First off, what a strange thing to say. And why do you speak in the plural form? How serious do I have to take the rest of your post? I don’t think EM is the source of all evil.
When you consider that everything we know about the world is encoded in the neocortex over trillions of synapses in sparse representations (as Numenta describes based on many neurological observations), then you can imagine that most synapses (i.e. bits, in combination with many others) represent a feature of an object, or a concept. All these bits (of that object’s set of features) must connect at roughly the same time for the idea of that specific object to form in our mind. Since most of these synapses have stochastic behaviors, this system can only work if there is sufficient redundancy.
When I wrote that quote, I didn’t know Numenta’s model very well yet, and it evolved quite a bit since. (I am still far from understanding everything to be honnest). But one of the questions I have is how exactly new information finds its way through the tree structure of the neocortex to select (so to speak) a synapse to represent this information. And later through the same pathway this synapse communicates its information to the rest of the brain (to generate behavior).
To use a metaphor from microcircuitry that is quite wrong: what is the address bus of the neocortex?
This thread talks about the difficulty of hypothetically transposing the structure of one brain to another device. I think the problem of this lies in the meta-data of the address space of the neocortex. If there is a way to understand how this works, then I think in principle there must be a way to read this meta-data (the address space) together with the data itself. And therefor restitute it.
But this is of course very speculative.