Consciousness: individuated information in action.
Front Psychol July 29, 2015 Jakub Jonkisz 14 citations
Consciousness is a graded, not all-or-none, phenomenon that can be characterized as dually accessible (from inside and outside), hierarchically referential, bodily determined, and useful in action. A gradational approach risks extending consciousness too broadly—for instance, information integration theory attributes miniscule consciousness even to simple artificial systems like photodiodes. The article argues for empirically justified constraints: globally, conscious systems are limited by the ability to individuate information (evolutionarily embedded, socially altered, and private); locally, limitations follow an action-oriented hypothesis about how states of consciousness are selected. This yields an abstract concept of consciousness that aims to unify the field.