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Johnjoe McFadden Johnjoe McFadden is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, and has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on subjects as wide-ranging as bacterial genetics, tuberculosis, idiopathic diseases and computer modelling of evolution. He lectured extensively in the UK, Europe, the USA and Japan and his work has been featured in radio, television and national newspaper articles. He wrote the popular science book, Quantum Evolution, which examines the role of quantum mechanics in life, evolution and consciousness. He also writes articles regularly for the Guardian newspaper in the UK on topics as varied as quantum mechanics, evolution and genetically modified crops. Most controversial were two papers published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, in which McFadden proposed that the brain's em information field is the physical substrate of conscious awareness: Synchronous Firing and Its Influence on the Brain's Electromagnetic Field: Evidence for an Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness, and The Conscious Electromagnetic Information (Cemi) Field Theory: The Hard Problem Made Easy? This theory was developed independently but concurrent with Susan Pockett's field theory of consciousness.
Related Links • Johnjoe
McFadden's Machines Like Us interview
Johnjoe McFadden Quotes Instead of the venerable sage, we should instead imagine a younger Aristotle diving into the clear waters of the Aegean to retrieve starfish, crabs and anemones, to study their form or observe their behaviour. We cannot account for life with classical science alone. In particular, we cannot account for how living creatures are able to direct their actions according to their own internal agenda. For higher animals, including ourselves, we call this ability, our will. The ability to will actions is a profoundly puzzling aspect of living organisms that appears to contradict scientific determinism. There is no role for will in determinism; we do not have choices. Every action that we perform should be determined, not by any decision we make, but by the precise molecular configuration of our bodies at the time preceding our action. What we have discovered is that there is no fixed border inside living cells but one that shifts up and down the hierarchy of cell function, depending on the state of the cell and the resources it has available. In starved, inactive cells, most of fundamental particles will be sunk into the quantum world of superpositions and interference. But give the cell some food and its quantum measuring apparatus will be armed with substrates that allow it to perform densely spaced measurements on critical particles, forcing them to take on real values and inhabit the classical world. The quantum-classical border will thereby be pushed down into the bowels of the cell where only non-critical particles, shielded from environmental interactions, will continue to persist as quantum entities. John Cairns discovered that after a prolonged period of starvation, mutations that allowed the E. coli to utilise lactose increased in frequency. It appeared that the presence of lactose specifically enhanced mutations that allowed the cells to eat the lactose. The E. coli cell appeared to be able to direct its own mutations. The brain's em field represents an integrated electromagnetic field representation of distributed neuronal information and has dynamics that closely map to those expected for a correlate of consciousness. I propose that the brain's em information field is the physical substrate of conscious awareness. Man is not an automaton. Our conscious electromagnetic field exploits quantum measurement to move particles within our brain, and provide us with that phenomenon we call our free will. Consciousness drives free will. This quantum level control – a control lacking in unconscious robots – gives us an edge in our interactions with the outside world. It propels men and women to drag tons of supplies up frozen mountainsides. It may sometimes (though at a more primitive level) be the driving force that causes a bird to soar into the air or a salmon to leap a waterfall. I believe it also lies at the heart of that most extraordinary of human abilities: creative thinking. Great ideas are not pulled out of the air; they are pulled out of the quantum multiverse. In a sense, our minds have recaptured the same process of quantum evolution that I believe propelled life through its origin billions of years ago and drove the evolution of living organisms towards increasing complexity.
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