Conscious and unconscious coherent excitations in brains

Understanding conscious and unconscious processes in brains has great potential importance in both medical applications and the race for optimized artificial intelligence. Here several issues will be discussed: (1) We will argue that conscious awareness can be interpreted as excitation of a hybrid bosonic brain-wide field defined as a functional of more fundamental fields. (2) This picture of an observable field defined as a combination of more fundamental fields is quite natural when a brain is regarded as a physical system, with many parallel examples in condensed matter, nuclear, and high-energy physics. (3) The clever algorithms for artificial intelligence that have been developed in recent decades can be regarded as far less sophisticated models of the algorithms employed by brains, which may also be interpreted as mappings from disparate input fields to coherent higher-level fields. (4) There are already experimental techniques that can test the present description of consciousness as a brain-wide physical field, and more can be envisioned. (5) Any solution of David Chalmer's "hard problem" would require new physics to characterise the ultimate degrees of freedom that are accessed intimately through direct conscious experience.