IIT Panpsychism Confirmed? -> The Tricky Business of Measuring Consciousness

The Tricky Business of Measuring Consciousness

As an idea, IIT is audacious. It ignores the meaning of information to quantify the way systems use information. The theory proposes five axioms and postulates that are properties of consciousness, which physical systems must possess to support sentience. Briefly, the more distinct the information in a system and the more fused those bits, the higher the information integration in a system and the more phi or consciousness. Considering information integration as the key to consciousness makes intuitive sense. Remember a first kiss: the touch of her lips, the smell of her skin, the light in a room, the feel of your heart racing. You were supremely conscious at the moment, because there was a very high level of information integration.

The great strength of IIT is that it’s mostly consistent with common sense, in contrast to competing theories, which often propose deeply weird solutions (such as denying that we are conscious at all). IIT explains why an assault to the cerebellum, which encodes motor events, causes ataxia, slurred speech, or a stumbling walk but results in no diminishment of consciousness. That’s because the cerebellum, unlike the neocortex, doesn’t integrate internal states, even though it is home to 69 of the 86 billion nerve cells in the human body. IIT tells us that human beings in deep sleep or under general anesthesia aren’t conscious, because information integration has broken down. And IIT is consistent with how life feels: Consciousness is graded over a lifetime, blooming in an adult but withering with age, drugs, or alcohol, when our capacity to integrate information falters.

But the theory has its surprises too. Because IIT proposes that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that any system that integrates information is to some degree sentient, it follows that things that we do not think of as conscious at all, such as a light diode or the clock in a computer, will possess non-zero phi values, like temperatures just above absolute zero. This seems wrong, but Tononi promises that an upcoming paper will show that computers that are feed-forward systems, even artificial intelligences that employ deep learning, would not be conscious. “The phi of a digital computer would be zero, even if it were talking like me,” Tononi says. To make a conscious AI, Christof Koch speculates, would require a different computer architecture with feedback mechanisms that promote information integration, such as a neuromorphic computer. Other things that have zero phi, according to Tononi, include collectives of sentient individuals, such as corporations or the United States.

Critics of IIT share similar objections. “It’s promising, but Tononi doesn’t know if his axioms and postulates are complete,” according to David Chalmers. Others object to the theory’s creeping pan-psychism, the ancient belief that everything material, however, small, has some consciousness, including the universe itself, the anima mundi. Scott Aaronson complains, “Tononi and his followers identify consciousness with information integration, or what a mathematician would call “graph expansion.” That doesn't work for the fundamental reason that you can have information integration without any hint of anything that anyone who wasn't already sold on IIT would want to call intelligence, let alone consciousness.”

Giulio Tononi is undeterred. He believes that IIT’s evasion of the hard problem, by beginning with the brute fact of consciousness, is the only way to explain sentience. “Most things are not conscious,” he says. “Some things are trivially conscious. Animals are conscious, somewhat. But the things that are certainly conscious are ourselves— not our component parts, not our bodies or neurons, but us as systems.” What’s next for IIT, according to Koch, is more work like Massimini’s, with more kinds of humans in many different conditions, as well as animals and machines: “Experiment, experiment, experiment.”

The Tricky Business of Measuring Consciousness

from the article

  IIT explains why an assault to the cerebellum, which encodes motor events, causes ataxia, slurred speech, or a stumbling walk but results in no diminishment of consciousness. That’s because the cerebellum, unlike the neocortex, doesn’t integrate internal states, even though it is home to 69 of the 86 billion nerve cells in the human body.

The functional relationship of emotions and the cerebellum is newly emphasized!  I strongly suggest that Tononi and others may have to back-up from the above claim.  Of all the things that structure personality and behavior; it is the integration of emotional information that drives focus!!!  

If you want to get a correspondence between brain IIT and behavioral outcomes - knowing how the brain and the mind are working functionally on a side-by-side basis seems critical.  ITT may need a new view on the cerebellum activity and functionality.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...016-0815-8

from the article

The functional relationship of emotions and the cerebellum is newly emphasized!  I strongly suggest that Tononi and others may have to back-up from the above claim.  Of all the things that structure personality and behavior; it is the integration of emotional information that drives focus!!!  

