Electromagnetic experiments on consciousness?

In the YouTube comments section of a video covering evidence for consciousness not being produced by the brain, there were several comments that caught my eye. The usual cynical, uninformed lot of course, but then there were also commenters who claimed that consciousness is produced by the brain because there have been experiments conducted showing how electromagnetic waves can affect a person's behaviour and mindset to the point of 'altering their morality and memories'. I'm not sure if this has been discussed here before and has anything to do with the materialist 'feedback loop theory' that argues that the brain can achieve complex levels of consciousness, among other things, via feedback loops. 

What are your thoughts on this and has anybody heard of such examples?

Disclaimer:
As noted here there's a good reason to reject this is proof materialism/physicalism is true, given these skeptical parties that continue to doubt the physicalist/materialist faith.


Additionally, whatever is shown by parapsychology or neuroscience, here are four good reasons to reject the religion of physicalism/materialism.

In the YouTube comments section of a video covering evidence for consciousness not being produced by the brain, there were several comments that caught my eye. The usual cynical, uninformed lot of course, but then there were also commenters who claimed that consciousness is produced by the brain because there have been experiments conducted showing how electromagnetic waves can affect a person's behaviour and mindset to the point of 'altering their morality and memories'. I'm not sure if this has been discussed here before and has anything to do with the materialist 'feedback loop theory' that argues that the brain can achieve complex levels of consciousness, among other things, via feedback loops. 

What are your thoughts on this and has anybody heard of such examples?

I think I can safely say I wouldn't be having this experience without my brain. But in my opinion, it's virtually impossible to come up with a way to claim that my experience is exclusively occurring in my localised brain... and by that, I mean my localised brain in spacetime.

As a single example of that, and of the sort of problems we start straying into when talking about these things from a naive position, are issues about my brain now, in the present... but also my brain in the past. When we read a sentence, our understanding of the sentence as we finish reading it, is being influenced by what we read at the start of the sentence (which is now in our the past). These past influences can be stretched out, further and further, over my lifetime... and very specific influences from the past, are even shown to jump quite specifically over multiple generations, in the case of epigenetic inheritance studies. So when people say experience is produced in the brain, they tend not to consider the brain over time.

There is just an assumption that we carry everything with us in an isolated way, everything that we need, to make up the whole of our experience... but this really is just the naive starting position... which is the experience of separate me, a separate/independent 'I', moving around in a separate/independent external world... but even the most conservative position (if a person believes it's all happening in their brain) has to accept that they are just having an experience of 'I', moving around in a separate external world... and if they don't accept that... then their beliefs 'it's all in their brain' and of an 'independent I, in an independent external world' really seem to be in conflict with each other.

But the naive position, that experience of a separate me, moving around in a separate external world... could be more acceptable - in my view - if my whole experience is not just created exclusively in my brain... but is created by shared processing... processing which is actually taking place outside (beyond) the 'result' of the processing... the 'result' I'm talking about here, being our everyday (spacetime) world which is experienced with every observation. In my view, this is very much the sort of idea physics seems to be pointing us towards...

We might all be experiencing walking around, in what we experience as everybody else's brains... and our everyday experiences of the world, could be just our way of understanding how we all experience together... but what actually lies behind my experience, behind the processing which results in our everyday spacetime world, is anybody's guess? Perhaps it's not even logical to ask such a question.

I really don't have the right words, or the right way to express this stuff...

As nbtruthman mentioned in another post, the only example I can think of for these 'experiments' is the controversial (and arguably flawed) God Helmet experiment. I haven't seen any recent articles claiming that consciousness/the self can be affected by electromagnetism either. They don't cite their sources so I'm very confused as to where they're coming from.

As nbtruthman mentioned in another post, the only example I can think of for these 'experiments' is the controversial (and arguably flawed) God Helmet experiment. I haven't seen any recent articles claiming that consciousness/the self can be affected by electromagnetism either. They don't cite their sources so I'm very confused as to where they're coming from.

Better than me spoon feeding you...

Go to

 -   Google Scholar

Type specific keywords for potentially relevant papers into the search box... I used these words to start the process of investigation...

 - electromagnetic effects behaviour

Once you find a paper with positive results... then use it's references to other papers (at the end of the paper) to explore new related papers which may give new insights...

Straight away I found this article... which could be a useful jumping off point...

-  "Effect of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiations (RF-EMR) on passive avoidance behaviour and hippocampal 
    morphology in Wistar rats"

But the idea that EM effects somehow proves Experience is isolated in a self-contained brain... is based on naive assumptions... as I explained.

Sorry if I'm annoying you Max, I don't tend to go looking for things that may upset or confuse me for one reason or another. 

I found that article too but not much else. The only study I found which indicated that electromagnetism can affect morality was this one from 2010: 
http://news.mit.edu/2010/moral-control-0330

Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.

One commenter noted: 'That magnets affect the organism, that's a triviality. EM fields can affect any human cognitive dynamics, of which moral judgment is just an example. Insistence of "neuroscience" upon the reduction of the organism to the brain, a single organ, is unscientific, a replication of a bad Cartesianism. Any judgment, by its nature, involves the whole organism, in relation with the environment/world, independently of the brain region mobilized at the moment.'