Emergentist Integrated Information Theory

Abstract

The integrated information theory (IIT) is an ambitious theory of consciousness that aims to provide both a neuroscientific and a metaphysical account of consciousness by identifying consciousness with integrated information. In the philosophical literature, IIT is often associated with a panpsychist worldview. In this paper, I show that IIT can be considered, instead, as a form of emergentism that is incompatible with panpsychism. First, I show that the panpsychist interpretation of IIT is based on two properties of integrated information: intrinsicality and fundamentality. I show that the way IIT deals with these two properties, however, aligns better with emergentism than panpsychism. Then, after plugging some anti-panpsychist assumptions into IIT’s structure, I analyse different philosophical options for interpreting the formal result of causal emergence of integrated information in terms of dependence on and autonomy from its physical substrate. The upshot is that integrated information can be seen as dependent upon the fusion of the cause-effect powers of a physical substrate, and as autonomous in virtue of global-to-local determination. According to this interpretation, consciousness is the constraining power of the system as a whole upon itself, when this power emerges from the fusion on the cause-effect powers of the system’s components.

The Fundamental Tension in Integrated Information Theory 4.0’s Realist Idealism

“…In addition to other experiences beyond one's own, this expanded realism would assert the mind-independent existence of non-sentient organisms, pieces of wire, neurons and fMRI scanners, among other non-conscious physical entities, as long as they are causally powerful. Arguably, this may result in a better version of IIT, one which would be more aligned to an ontological form of emergentism [6,47]. This emergentist IIT could provide, given the theory's robust causal formalism [21,[48][49][50][51], a crucial aid to advance our scientific understanding of the causal difference that consciousness seems to make in a diversity of phenomena such as motivation [52][53][54][55][56], psychedelic medicine [57][58][59][60], information integration and behavioural flexibility [61], free will [62-65], and other psychological and behavioural functions [66][67][68][69], thus holding the potential to significantly advance our scientific knowledge of consciousness and its place in nature.…”

When philosophical nuance matters: safeguarding consciousness research from restrictive assumptions

“…Two prominent theories of this sort are the integrated information theory ( IIT ) ( Oizumi et al, 2014 ; Tononi and Koch, 2015 ; Albantakis et al, 2023 ) and the recurrent processing theory ( RPT ) ( Lamme, 2006 ), which both assume that consciousness depends on the presence of recurrent brain connectivity. Categorizing IIT and RPT in relation to traditional philosophical positions is not straightforward ( Tononi and Koch, 2015 ; Tononi, 2017 ; Grasso, 2019 ; Cea, 2020 ; Negro, 2022 ; Tononi et al, 2022 ). According to both theories, consciousness depends on the causal structure of the brain, but both theories hold that consciousness may be multiply realizable, and allow that it can be realized in non-biological systems, as long as those systems have the abstract (i.e., independent of the specific and fine-grain biological details) network-structure that the theories associate with consciousness.…”