Estimations of Integrated Information Based on Algorithmic Complexity and Dynamic Querying

Abstract

Information has emerged as a language in its own right, bridging several disciplines that analyze natural phenomena and man-made systems. Integrated information has been introduced as a metric to quantify the amount of information generated by a system beyond the information generated by its elements. Yet, this intriguing notion comes with the price of being prohibitively expensive to calculate, since the calculations require an exponential number of sub-divisions of a system. Here we introduce a novel framework to connect algorithmic randomness and integrated information, and a numerical method for estimating integrated information using a perturbation test rooted in algorithmic information dynamics. This method quantifies the change in program size of a system, when subjected to a perturbation. The intuition behind is that if an object is random then random perturbations have little to no effect to what happens when a shorter program but when an objects has the ability to move in both directions (towards or away from randomness) it will be shown to be better integrated as a measure of sophistication telling apart randomness and simplicity from structure. We show that an object with a high integrated information value is also more compressible, and is therefore more sensitive to perturbations. We find that such a perturbation test quantifying compression sensitivity, provides a system with a means to extract explanations-causal accounts-of its own behaviour. Our technique can reduce the number of calculations to arrive to some bounds or estimations, as the algorithmic perturbation test guides an efficient search for estimating integrated information. Our work sets the stage for a systematic exploration of connections between algorithmic complexity and integrated information at the level of both theory and practice.