Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a theoretical framework
proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi to understand consciousness. It
suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of information
within the brain, rather than being a property of specific types of neurons
or brain regions.
Key principles of Integrated Information Theory include:
Integration: Consciousness is associated with the integration of information.
This means that a conscious experience cannot be divided into independent
parts without losing its essential properties.
Western theory and thinking of the consciousness are not different
from the conscience; it has only a literal mundane meaning; if you are
conscious, you have the consciousness; it is different from the existence
theory of epistemology of the integrated Vedic statements of the sanatana
dharma. According to the west, where there is nil information to grind, the
consciousness is unaware. Thus, the West believes that consciousness is
residing only within the brain and neurons, unlike what we say cannot be
identified as only in one place; according to us it is all around us; it is
in all the species.
Information: IIT defines information in a specific way, not merely as the
transmission of data, but as the ability of a system to differentiate
between a large number of possible states. And west say that any analysis
of the pros and the cons is determined only by consciousness. Brain is
reduced to neurons.
Exclusion: Consciousness is exclusive; one conscious experience at a time
dominates, and others are excluded. The West thinks that it can only work
one by one and never all together.
Composition: IIT suggests that consciousness can be present in different
degrees and qualities depending on the level of integration and information
processing within a system. In short, unless there is information and it is
not processed, there is no consciousness and we are sleeping; and in sleep
there is no consciousness. So it varies from person to person and according
to the significant territory, time and other miscellaneous factors. There
is no principle focus about it as one can act independent; but determined
as acting only on data like cell phone memory.
Structural constraints: Certain structures and dynamics within the brain
are more conducive to generating consciousness according to IIT.As
information is processed, consciousness is generated to feed the brain to
think over. This theory cannot answer the speed with which decisions are
flown and if so what is the part of the consciousness is a mute question.
Causal power: According to IIT, conscious systems have causal power,
meaning they can affect and be affected by other systems. The West thinks
exactly the opposite to us. It is not a potential force to reckon with
until, mind is screwed down to coma status, It is a tool of operation with
a variable factor. A power and powerlessness depends on the information it
attains.
IIT has sparked significant interest and debate within the scientific
community. While it offers a compelling framework for understanding
consciousness, it also faces criticisms and challenges, such as
difficulties in quantifying integrated information and in relating its
postulates to empirical data.
Overall, Integrated Information Theory represents an ambitious attempt to
provide a scientific account of consciousness, but it remains an active
area of research with much yet to be understood and validated.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Rangarajan T.N.C. <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2024 at 05:53
Subject: what counts as consciousness
To:
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[image: nautil.us]nautil.usWhat Counts as Consciousness
May. 7th, 2024
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Some years ago, when he was still living in southern California,
neuroscientist Christof Koch drank a bottle of Barolo wine while watching *The
Highlander*, and then, at midnight, ran up to the summit of Mount Wilson,
the 5,710-foot peak that looms over Los Angeles.
After an hour of “stumbling around with my headlamp and becoming
nauseated,” as he later described the incident, he realized the nighttime
adventure was probably not a smart idea, and climbed back down, though not
before shouting into the darkness the last line of William Ernest Henley’s
1875 poem “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my
soul.”
Which Animals Will Survive Climate Change
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Koch, who first rose to prominence for his collaborative work with the late
Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, is hardly the only scientist to ponder the
nature of the self—but he is perhaps the most adventurous, both in body and
mind. He sees consciousness as the central mystery of our universe
<https://nautil.us/the-spiritual-consciousness-of-christof-koch-238327>,
and is willing to explore any reasonable idea in the search for an
explanation.
Over the years, Koch has toyed with a wide array of ideas, some of them
distinctly speculative—like the idea that the Internet might become
conscious, for example, or that with sufficient technology, multiple brains
could be fused together, linking their accompanying minds along the way.
(And yet, he does have his limits: He’s deeply skeptical both of the idea
that we can “upload
<https://theconversation.com/when-will-i-be-able-to-upload-my-brain-to-a-computer-184130>”
our minds and of the “simulation hypothesis
<https://nautil.us/the-simulated-world-according-to-david-chalmers-238417/>
.”)
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In his new book, *Then I Am Myself The World*
<https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dr-christof-koch-phd/then-i-am-myself-the-world/9781541602816/?lens=basic-books>,
Koch, currently the chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain
Science in Seattle, ventures through the challenging landscape of integrated
information theory <https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44> (IIT), a
framework that attempts to compute the amount of consciousness in a system
based on the degree to which information is networked. Along the way, he
struggles with what may be the most difficult question of all: How do our
thoughts—seemingly ethereal and without mass or any other physical
properties—have real-world consequences? We caught up with him recently
over Zoom.
[image: In Body Image]*THE SELF*: In his new book, neuroscientist Christof
Koch grapples with the complexity of consciousness. *Photo courtesy of
Allen Institute.*
*In your new book, you ask how the mind can influence matter. Are we any
closer to answering that question today than when Descartes posited it
nearly four centuries ago?*
Let’s step back. Western philosophy of mind revolves around two poles, the
physical and the mental—think of them like the north and the south pole.
