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Is consciousness everywhere? Koch discusses Integrated Information Theory in new book

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This article is adapted from Christof Koch’s book “The Feeling of Life Itself.” Koch is chief scientist of the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-co...verywhere/

EXCERPTS: . . . Consciousness is experience. That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness; I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, although in everyday use feeling is usually reserved for strong emotions, such as feeling angry or in love. As I use it, any feeling is an experience. Collectively taken, then, consciousness is lived reality. It is the feeling of life itself.

But who else, besides myself, has experiences? Because you are so similar to me, I abduce that you do. The same logic applies to other people. Apart from the occasional solitary solipsist this is uncontroversial. But how widespread is consciousness in the cosmos at large? How far consciousness extends its dominion within the tree of life becomes more difficult to abduce as species become more alien to us.

One line of argument takes the principles of integrated information theory (IIT) to their logical conclusion. Some level of experience can be found in all organisms, it says, including perhaps in Paramecium and other single-cell life forms. Indeed, according to IIT, which aims to precisely define both the quality and the quantity of any one conscious experience, experience may not even be restricted to biological entities but might extend to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless — a pleasing and parsimonious conclusion about the makeup of the universe.

[...] While mammalian consciousness depends on a functioning six-layered neocortex, this does not imply that animals without a neocortex do not feel. Again, the similarities between the structure, dynamics, and genetic specification of nervous systems of all tetrapods — mammals, amphibians, birds (in particular ravens, crows, magpies, parrots), and reptiles — allows me to abduce that they too experience the world. A similar inference can be made for other creatures with a backbone, such as fish.

But why be a vertebrate chauvinist? The tree of life is populated by a throng of invertebrates that move about, sense their environment, learn from prior experience, display all the trappings of emotions, communicate with others — insects, crabs, worms, octopuses, and on and on. We might balk at the idea that tiny buzzing flies or diaphanous pulsating jellyfish, so foreign in form, have experiences.

[...] Of course, the richness and diversity of animal consciousness will diminish as their nervous system becomes simpler and more primitive, eventually turning into a loosely organized neural net. As the pace of the underlying assemblies becomes more sluggish, the dynamics of the organisms’ experiences will slow down as well.

Does experience even require a nervous system? We don’t know. It has been asserted that trees, members of the kingdom of plants, can communicate with each other in unexpected ways, and that they adapt and learn. Of course, all of that can happen without experience. So I would say the evidence is intriguing but very preliminary.

[...] IT offers a different chain of reasoning. The theory precisely answers the question of who can have an experience: anything with a non-zero maximum of integrated information; anything that has intrinsic causal powers is considered a Whole. What this Whole feels, its experience, is given by its maximally irreducible cause-effect structure. How much it exists is given by its integrated information.

In other words, the theory doesn’t stipulate that there is some magical threshold for experience to switch on. The degree of consciousness is instead measured with Φ, or phi. If phi is zero, then the system doesn’t exist for itself; anything with Φmax greater than zero exists for itself, has an inner view, and has some degree of irreducibility — the larger this number, the more conscious it is. And that means there are a lot of Wholes out there.

[...] Integrated information is not about input–output processing, function or cognition, but about intrinsic cause-effect power. Having liberated itself from the myth that consciousness is intimately related to intelligence, the theory is free to discard the shackles of nervous systems and to locate intrinsic causal power in mechanisms that do not compute in any conventional sense.

[...] One of the early students of such microorganisms, H. S. Jennings...: "The writer is thoroughly convinced, after long study of the behavior of this organism, that if Amoeba were a large animal, so as to come within the everyday experience of human beings, its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog."

[...] First, these ideas are straightforward extensions of IIT — constructed to explain human-level consciousness — to vastly different aspects of physical reality. This is one of the hallmarks of a powerful scientific theory — predicting phenomena by extrapolating to conditions far from the theory’s original remit. There are many precedents — that the passage of time depends on how fast you travel, that spacetime can break down at singularities known as black holes, that people, butterflies, vegetables, and the bacteria in your gut use the same mechanism to store and copy their genetic information, and so on.

Second, I admire the elegance and beauty of this prediction. (Yes, I’m perfectly cognizant that the last 40 years in theoretical physics have provided ample proof that chasing after elegant theories has yielded no new, empirically testable evidence describing the actual universe we live in.) The mental does not appear abruptly out of the physical. As Leibniz expressed it, natura non facit saltus, or nature does not make sudden leaps (Leibniz was, after all, the co-inventor of infinitesimal calculus). The absence of discontinuities is also a bedrock element of Darwinian thought. Intrinsic causal power does away with the challenge of how mind emerges from matter. IIT stipulates that it is there all along.

Third, IIT’s prediction that the mental is much more widespread than traditionally assumed resonates with an ancient school of thought: panpsychism. [...] Particularly striking are the many scientists and mathematicians with well-articulated panpsychist views. Foremost, of course, is Leibniz. But we can also include the three scientists who pioneered psychology and psychophysics — Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, and William James — and the astronomer and mathematicians Arthur Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell. With the modern devaluation of metaphysics and the rise of analytic philosophy, the last century evicted the mental entirely, not only from most university departments but also from the universe at large. But this denial of consciousness is now being viewed as the “Great Silliness,” and panpsychism is undergoing a revival within the academe.

