Shocker: Physics and chemistry unscientific

I was reading a piece in Wired recently when I came across a remark that stopped me cold:

"No serious researcher I know believes in an electromagnetic theory of consciousness," Bernard Baars wrote in an e-mail. Baars is a neurobiologist and co-editor of Consciousness & Cognition, another scientific journal in the field. "It's not really worth talking about scientifically."

Well, this is a damning indictment, as is. One need not delve deeply into quantum theory to learn that the brain's chemistry is all about electromagnetic fields:

I would like to again impress you with the vast range of phenomena that the theory of quantum electrodynamics describes: It's easier to say it backwards: the theory describes all the phenomena of the physical world except the gravitational effect [...] and radioactive phenomena, which involve nuclei shifting in their energy levels. So if we leave out gravity and radioactivity (more properly, nuclear physics) what have we got left? Gasoline burning in automobiles, foam and bubbles, the hardness of salt or copper, the stiffness of steel. In fact, biologists are trying to interpret as much as they can about life in terms of chemistry, and as I already explained, the theory behind chemistry is quantum electrodynamics.

Feynman, QED: the strange theory of light and matter

It gets better. Freeman Dyson, in a classic article in Scientific American, tells us pretty clearly that "There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them."

The brain is presumably a material thing and therefore just is a collection of fields. EM fields are clearly the only real contender among those fields if we are looking for a physical locus for consciousness.

Abdua Salam shared a Nobel for his work on the Standard Model and said: "[All] chemical binding is electromagnetic in origin, and so are all phenomena of nerve impulses."

Which seems clear enough.

In recent news, there's this: Magnetic Fields Spook the Brain, which provides another nice basis in reality.

I suppose Baars and his terribly serious colleagues are free to fabricate a physics that is more to their liking, but feel compelled to advise them that they have picked a hard row to hoe.

I used to worry, back when I was a young man pursuing these matters, that I was missing some essential point. Surely some wiser head had considered the path I was treading and rejected it for reasons I was too dim to discern. 

Only to discover that the vast majority of researchers were (and are) nearly clueless as to the basic physics and chemistry underlying neuroscience.

I'm going to go pull my hair out, now.