There’s materialism, which is now known as physicalism, which says that
only physical really exists, and there is no mental; it’s all an illusion,
like Daniel Dennett
<https://nautil.us/i-never-stopped-learning-from-daniel-dennett-569904> and
others have said.
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Then there’s idealism, which is now enjoying a mini-renaissance, but by and
large has not been popular in the 20th and early 21st century, which says
that everything fundamentally is a manifestation of the mental.
Then there is classical dualism, which says, well, there’s clearly physical
matter and there’s the mental, and they somehow have to interact. It’s been
challenging to understand how the mental interacts with the physical—that’s
known as the causation problem.
And then there are other things like panpsychism
<https://nautil.us/a-clash-of-perspectives-on-panpsychism-237719>, that’s
now becoming very popular again
<https://nautil.us/why-philip-pullman-is-obsessed-with-panpsychism-237726>,
which is a very ancient faith. It says that fundamentally everything is
“ensouled”—that everything, even elementary particles, feel a little bit
like something.
All of these different positions have problems. Physicalism remains a
dominant philosophy, particularly in Western philosophy departments and big
tech. Physicalism says that everything fundamentally is physical, and you
can simulate it—this is called “computational functionalism.” The problem
is that, so far, people have been unable to explain consciousness, because
it’s so different from the physical.
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It may be that a little bacterium feels a little bit like something.
*What does integrated information theory say about consciousness?*
IIT says, fundamentally, what exists is consciousness. And consciousness is
the only thing that exists *for itself*. You are conscious. Tonight, you’re
going to go into a deep sleep at some point, and then you’re not conscious
anymore; then you do not exist for yourself. Your body and your brain still
have an existence for others—I can see your body there—but you don’t exist
for yourself. So only consciousness exists for itself; that’s absolute
existence. Everything else is derivative.
It says consciousness ultimately is causal power upon itself—the ability to
make a difference. And now you’re looking for a substrate—like a brain or
computer CPU or anything. Then the theory says, whatever your conscious
experience is—what it feels like to see red, or to smell Limburger cheese,
or to have a particular type of toothache—maps one-to-one onto this
structure, this form, this causal relationship. It’s not a process. It’s
not a computation. It’s very different from all other theories.
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*When you use this term “causal powers,” how is it different from an
ordinary cause-and-effect chain of events? Like if you’re playing
billiards, you hit the cue ball, and the cue ball hits the eight ball …*
It’s nothing woo-woo. It’s the ability of a system, let’s say a billiard
ball, to make a difference. In other words, if it gets hit by another ball,
it moves, and that has an effect in the world.
And IIT says you have a system—a bunch of wires or neurons—and it’s the
extent to which they have causal power upon themselves. You’re always
looking for the maximum causal power that the system can have on itself.
That is ultimately what consciousness is. It’s something very concrete. If
you give me a mathematical description of a system, I can compute it, it’s
not some ethereal thing.
*So it can be objectively measured from the outside?*
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That’s correct.
*But of course there was the **letter* <https://psyarxiv.com/zsr78/>* last
year that was signed by 124 scientists claiming that integrated information
theory is pseudoscience, partly on the grounds, they said, that it isn’t
testable.*
Many years ago, I organized a meeting in Seattle, where we came together
and planned an “adversarial collaboration.” It was specifically focused on
consciousness. The idea was: Let’s take two theories of consciousness—in
this case, integrated information theory versus the other dominant one, global
neuronal workspace theory
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8770991/>. Let’s get people
in a room to discuss—yes, they might disagree on many things—but can we
agree on an experiment that can simultaneously test predictions from the
two theories, and where we agree ahead of time, in writing: If the outcome
is A it supports theory A; if it’s B, it supports theory B? It involved 14
different labs.
The experiments were trying to predict where the “neural footprints of
consciousness,” crudely speaking, are. Are they in the back of the brain,
as integrated information theory asserts, or in the front of the brain, as
global neuronal workspace asserts? And the outcome was very clear—two of
the three experiments were clearly against the prefrontal cortex and in
favor of the neural footprint of conscious being in the back.
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It’s not my brain that sees; it’s consciousness that sees.
This provoked an intense backlash in the form of this letter, where it was
claimed the theory is untestable, which I think is just baloney. And then,
of course, there was blowback against the blowback, because people said,
wait, IIT may be wrong <https://nautil.us/the-worth-of-wild-ideas-399097>—the
theory is certainly very different from the dominant ideology—but it’s
certainly a scientific theory; it makes some very precise predictions.
But it has a different metaphysics. And people don’t like this.
Most people today believe that if you can simulate something, that’s all
you need to do. If a computer can simulate the human brain, then of course
[the simulation is] going to be conscious. And LLMs—sooner or later [in the
functionalist view] they’re going to be conscious—it’s just a question of,
is it conscious today, or do you need some more clever algorithm?