Debates concerning what exists are organized around two poles: materialism and idealism. Materialism, and its modern version known as physicalism, has profited immensely from Galileo Galilei’s pragmatic stance of removing mind from the objects it studies in order to describe and quantify nature from the perspective of an outside observer. It has done so at the cost of ignoring the central aspect of reality — experience. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, after whom its most famous equation is named, expressed this clearly:

"The strange fact [is] that on the one hand all our knowledge about the world around us, both that gained in everyday life and that revealed by the most carefully planned and painstaking laboratory experiments, rests entirely on immediate sense perception, while on the other hand this knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the outside world, so that in the picture or model we form of the outside world, guided by our scientific discoveries, all sensual qualities are absent."

Idealism, on the other hand, has nothing productive to say about the physical world, as it is held to be a figment of the mind. Cartesian dualism accepts both in a strained marriage in which the two partners live out their lives in parallel, without speaking to each other...

[...] is unitary. There is only one substance, not two. This elegantly eliminates the need to explain how the mental emerges out of the physical and vice versa. Both coexist. But panpsychism’s beauty is barren. Besides claiming that everything has both intrinsic and extrinsic aspects, it has nothing constructive to say about the relationship between the two...

[...] IIT shares many insights with panpsychism, starting with the fundamental premise that consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental aspect of reality. Both approaches argue that consciousness is present across the animal kingdom to varying degrees. ... Most importantly, though, IIT is a scientific theory, unlike panpsychism. IIT predicts the relationship between neural circuits and the quantity and quality of experience, how to build an instrument to detect experience, pure experience (consciousness without any content) and how to enlarge consciousness by brain-bridging, why certain parts of the brain have it and others not (the posterior cortex versus the cerebellum), why brains with human-level consciousness evolved, and why conventional computers have only a tiny bit of it.

When lecturing about these matters, I often get the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-stare. This passes once I explain how neither panpsychism nor IIT claim that elementary particles have thoughts or other cognitive processes. Panpsychism does, however, have an Achilles’ heel — the combination problem, a problem that IIT has squarely solved. [...] Experiences do not aggregate into larger, superordinate experiences. Closely interacting lovers, dancers, athletes, soldiers, and so on do not give rise to a group mind, with experiences above and beyond those of the individuals making up the group. John Searle wrote: "Consciousness cannot spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam; there has to be a point where my consciousness ends and yours begins."

Panpsychism has not provided a satisfactory answer as to why this should be so. But IIT does. IIT postulates that only maxima of integrated information exist. This is a consequence of the exclusion axiom — any conscious experience is definite, with borders. Certain aspects of experience are in, while a vast universe of possible feelings are out.

[...] The exclusion principle also explains why consciousness ceases during slow sleep. [...] on- and off-periods are regionally coordinated. As a consequence, the cortical Whole breaks down, shattering into small cliques of interacting neurons. Each one probably has only a whit of integrated information. Effectively, “my” consciousness vanishes in deep sleep, replaced by myriad of tiny Wholes, none of which is remembered upon awakening.

The exclusion postulate also dictates whether or not an aggregate of conscious entities — ants in a colony, cells making up a tree, bees in a hive, starlings in a murmurating flock, an octopus with its eight semiautonomous arms, or the hundreds of Chinese dancers and musicians during the choreographed opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing — exist as conscious entities. A herd of buffalo during a stampede or a crowd can act as if it had “one mind,” but this remains a mere figure of speech unless there is a phenomenal entity that feels like something above and beyond the experiences of the individuals making up the group...

[...] IIT’s exclusion postulate does not permit the simultaneous existence of both individual and group mind. Thus, the Anima Mundi or world soul is ruled out, as it requires that the mind of all sentient beings be extinguished in favor of the all-encompassing soul. Likewise, it does not feel like anything to be the three hundred million citizens of the United States of America. [...] Thus, per IIT, single cells may have some intrinsic existence, but this does not necessarily hold for the microbiome or trees. Animals and people exist for themselves, but herds and crowds do not. Maybe even atoms exist for themselves, but certainly not spoons, chairs, dunes, or the universe at large.

IIT posits two sides to every Whole: an exterior aspect, known to the world and interacting with other objects, including other Wholes; and an interior aspect, what it feels like, its experience. It is a solitary existence, with no direct windows into the interior of other Wholes. Two or more Wholes can fuse to give rise to a larger Whole but at the cost of losing their previous identity.

Finally, panpsychism has nothing intelligible to say about consciousness in machines. But IIT does. Conventional digital computers, built out of circuit components with sparse connectivity and little overlap among their inputs and their outputs, do not constitute a Whole. Computers have only a tiny amount of highly fragmented intrinsic cause-effect power, no matter what software they are executing and no matter their computational power. Androids, if their physical circuitry is anything like today’s CPUs, cannot dream of electric sheep. It is, of course, possible to build computing machinery that closely mimics neuronal architectures. Such neuromorphic engineering artifacts could have lots of integrated information. But we are far from those.

IIT can be thought of as an extension of physics to the central fact of our lives — consciousness. Textbook physics deals with the interaction of objects with each other, dictated by extrinsic causal powers. My and your experiences are the way brains with irreducible intrinsic causal powers feel like from the inside. IIT offers a principled, coherent, testable, and elegant account of the relationship between these two seemingly disparate domains of existence — the physical and the mental — grounded in extrinsic and intrinsic causal powers. Causal power of two different kinds is the only sort of stuff needed to explain everything in the universe. These powers constitute ultimate reality.

[...] Experience is in unexpected places, including in all animals, large and small, and perhaps even in brute matter itself. But consciousness is not in digital computers running software, even when they speak in tongues. Ever-more powerful machines will trade in fake consciousness, which will, perhaps, fool most. But precisely because of the looming confrontation between natural, evolved and artificial, engineered intelligence, it is absolutely essential to assert the central role of feeling to a lived life... (MORE - details)
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