Some 2,700 years ago, in the city of Sam’al, in what is now southern Turkey, an elderly servant of the king sat quietly inside his home contemplating the mystery of his soul. His name was Katumuwa. In front of him stood a heavy basalt stele bearing his image and a carved inscription in ancient Aramaic. This text instructed his family to hold a ritual feast after his death, offering a bull to Hadad harpatalli, a ram to Nik-arawas of the hunters, a ram to Shamash, another to Hadad of the vineyards, one to Kubaba, and, crucially, one to “my soul that is in this stele.” Katumuwa believed that in shaping this stone and inscribing it with these words, he had prepared a secure and durable home for his soul after death. This single artifact is one of the earliest written testimonies of what we now call dualism: the belief that our conscious self resides in an immaterial soul separate from the matter of the body.
More than two millennia later, Professor Johnjoe McFadden, a molecular geneticist at the University of Surrey in the UK, found himself contemplating the same mystery. Professor McFadden is known for his books Quantum Evolution (2011), Human Nature: Fact and Fiction (2006), Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (2014, co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili), and Life Is Simple (2021). While sitting beside his son in a hospital room, he watched an electroencephalogram (EEG) trace the electrical signals of the boy’s brain. His son was undergoing this test for a condition that turned out to be benign. As the irregular, wavy lines crept across the screen, spikes and dips reacting to noises like a door banging shut, Professor McFadden found himself wondering about the nature of the consciousness that produced those signals.
How, he asked himself, do the atoms and molecules inside neurons; no more magical in their substance than the basalt of Katumuwa’s stele or the steel rails of the hospital gurney, somehow give rise to human awareness and thought? Today, most neuroscientists answer this question by pointing to the information-processing performed by neurons. Both Katumuwa and Professor McFadden’s son would have begun their experiences as soon as light or sound reached their senses, triggering their neurons to fire in complex patterns. For Katumuwa it might have been the pinecone or comb carved into his likeness on the stele. For the boy it was the beeps of the hospital machine or the ticking of the wall clock.
Each firing event involves the movement of electrically charged ions in and out of neurons. These movements set off a chain reaction that travels from one nerve cell to the next following logical rules that resemble the AND, OR and NOT gates of a computer. Within milliseconds of looking at his stele, millions of neurons in Katumuwa’s brain would have been firing in patterns representing thousands of visual features of that stone object and the room around it. In a limited sense, those neurons “knew” some aspects of the stele.
Yet information-processing alone does not explain conscious knowing. Computers process enormous amounts of information without showing the faintest glimmer of awareness. Decades ago, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked us to imagine what it is like to be a bat. That “being-like-something,” that subjective point of view, marks what it means to be truly conscious. In that hospital room, as Professor McFadden watched the EEG, he asked himself what it might feel like to be one of his son’s neurons responding to the slam of a door. An individual neuron, after all, knows only one thing, its firing rate. It either fires or it does not, encoding a single bit of information much like a zero or a one in computer language. This bit might correlate with the sound of a door but it says nothing about the door’s shape, its color, its weight, or the memories associated with it. Being a single neuron in his son’s brain, Professor McFadden concluded, would probably not feel like anything at all.
Neurobiologists would counter that while a single neuron knows almost nothing, the 100 billion neurons in a human brain collectively know everything in the mind. This leads directly into what scientists call the binding problem. How do millions of widely distributed neurons combine their data streams into a single complex and unified conscious perception of a room, a door, or a basalt stele? Why do you not have any awareness of the complex decision-making your immune cells perform to fight infections? Why did Katumuwa not consciously experience the intricate neural control required to keep himself balanced as he walked across the room? Why does a chess supercomputer like Deep Blue not develop an abiding interest in the game? Something special about certain brain activities must produce awareness and thought, while other equally complex activities do not.
As Professor McFadden stared at those trembling EEG lines, a different possibility began to form in his mind. Perhaps the answer did not lie solely in neurons or in the information they process. Every time a neuron fires, it not only sends an electrical signal along its fiber but also emits a tiny electromagnetic (EM) pulse into the surrounding space, similar to the way your phone sends a radio signal when you text. When his son heard the door slam, billions of neurons fired and billions of EM pulses were released, overlapping and flowing into one another to form an electromagnetic field. Neurobiologists have long known about the brain’s EM field but typically dismissed it as irrelevant, like the exhaust fumes of a car compared to its steering. Yet Professor McFadden realized that the EM tremors recorded on the EEG knew about the door slam just as much as the neurons whose firing created them.
The difference is crucial. The information stored in millions of scattered neurons exists as disconnected bits, but the EM field generated by their firing unites that information into a single physical whole. In other words, information within the brain’s EM field is inherently unified, unlike the discrete bits held in matter. This is a form of dualism rooted not in matter versus spirit but in matter versus energy.
