Yes there is. It's called magnetic transparency. It's the way a really good piece of window glass filters out the visible spectrum.
I would like you to ponder for a moment what goes on in an MRI scan (technically an NMRI). You have a superconducting electromagnet powerful enough to make the protons in the molecules of you brain jiggle in resonance. Yet it has no discernable effect on people's ability to think, nor on the content of their thought. Why is that? Because the brain is 99.999 percent free of magnetic materials. There might be a few isolated pockets of magnetic material that may or may not be sensitive to the earth's magnetic field, but I assure you that if the brain were a radio receiver it would explode like a hamster in a microwave during an MRI scan.
I recall reading somewhile ago of a frog being suspended in a very strong magnetic field. This was due to the diamagnetic properties of water. Presumably one could do the same with a human. That would be very cool!
And then someone else said: “This is far too vague…. How is it key? The future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex in its possibilities. What test does it give us?
Then the first observer observed: “This debate about free will has a fundamental flaw, and that is that it fails to recognize that things are as they are regardless of which side ‘wins’” [i.e., it seems a conclusion already has been firmly drawn on the matter of this question by this party to the debate].
Well, if that is so, Mr. First Observer, then human free will is “dead as a doornail,” right out of the starting gate. Unable by definition, on principle, to tell us anything about, or to affect the course of events -- that is, unable to affect or effect anything new in the world of human experience and endeavor. And we haven't even touched on the problem of "winning." How well does this mental construct really accord with what you personally know of Reality?
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I think open questions present themselves here that we won’t answer tonight, if in a lifetime.
So let’s just change the subject. You wrote:
It's called magnetic transparency. It's the way a really good piece of window glass filters out the visible spectrum.... I would like you to ponder for a moment what goes on in an MRI scan (technically an NMRI). You have a superconducting electromagnet powerful enough to make the protons in the molecules of you brain jiggle in resonance. Yet it has no discernable effect on people's ability to think, nor on the content of their thought. Why is that? Because the brain is 99.999 percent free of magnetic materials. There might be a few isolated pockets of magnetic material that may or may not be sensitive to the earth's magnetic field, but I assure you that if the brain were a radio receiver it would explode like a hamster in a microwave during an MRI scan.
So, let me thank you, js1138, for correcting the public record, and affording a new learning experience for non-scientific folk who maybe are playing “catch-up” WRT to the reigning scientific – and public – debate of these issues.
So here's a (probably dumb) question: If the brain "is 99.999 percent free of magnetic materials," then how can it be said to participate in a quantum universe that would seem to be dispositably described as a seething sea of electomagnetic possibility?
You give a good description of the "magnetic shield" defense -- here derived, I gather, from classical physics. I do have a few questions. You seemed to indicate that the ability to apperceive the idea of “future” was perhaps a mark of high-level consciousness. You seemed to suggest that a sure test (albeit still on trial) of human consciousness would be the ability to “anticipate” the future.
But what does this mean? Does “anticipate” mean “prove?” As in: Validate by means of the scientific method?
Another thing I wondered about: Do you think that consciousness is coextensive with thought --which, as you seem to define it, ultimately depends on words or other kinds of symbols? That is, that we humans are inexorably, ineluctably “language-dependent” for everything we know?
I find such questions interesting. Hope you do, too.