Consciousness: Here, There but Not Everywhere

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) starts from five axioms about conscious experience—existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion—to derive physical postulates that specify which systems can be conscious and what their experience is like. IIT provides a calculus to measure both the quantity and quality of experience, explains clinical and laboratory findings, and makes testable predictions. It holds that consciousness is graded, common among biological organisms, and present even in some simple systems, but not in everything: groups of individuals or feedforward networks lack it. Crucially, IIT implies that digital computers, even those that perfectly simulate human behavior or brain function, would experience next to nothing, contradicting functionalist views.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in cases where we would like to know if consciousness is present: patients with a few remaining islands of functioning cortex, pre-term infants, non-mammalian species, and machines that are rapidly outperforming people at driving, recognizing faces and objects, and answering difficult questions. To address these issues, we need a theory of consciousness that specifies what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) does so by starting from conscious experience via five phenomenological axioms of existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. From these it derives five postulates about the properties required of physical mechanisms to support consciousness. The theory provides a principled account of both the quantity and the quality of an individual experience, and a calculus to evaluate whether or not a particular system of mechanisms is conscious and of what. IIT explains a range of clinical and laboratory findings, makes testable predictions, and extrapolates to unusual conditions. The theory vindicates some panpsychist intuitions -- consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental property, is graded, is common among biological organisms, and even some very simple systems have some. However, unlike panpsychism, IIT implies that not everything is conscious, for example group of individuals or feed forward networks. In sharp contrast with widespread functionalist beliefs, IIT implies that digital computers, even if their behavior were to be functionally equivalent to ours, and even if they were to run faithful simulations of the human brain, would experience next to nothing.