Hmm, interesting. Can you give me any more pointers to articles or stuff about this theory? From just the short non-technical article, it sounds fishy to me, but definitely interesting. I think I'm still leaning toward functionalism, especially after reading Diaspora, by Greg Egan. Oh, I should post about that book...

(:,
Pace

I wonder what the researchers think about the problem of external fields -- presumably they'd have further thoughts than the "our skin, skull and cerebrospinal fluid shield us from external electric fields" that made it into the newspaper.

They need a big difference between the EM properties of the skull and the brain, so the brain's weak fields can propagate internally to make the theory go, but strong external fields don't interfere. This is data that I'd think would be available. The TMS people would know about magnetic-field behavior, and the EEG people would know about electric-field (not much like free space, because of conductivity).