One Crucible, Two Origins The origin of life is often pictured as a single miraculous spark in a warm little pond. The reality is far more industrial and dramatic. Recent headlines announcing two origins of life can easily be read as claiming that life began twice, independently. What the work actually describes is narrower and stranger: two distinct emergences of free-living cells from one original crucible — a labyrinth of microscopic pores inside deep-sea serpentinizing alkaline hydrothermal vents. The transition from dead rock to free-living cells involved a series of compounding explosions in capability. Chemistry came alive through the following stages. 1. Abiotic chemosynthesis References: Martin & Russell (2003) , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B; Martin (2020) , Frontiers in Microbiology. Deep under the ocean, alkaline fluids rich in hydrogen met slightly acidic seawater inside towers of iron and sulfur. Martin and Russell argued that these structu...
Lately I've been captivated by an idea: electromagnetic theories of consciousness , which hypothesise that conscious experiences are identical with certain electromagnetic (EM) patterns generated by the brain ( Pockett, 2012 ). The central claim of these theories is that spatiotemporally integrated information in an electromagnetic field feels like something. Dr Mostyn W. Jones , a philosopher of mind at University of Manchester, provides a good summary and comparison of EM theories of consciousness ( 2013 ), which come in a range of flavors: computationalist, reductionist, dualist, realist, interactionist, epiphenomenalist, globalist, or localist. What's the physical basis? Each neuron when firing generates an electric dipole field, and the overlap of these fields from the firing of many neurons across the brain produces an ever-changing and unified brain-wide electromagnetic field of extraordinary complexity. That much is known. EM field theories of ...