A critique of the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness. Dr Shamil Chandaria

A critique of the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness. Dr Shamil Chandaria. Recorded 14th April 2020 at the virtual seminar at Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, London University.

[Xcalator]

Wow! This is hands down the best presentation of IIT I've seen so far! The criticisms and the discussão were also great (Barry has such a sharp mind!). Kudos to you!

[mattsigl]

The “identity” is not between consciousness and states in the brain but between consciousness and a cause/effect structure and it’s intrinsic geometry. This is important because cause/effect structures (quales) can, at least sometimes, be realized by a plurality of mechanisms or by (at least sometimes) by different states within one mechanism.

[mattsigl]

“Unconscious mental causation” is just other conscious systems in your brain (perhaps minimal) effecting (perturbing) your conscious system. There is nothing that is unconscious . The ontology of IIT makes this clear, the only thing that exists is conscious states and the logical systems “grounding” them. From your point of view the “unconscious” is everything else in the universe that exists that isn’t your current conscious state.

[mattsigl]

In regards to the gentleman’s question to the host: you can’t assume the existence of “the world” if you’re trying to argue from first principles what consciousness is and how it could be generated operationally. This analysis could hold even if you were a brain in a vat. “The world” is something that we infer exists from within consciousness.

[connorschmidt]

Thanks for the video, very insightful and you do a wonderful job explaining the theory.

Unfortunately though I think your issue with the theory is unsupported. You express no issue with the axioms of the theory, only saying that the axioms do not imply what the math of the theory says they do. But you provide no statement as to why the postulates are unsupported, only that they are. For a thorough refutation there needs to be an explicit logical argument showing an inconsistency in the translation of the axioms into the postulates.

To me it seems there are no alternatives to the postulates of IIT to account for the axioms. Take the information postulate, how could you account for the informative nature of consciousness without having an infornation-based substrate? You say there are other ways of interpreting these axioms into postulates, but dont provide any explicit examples or support for this. The postulates appear to follow clearly from the axioms to me, and without a argument towards the contrary I have no choice but to discard your counter-proposal.

[mattsigl]

In regards to exclusion the phenomenological motivation is clear. In any system of micro-physical causes that ground a conceptual structure of high phi there is going to likely be many ways to cut that system which would generate a wide variety of conceptual structures with high phi. In our brain, probably trillions. But this is not how we think reality is. For instance you can look at my brain and see that it generates my current experience via a supervenient relation but you could also analyze it to see that it should generate an experience like mine but without the concepts of color. Exclusion eliminates the possibility of this “color-less” experience actually being real as only the most maximal causal structure exists. Philosophically, if the microphysical causes contributed to plural experiences you would indeed have an over-determination of causes. So exclusion works both intuitively and conceptually. Otherwise all possible ways of dividing a system that still generates any phi value at all would b actualized and the microphysical causes would be doing too much causal work, not to mention generating very counterintuitive ideas about what consciousnesses actually exist.

[danielsvedberg]

I believe there's a small mistake in the Kullbach-Leibler divergence calculation around 18:30--the expression solving for bits does NOT equal 3 bits as stated. Instead of 8*log2(8), I believe it should be 1*log2(8), since p(x) integrated/summed from 0.875 to 1 = 1 instead of 8, and q(x) integrated over the same interval = 1/8. log2(8) does indeed equal 3 bits.

[mattsigl]

The gap is addressed in IIT by starting with consciousness itself and then coming up with the postulates that could operationally (“physically” but operationally is a better way to describe it, as Tononi admits) explain how such phenomenal properties could be instantiated in a physical/operational system. It’s really articulating how consciousness can be translated/realized into/by a logical structure. The biggest criticism in the video is a claim that the axioms don’t translate into the postulates reliably, but this is just stated, not argued for. It is intimated that IIT’s claim that the theory’s logic starts from axioms and moves to postulates is a fib, and it really started with the postulates and moved to the axioms. This may be “historically” true in IIT’s development but the theory should be judged on the structure of its own claimed form and order of argumentation, not analyzed by how it developed. Nonetheless, this is one of the best explications of IIT out there.

[havenbastion]

Bottom up understandings of consciousness must be discarded if they ever disagree with a valid top down analysis. Consciousness is an experience, which happens to correlate physically, not a physical mechanism that happens to be experienced. Consciousness as a brain state is Only meaningful in relation to lived experience.

[havenbastion]

There needs to be a distinction drawn between consciousness itself and awareness Of.

[havenbastion]

It's important to note that statistics are a measure of Uncertainty and can never be information in the additive sense.

[silvomuller]

Ah I think I finally understand it a bit better

[gsriuhi]

This holds the potential for multiple commercial endeavors. However its reductionism is paradoxical to a meaningful theory of consciousness.

[brentpoynton]

now integrate this into an interpretation of the double slit experiment 😎