By the mid-1990s consciousness had become the hot topic in philosophy of mind, and that's where I realized that consciousness is an electromagnetic phenomenon. A conscious self is not a massive 3 dimensional physical thing that is made of atomic matter. It is a massless "immaterial" energetic thing that is made of neurally-generated electromagnetic wave energy. From the perspective of neurophysics, we can clearly see the reality of the conscious self within a comprehensively coherent conceptual paradigm.
In June 2014 I published The Physics of Spirit: God, Heaven and Human Consciousness. The book describes our brain-consciousness relationship in terms of neurophysics: a marriage of 20th century atomic physics and wave mechanics, 21st century neuropsychology, 2500 year old philosophical metaphysics, and an even older tradition of spiritual awareness and mystical knowledge.
Neurophysics works. It accommodates the evidence within a single causally/logically coherent explanatory framework; an expanded paradigm whose perspectives show clear solutions to ancient and modern questions about what we "are" and how we "work", as conscious human beings.
Since 1890 when William James published his vast compendium of all things related to brain and mind -- The Principles of Psychology -- the metaphysically literate strain of physiological psychology has explored the brain/mind relationship. Since Rene Descartes' 1642, Meditations on First Philosophy, rational minds have been aware that the immaterial mind in us that knows is not the same "thing" as the physical thing that our mind knows as its body/brain. There is a body/brain (ontology), and there is a conscious mind knowing its body/brain (epistemology). Reality, and knowing reality. Two different kinds of things.
Brain and mind are two related but different things. The neurological workings of brains and the psychological experiences of minds are related to each other by what William James called "neural-mental correlates". A neural event causes or is correlated with a mental event; and a mental event causes or is correlated with a neural event. Neuro-psychology continues to explore the brain-mind relationship: the relationship between reality as it exists "out there", and my experiences of reality that exist "in here", in my conscious awareness.
How does reality get from out there in ontology to in here in epistemology? Neurophysics identifies electromagnetic information as the causal bridge that connects ontological reality with conscious knowing.
In his 1994 book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio reports his findings with neurally and nerve damaged patients. If the flow of electrical information along nerve-wires from our body to our brain/mind is cut, or if the neural circuitry that makes the information available to mind is dysfunctional, the patients report that they have no body. They experience themselves as a free-floating consciousness, and have no sense that they are somehow connected with a physical body/brain. Their brainstem is performing its "awake state" patterns of neuron firings that generate the conscious "mind", but the mind is not receiving a flow of electrical information "from" its body, so the mind feels/thinks/perceives/believes that it has no body.
"Descartes' Error" was to think he could believe he had a body, if he really didn't have a body. Damasio shows that without an actual body sending electrical information about its physical states, our mind has no awareness of having a body, and our consciousness believes it doesn't have a body.
Sam Harris thinks he is a brain that has no mind. 2500 years of philosophical metaphysics, an even longer history of spiritual awareness, Rene Descartes' Meditations, William James' exhaustive inquiries, Damasio's research, strongly suggests the opposite is closer to the truth: that the thing that is "me" is my conscious mind, and my mind "has" a body/brain. Even when me thinks me has no body, "me" still exists as a consciously aware and self-aware "thing".
This fundamental personal experience of our own conscious awareness is the single "thing" that Descartes could not explain away by his strategy of rational doubt. "I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time that I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind." By systematically eliminating all of the information contents of his consciousness (which is what we do when we clear our mind in "meditation"), Descartes discovered what he essentially "is": an empty awareness, a consciousness, a personal conscious "me".
But then Descartes made a different error by identifying his essential conscious self with something he found he is able to do: think. "I am a thinking being." This identity-error led Descartes to define all of his conscious experiences in terms of "thinking", so that "feeling must be some confused kind of thinking."
Today the neurophysics of an electromagnetic consciousness causally interacting with electromagnetic information, recognizes "feeling" as conscious experiences in a longer, slower bandwidth, and seeing/thinking as happening in a shorter faster bandwidth, of electromagnetic wave energy. Our conscious being itself, and the information that we interact with, are both made of neurally-generated electromagnetic wave energy.
We experience the causal interactions -- between our self-aware conscious waveform and information waveforms -- as perceptions. The information energy causally alters the waveform structure of the conscious "me", and the self-aware waveform experiences those alterations to its structure as perceptual experiences of realities. We experience information from reality as "happening to me", because the energetic information really is "happening to" the electromagnetic structure that is the conscious personal "me".
It is these perceptual experiences of realities by which a consciousness is empirically introduced to realities. We "know reality" by causally interacting with information from reality. Neurophysics identifies electromagnetic information as the causal bridge that connects reality with empirically/perceptually knowing reality.
Our conscious perceptual experiences, such as our visual "observations", are our empirical evidence of the presence of realities. Empirical science assumes that reality somehow causes scientists to accurately "know" reality by "observing"; but science has never explained the causal processes by which "observation" happens. The empirical link to reality has stood as a bald assumption that reality somehow gets into the "knowing" of scientists, so that empirical science is reliably "about reality". Neurophysics confirms the truth of the empirical assumption, by describing the causal mechanisms by which conscious perception works.
Feeling and seeing are our conscious being's two different ways of interacting with information "about reality". We can stretch visible information to feel it subjectively, or we can compress felt information to see it objectively. It's the same "information". But our conscious being has different kinds of experiences with information, at different wavelengths/frequencies. Our conscious being is a self-aware electromagnetic wave phenomenon, and we have different kinds of conscious experiences when interacting with different structures of electromagnetic waveforms that embody causally affective information.
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