Photons As Carriers Of Consciousness

Romijn puts forward the concept that subjectivity or consciousness is coded into the virtual photons that generate electric and magnetic fields. 

This approach has considerable advantages. Photons intermediating the electromagnetic force are, as far as we know, the most basic level of the universe.

At this level the fundamental components of the universe have given properties that cannot be explained, analysed or reduced further. 

So both the charge on the electron and the ability of the photon to intermediate it across space are given properties that cannot be explained or reduced. 

This is the only physical level at which it is possible to have properties that cannot be reduced to something more fundamental.

The only known contemporary portrait of Jeanne d'Arc. By Clément de Fauquembergue, the secretary of the Palement of Paris. The artist had never seen Jeanne d'Arc. This fascinating plain, small line drawing shows her as a small determined woman carrying her army’s sacred banner in one hand and a sword in the other. The drawing was made in the margin of the Orleans city record manuscripts on the day she got the English armies away from the city and freed the countryside around Orleans May 10. 1429

The article suggests that photons carry subjectivity or consciousness as such a given property. 

 

This is in principle possible because irreducible properties are present at this level. 

It is more reasonable than the mainstream approach, which suggests that a new property of consciousness can be produced by banging together previously unconscious bits of matter. 

bohemian sandals

The problem would be the same if we tried to say that electrical charge was a function of banging things together in some complex system.

It might look plausible, but we would forever be looking for what actually happened that produced the charge. 

Romijn’s theory is not fully panpsychic.

 

Although subjectivity is present at the level of photons, it requires brain sytems to generate ordered patterns that are the basis of actual conscious experience.

Romijn views the brain as a chaotic self-organising process, the outcome of which is the pattern of electric and magnetic fields generated by the dendritic trees of neurons. 

The author thinks that these patterns code for the qualia.

Virtual photons comprise the electric and magnetic fields and it is these which are claimed to encode conscious experience.  

Romijn argues that they are causally necessary and sufficient for consciousness.

http://quantum-mind.co.uk/theories/other-quantum-theories/photons-as-carriers-of-consciousness/