The Higgs Field and Consciousness
When the announcement about the probable discovery of the Higgs boson was made on July 4, many people were excited. But despite all this discussion, few people understood what was important about this discovery. All the focus was on the properties of the boson itself. But the boson itself is of little importance, it only occurs in very difficult, rare, high energy states. What is important is the Higgs field. The boson serves as an indicator of the concept of the Higgs field. The field is what gives matter mass. It does this through interacting with elementary particles. The particles gain mass by interacting with the field. Some types of elementary particles attract the Higgs field and thus have mass and some do not. Some have suggested that thinking of the field as being like a kind of molasses that drags on some particles, giving them mass and inertia.
So if this strange concept of the interacting field is legitimate, then what other kinds of fields might there be in existence of which we know nothing? What if there is a consciousness field which exists and works in a manner analogous to the Higgs field? The consciousness field would then interact with normal matter as does the Higgs field. When information processing structures are created by nature, then they will then interact with the field. Different types and configurations of neurons or other information processing structures will attract more or less of the consciousness field depending on its properties. Consciousness would thus arise from the interaction between matter and the field. All types of life on earth that have neurons will thus have some degree of consciousness. For small animals like insects, the amount of consciousness will be very small, but for animals like human beings which which have relatively large brains they will attract a much larger share of the field and the consciousness that it generates.
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