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 claiming "A New Study Points to Two Origins of Life on Earth" ( Smithsonian Mag , Phys.org ) can easily be taken to indicate that life had two completely independent beginnings. More accurately, there were two distinct emergences of free-living cells from one original crucible of life: 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. Geochemistry & Abiotic Chemosynthesis Reference: Martin & Russell (2003), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Deep under the ocean, alkaline fluids rich in hydrogen met slightly acidic seawater inside towers of iron and sulfur. These structures consisted primarily of ...
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 ...