The unity of EM fields is something most of us experience every day without noticing. When you use wifi at home, your phone might stream a documentary about Katumuwa’s stele while someone else watches a movie and another listens to music. All this information overlaps within a single field around the router, yet each device can download what it needs. This is possible because, unlike information locked in discrete matter such as computer chips or neurons, EM field information travels as immaterial waves moving at light speed. These waves overlap and intermingle into one physically bound field of information that can be accessed from any point. Watching his son’s EEG, Professor McFadden wondered what it might feel like to be the EM field of a human brain, pulsing with bound information from all senses at once. Perhaps it would feel a lot like being conscious.
This idea might seem strange, but is it any stranger than believing awareness resides in matter itself? Recall Einstein’s equation E = mc². Energy and matter are two sides of the same physical coin. Matter encodes information as discrete particles separated in space, while energy encodes information as overlapping fields unified into single wholes. Locating consciousness in the brain’s EM field elegantly solves the binding problem. Awareness becomes what this unified EM field information feels like from the inside. Hearing a door slam, then, is what an EM perturbation correlating with that event and its memory associations feels like subjectively.
Just weeks before that hospital visit, Professor McFadden had read Francis Crick’s provocative book The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), in which the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix argued that consciousness could be solved by finding the brain activity correlating with it. Everyone knows the frustrating experience of failing to see something in plain sight—like glasses on a cluttered desk. For minutes the image is on your retina and processed by parallel neural pathways without you seeing it, then suddenly you do. Crick suggested that researchers identify what changes between the unconscious and the conscious stages of perception. Years of research have pointed to synchronous firing of neurons as the best correlate of consciousness. When scattered neurons process the features of an object without awareness, they fire out of sync. In the moment of recognition, they fire in unison.
But why would synchrony matter? For neurons as computational units, synchrony makes little sense. For a consciousness located in an EM field, however, synchrony is inevitable. Toss pebbles into a pond and the resulting waves interfere. Peaks and troughs cancel out when misaligned, but when aligned they reinforce each other to create a stronger wave. In the brain, asynchronous neurons cancel out their EM waves, creating a weak or nonexistent field. When they fire synchronously, their waves line up and reinforce each other, projecting a strong EM signal into the brain’s field. This is the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field. At that point, you see your glasses.
Professor McFadden has been publishing on cemi field theory since 2000, updating it in 2020. A striking feature of the theory is its account of free will. Katumuwa likely believed his immaterial soul drove his voluntary actions. Modern science removed the soul, reducing voluntary actions to mere motor outputs of neural computation no different from blinking or chewing. Why, then, do voluntary actions feel so different? In a 2002 paper, Professor McFadden proposed that free will is the cemi field’s influence on neurons to initiate voluntary acts. Back then, evidence for EM fields affecting neurons was scant, but experiments by David McCormick at Yale in 2010 and Christof Koch at Caltech in 2011 showed that even weak brain-level EM fields can perturb neuronal firing. This suggests a wifi-like component of neural processing experienced as free will. Katumuwa, in a way, was right: his “soul” as EM field-encoded information in his brain did drive his will.
Cemi field theory also explains the difference between the non-conscious and conscious minds. The non-conscious mind operates in parallel, handling many tasks at once. The conscious mind runs serially, focusing on one task at a time. Katumuwa could chat while eating but could not divide a large number while concentrating on a game. The theory accounts for this by recognizing that most brain processing runs solely through neurons without EM field interaction, enabling parallelism. At some point in evolution, denser brains led to EM interference among neurons. Usually detrimental, this interference occasionally conferred advantages, allowing computation with complex joined-up EM field information rather than single bits. Natural selection then increased sensitivity to EM interactions. The cost of this advantage was seriality: like overlapping waves in a pond, ideas dropped into the cemi field interfere, forcing the conscious mind to process them one at a time.
This same theory hints at why consciousness evolved. Activities that rely on it; planning, imagination, creativity, problem-solving, operate with holistic field-encoded “ideas” rather than binary digits. These “ideas” are the computation units of consciousness, its “cbits.”
Katumuwa imagined his mind enduring in basalt, which is a silica-based stone. He might have been amused to learn that silicon (the same element in basalt) is now the key to computer chips. Yet even the most advanced AI systems remain non-conscious. As Gary Marcus has noted, they lack “general intelligence,” the ability to generalize knowledge to novel situations. A five-year-old child could figure out how to free a rope caught in a bicycle wheel in seconds; no current AI could. Cemi field theory predicts that conventional computers will never achieve general intelligence because engineers deliberately prevent EM field interference in their designs. Without EM interactions, AI will remain clever but unconscious.
However, this theory also opens the door to building artificial conscious minds. Doing so would require a new type of computer architecture that computes not only with logic gates encoding bits but also with interacting fields encoding cbits. Our own EM field-sensitive brain offers clues about how to build such machines. Transforming those clues into hardware and software could yield the long-sought dream of conscious, general-intelligence AI.
Looking even further into the future, might a new Katumuwa achieve what the ancient one hoped for, mental immortality? Reverse-engineering the informational content of a human brain and uploading it into a silicon-based system that processes both wires and fields would be extraordinarily difficult but not impossible. These new receptacles for electric souls would not be carved of basalt, but they might endure far longer. Katumuwa’s ancient dream of preserving the self could one day be realized not only for him but for all of humanity.