If you want to get a correspondence between brain IIT and behavioral outcomes - knowing how the brain and the mind are working functionally on a side-by-side basis seems critical.  ITT may need a new view on the cerebellum activity and functionality.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...016-0815-8

What do you think the I in IIT is referring to. Vacuously the answer is "Information" but it's never been clear to me what people are trying to say or if they are saying the same thing.

For example see Kauffman's past critique about information being involved in biological evolution. Very curious as to your thoughts. I think Information is a useful concept, potentially, but there needs to be better standardization in what the term is referring to...or so it seems to me right now...

What do you think the I in IIT is referring to. Vacuously the answer is "Information" but it's never been clear to me what people are trying to say or if they are saying the same thing.

For example see Kauffman's past critique about information being involved in biological evolution. Very curious as to your thoughts. I think Information is a useful concept, potentially, but there needs to be better standardization in what the term is referring to...or so it seems to me right now...

Great question.  Tononi's integrated information is based on formal MTC (mathematical theory of communication).  The core concept of Claude Shannon's measurement tools for measuring information is in terms of mutual information!  After transmission there exist matching structure at both source and receiver and how much was successfully transferred is measured.  As a science standard there is none better.

Tononi starts with the mutual information equations of Shannon and then derives his ''effective information'' equations.  Science wise - its impeccable.

The MTC is measuring structure and the integrity of logical arrangement of the sequence of symbols.  
It can error-correct the symbols in the signals.  However, it says nothing about meaning the symbols may represent.

Biological evolution is a narrative about functionality.  Questions about how symbols are grounded in meaning is where the messy real-world concepts are in this subject matter.  When I am talking about informational objects (ala Floridi) this is where I see the connection of meaning with binary digits.  I would also draw inference to Whitehead's actual occasions as the information object of thing, event or process.  Informational objects can have their structure measured according to formal information theory --- but they draw out their meaning by their ability to change real world probability for living things to do or have experiences. 

 The problem of semantic content is the problem of explicating those features of brain processes by virtue of which they may properly be thought to possess meaning or reference. This paper criticizes the account of semantic content associated with Fodor's version of cognitive science, And offers an alternative account based on mathematical communication theory. Its key concept is that of a neuronal representation maintaining a high-Level of mutual information with a designated external state of affairs under changing conditions of perceptual presentation.  (Kenneth Sayre - who coined the term Informational Realism) 

https://philpapers.org/rec/SAYCSA

In this community looking at "pscience", where the evidence for psi is parsed and evaluated, it seems strange that the leading theory of mind doesn't draw more interest.  I think that your question about the nature of information is the one way of getting to the root-cause issues on the subject.  If one wanted to get to the bottom of how gravity works, the units of measure for space/time and force need to be understood.

Without an understanding of informational environments (affordance and logical relations) and mutual information creating informational objects; the analysis will not be successful.  I am not formally educated in these fields, yet think that there are general level concepts that lead me, as a member of the general public, to grasp what is happening.  The reason being, that informational events have analogous features to physical events that are well understood.  The creation of mutual information can be contrasted and compared to the transfer of force and physical environments to informational environments.

Here is an well-reasoned counter argument to Tononi's approach from S. Aaronson.     https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

 I’ll return later to the precise definition of Φ—but basically, it’s obtained by minimizing, over all subdivisions of your physical system into two parts A and B, some measure of the mutual information between A’s outputs and B’s inputs and vice versa.  Now, one immediate consequence of any definition like this is that all sorts of simple physical systems (a thermostat, a photodiode, etc.) will turn out to have small but nonzero Φ values.

To his credit, Tononi cheerfully accepts the panpsychist implication: yes, he says, it really does mean that thermostats and photodiodes have small but nonzero levels of consciousness.

Again, to "grok" what Tononi and Aaronson are talking about - the meaning of mutual information is needed.

Note: while I strongly support the mathematical analysis of Tononi and his team, thermostats while creating structured information, do not understand anything.  Consciousness, for me, is not the reductive root-cause factor or a primitive in nature.   Understanding, as a biological function exhibited by living things, is.