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IIT says, no, it’s not about simulating; it’s not about doing—it’s
ultimately about *being*, and for that, really, you have to look at the
hardware in order to say whether it’s conscious or not.
*Does IIT involve a commitment to panpsychism?*
It’s not panpsychism. Panpsychism says, “this table is conscious” or “this
fork is conscious.” Panpsychism says, fundamentally, everything is imbued
with both physical properties as well as mental properties. So an atom has
both mental and physical properties.
IIT says, no, that’s certainly not true. Only things that have causal power
upon themselves [are conscious]—this table doesn’t have any causal power
upon itself; it just doesn’t do anything, it just sits there.
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But it shares some intuitions [with panpsychism]—in particular, that
consciousness is on a gradient, and that maybe even a comparatively simple
system, like a bacterium—already a bacterium contains a billion proteins,
[there’s] immense causal interaction—it may well be that this little
bacterium feels a little bit like *something*. Nothing like us, or even the
consciousness of a dog. And when it dies, let’s say, when you’re given
antibiotics and its membrane dissolves, then it doesn’t feel like anything
anymore.
A scientific theory has to rest on its on its predictive power. And if the
predictive power says, yes, consciousness is much wider than we think—it’s
not only us and maybe the great apes; maybe it’s throughout the animal
kingdom, maybe throughout the tree of life—well, then, so be it.
*Toward the end of the book, you write, “I decide, not my neurons.” I can’t
help thinking that that’s two ways of saying the same thing—on the macro
level it’s “me,” but on the micro level, it’s my neurons. Or am I missing
something?*
Yeah, it’s a subtle difference. What truly exists for itself is your
consciousness. When you’re unconscious, as in a deep sleep on anesthesia
<https://nautil.us/under-anesthesia-where-do-our-minds-go-238501/>, you
don’t exist for yourself anymore, and you’re unable to make any decisions.
And so what truly exists is consciousness, and that’s where the true action
happens.
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I actually see you on the screen, there are lights in the image; inside my
brain, I can assure you, there are no lights, it’s totally dark. My brain
is just in a goo. So it’s not my brain that sees; it’s consciousness that
sees. It’s not my brain that makes a decision, it’s my consciousness that
makes a decision. They’re not the same.
You can simulate a rainstorm, but it never gets wet inside the computer.
*For as long as we’ve had computers, people have argued about whether the
brain is an information processor of some kind. You’ve argued that it
isn’t. From that perspective, I’m guessing you don’t think large language
models have causal powers.*
Correct. In fact, I can pretty confidently make the following statement:
There’s no Turing test for consciousness, according to IIT, because it’s
not about a function; it’s all about this causal structure. So you actually
have to look at the CPU or the chip—whatever does the computation. You have
to look at that level: What’s the causal power?
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Now you can of course simulate perfectly well a human brain doing
everything a human brain can do—there’s no problem conceptually, at least.
And of course, a computer simulation will one day say, “I’m conscious,”
like many large language models do, unless they have guardrails where they
explicitly tell you “Oh no, I’m just an LLM—I’m not conscious,” because
they don’t want to scare the public.
But that’s all simulation; that’s not actually being conscious. Just like
you can simulate a rainstorm, but it never gets wet inside the computer,
funnily enough, even though it simulated a rainstorm. You can solve
Einstein’s equation of general relativity for a black hole, but you never
have to be afraid that you’re going to be sucked into your computer
simulation. Why not? If it really computes gravity, then shouldn’t
spacetime bend around my computer and suck me, and the computer, in? No,
because it’s a simulation. That’s the difference between the real and the
simulated. The simulated doesn’t have the same causal powers as the real.
So unless you build a machine in the image of a human brain—let’s say using
neuromorphic engineering, possibly using quantum computers—with that, you
can get human-level consciousness. If you just build them like we build
them right now, where one transistor talks to two or three other
transistors—that’s radically different from the connectivity of the human
brain—you’ll never get consciousness. So I can confidently say that
although LLMs very soon will be able to do everything we can do, and
probably faster and better than we can do, they will never be conscious.
*So in this view, it’s not “like anything” to be a large language model,
whereas it might be like something to be a mouse or a lizard, for example?*
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Correct. It is like something to be a mouse. It’s not like anything to be
an LLM—although the LLM is vastly more intelligent, in any technical sense,
than the mouse.
*Yet somewhat ironically, the LLM can say “Hello there, I’m conscious,”
which the mouse cannot do.*
That’s why it’s so seductive, because it can speak to us, and express
itself very eloquently. But it’s a gigantic vampire—it sucks up all of
human creativity, throws it into its network, and then spits it out again.
There’s no one home there. It doesn’t feel like anything to be an LLM.
*Lead image: chaiyapruek youprasert / Shutterstock*
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Dan Falk (@danfalk) is a science journalist and broadcaster based in
Toronto. His books include *The Science of Shakespeare* and *In Search
of Time*.
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