On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 05:26:39PM +0200, Günther Greindl wrote: > > Have you looked at this?: > > The information integration theory of consciousness > by Giulio Tononi > in Velmans, M. & Schneider, S. The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness > Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 287-300 > > An overview can be found here: > http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6315 >
Interesting reference Günther! Its not overly convincing, however (or at least the online abstract you point is overly vague on detailes). It does remind me of Philemotte & Bersini's "intrinsic emergence" (Bersini's paper in ALife 9 or P & B's paper in ECAL05). A brief summary of their idea (if I have the gist right) is that emergence is detected whenever a dramatic reduction of complexity of a system is produced by adding in a "detector" or "observer" to the system. This is quantifiable, at least for their CA examples. Tononi's \Phi seems to be nothing other than this reduction in complexity - so it would seem to me (off the bat) that he is just measuring emergence (which in the brain might well be a measure of consciousness, but is dubious in other systems). Anyway, all these ideas are very immature, but nevertheless interesting. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
