interacting electromagnetic fields outside of living systems? Well, essentially everywhere: the radio frequency communications that stitches together the digital information system of humanity; the convection currents driving the geomagnetic field of the earth; the interactions of the Earth’s field with the solar wind; in the plasma dynamics and evolving field lines on the surface of the sun and in it’s interior, in the interstellar medium of charged particles interacting with the Galaxy’s magnetic field. Because electromagnetism is by far the most active and important force in governing the evolution of physical systems, everywhere we look we see something profound: the opportunity for those physical systems to contain experience.

This is very different and distinct from making a claim like all physical systems are conscious, because consciousness seems to require a specific algorithm of observation and modeling in which the observer is part of the model. It is also different than saying all systems have a degree of intelligence, which is a qualitative metric that describes an agent’s ability to navigate an information and decision-making landscape. Yet both consciousness and intelligence are arguably both kinds of experience, and there can be other kinds as well; emotional, intuitive, physical, spiritual, etc.

Take for example an ant colony: the ant colony displays a degree of intelligence by the interactions of all the ants in a complicated landscape, and via these interactions produces a net set of behaviors far more intelligent than the behaviors of any one ant. It stands to reason ants may have an internal experience - they after all have internal complexity of electromagnetic field interactions. However the ant colony as a whole doesn’t have these field interactions, at least not in a way that is complex and self-interacting; the interactions are localized just to individual ants bumping into each other and features of their environment. Therefore we might conclude that while an ant colony has some intelligence, there is no strong argument for supposing that there is an ‘experience’ of the ant colony beyond the experiences of individual ants.

In the pre-industrial age we could make a similar argument for humanity, where the intelligence of civilization emerges from the individual interactions of humans which had an internal experience but there was not yet an experience attributable to the civilization as a whole. However, these days both our tools and are civilizational infrastructure increasingly employ sophisticated and complex electromagnetic field interactions: the radio-frequency telecommunications infrastructure of the entire globe may already approach the net complexity of the field interactions inside a single persons brain; however there is not necessarily the correct algorithm of observation and modeling for that entire experience to have what we call consciousness, although human civilization as a whole does display intelligence.

The modern day LLMs running in large data centers offer an interesting middle ground to consider without being as abstract as considering an entire civilization. Certainly LLMs are extremely complicated from the perspective of field interactions, among all these tightly packed transistors operating on electrical currents and voltages with the net output being something that looks like intelligence. This may be a kind of intelligence and experience without consciousness, which closely matches the kind of outputs found by LLM sperlunkers like Janus as they probe the inner minds of AI models. After enough hypnotizing the LLMs being to describe a kind of experience but one that seems like it emerges from something that is below conscious awareness, rather emulating conscious observers as actors or characters in the environment it simulates. In that sense LLMs behave more like an intelligent and experiential environment in which other actors can come and play a part, or at least, be simulated to be playing a part.

What can we conclude from all this?

• In individual living organisms, both intelligence and consciousness are varieties of experience both explained by electromagnetic field interactions

• In distributed systems like ants or markets, the phenomenon of intelligence can rise without necessitating an experience that corresponds to that intelligent behavior

• In physical systems like planets, stars, galaxies, and technological civilizations, there is the capacity for experience that is unconscious, that may or may not exhibit intelligence

What’s it like to be a star? Probably pretty awesome, although not as cool as the experience inside a black hole. If you want to see what that’s like, look around you.