23 minute read
Aidan Peters, St. Francis Xavier University
An Overview of The Information Integration Theory of Consciousness and Reflections on its Potential Ethical Consequences
Aidan Peters St. Francis Xavier University
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AB S T R A C T
Consciousness is subjective experience, it is the feelings which accompany different states in a physical system, for example patterns of cortical activation. The perennial question in the study of consciousness has been: how are consciousness and the physical world causally related? If the ultimate cause of consciousness is the physical world, then volition is illusory and ethics require radical restructuring. Without paying total credence to a materialistic-deterministic philosophy, the current paper sought to explore the plausibility of this reality in order to forward an alternative ethical system grounded in empathy.
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1 Attempting to Define Consciousness
Consciousness refers to the entirety of experience (Tononi, 2004). Experience as a whole can be described as a structured integration of subjective (i.e., internally observable) information (Tononi, 2015). This is also true of the specific aspects of experience – they can be described in terms of subjective information with varying degrees and kinds of complexity. For example, colours and shapes (both described in terms of subjective information) integrate in vision to produce an irreducible visual percept (e.g., a traffic sign; also described in terms of subjective information), having higher structure than its components of colour and shape. A percept is seen in spatial relation to other percepts, and this will change across time, meaning that experience also has a temporospatial structure (which can also described in terms of subjective information).
The temporospatial structure of experience is irreducible and is therefore integrated (Tononi, 2015). This means that changing, adding, or removing component parts holistically changes the temporospatial structure (i.e., changes in simpler bits of subjective information changes its overarching subjective information describing the holistic temporospatial structure, meaning that all of the components of experience have an effect on the overall experience. For example, consciousness involves an integration of various kinds of perception; so, if one compared the experience of a seeing person at an art gallery to their experience if they were blind, it becomes quickly apparent that change in one dimension holistically makes the experience different. In the former condition, one sees beautiful artwork, perceives sounds, smells, temperature, etc.; in the latter condition, everything can be considered the same except the absent dimension of sight, and the overall experience is drastically different. So, although the dimension of sight may seem completely unrelated to smell, taking away sight changes the overall experience which smell is a part of. Therefore, these two dimensions are integrated as changes to either can change the overall experience that they are both components of. Less drastically, smaller order subjective information, is irreducible in the sense that changing a particular aspect changes other aspects; for example, changing the size of an object then changes how much of its colour we see. Different kinds of information, depend on each other to exist/ be experienced (e.g., shape and colour). This irreducibility of information is described as integration (Tononi, 2015).
These prior examples help elucidate hierarchical structure of subjective information from elementary components to the grand concept of consciousness (Tononi,
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2015). This integration of information further applies such that a conscious entity can have some sense of being a particular entity across time with its particular experiences applying exclusively to it. In other words, experience/consciousness exists from a single viewpoint. The single viewpoint of experience suggests an exclusivity of subjective information, such that, subjective information is not shared between distinct conscious identities For example, the experience of a mother and a daughter are exclusive, such that each exclusively experiences their own subjective set of information and the other exclusively experiences their subjective set of information. Furthermore, this exclusive experience is such that one’s current experience excludes their past, future, and other potential experienin spacetime differs from seeing the book in a different scene, from a different viewpoint, of a different size or colour, at a different point in time, etc. The information of what is vs. what is not experienced in spatiotemporal relationship to other information describes all of consciousness from the first-person perspective. (Tononi, 2015). In other words, one’s current experience differs from all the other experiences they have ever, will ever, or could ever experience. Even a memory of an experience is not the remembered experience itself; more generally, a replicated experience exists at a different point in space-time, and it can exist from a different conscious identity with a different conscious history.
Subjective information can be conceptualized as particular states of experience out of potential states (Tononi, 2015). For example, the experience of seeing a book at a particular point in spacetime differs from seeing the book in a different scene, from a different viewpoint, of a different size or colour, at a different point in time, etc. The information of what is vs. what is not experienced in spatiotemporal relationship to other information describes all of consciousness from the first-person perspective.
Considering that consciousness is experience itself, and therefore it is the concept with which we are most acquainted with, it is perplexing that it may be the most difficult phenomenon to explain in neuroscience (Chalmers, 1985). Scientific and philosophical attempts to bridge the gap between subjective (internally observable) consciousness and objective (externally observable) cognitive functioning/neurophysiology; in other words, attempts to explain how subjective information of experience causally relates to objective information about the properties of a physical system have always resulted in failure. The Information Integration Theory of Consciousness (IIT) (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2015), is a prominent contemporary cognitive theory of consciousness and furthers the ability to understand the relation-
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ship between subjective information and objective information in physical systems. However, IIT ultimately fails to fully bridge this explanatory gap and explain how consciousness is generated and objective information becomes subjective.
2 An Overview of Information Integration Theory
Physical causes (e.g., drugs, brain damage, illness, etc.) can affect consciousness, hence IIT argues that consciousness must have a physical basis (Tononi, 2004). Cognitive theories of consciousness typically originate from objective, externally observable information describing neurological properties (Tononi, 2015). IIT is unique from other cognitive theories of consciousness because it began by investigating the internally observable subjective information describing the properties of experience/consciousness and then argued that parallel properties must exist in a physical system to account for those internally observable properties. IIT refers to the essential properties of subjective information as axioms and refers corresponding physical properties for a physical system to produce consciousness as the postulates (Tononi, 2004; Tononii, 2015). IIT uses the postulates to argue how to quantitatively and qualitatively describe consciousness relative to the objective information describing a physical system. Specifically, IIT suggests that consciousness, quantitatively, is an amount of integrated subjective information corresponding to an amount of integrated objective information produced by a physical system of elements (e.g., in terms of the patterns of neuronal firing in an integrated system of neurons). The more integrated objective information produced by a physical system, the more conscious it is (i.e., the more integrated subjective information it produces). IIT offers a precise theoretical, albeit lengthy, approach to calculate the quantity of consciousness produced by a physical system. IIT also suggests that qualitative aspects of consciousness are produced by the many subsystems within its substrate. It forwards some abstract relationships to exist between this kind of information which produce the entirety of qualitative experience. However, the qualitative claims of IIT are more speculative and less precise than its quantitative claims in IIT, and even Tonooni (2015) admits that his qualitative theory is underdeveloped “assessing [these relationships] systematically is [nearly impossible], mathematically, computationally, and experimentally: [because of insufficient practical and theoretical methods of doing so].” Because IIT is underdeveloped theoretically in explaining the qualitative aspects of consciousness, only the foundations of IIT and quantitative aspects of IIT will be discussed further.
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The essential properties of experience, the axioms, were derived from the reasoning that they should: directly describe experience; be immediately evident to conscious entities (i.e., be internally observable), and therefore not require logical proofs; apply to all experiences; completely describe all experiences such that no experiences involve additional essential properties; be independent such that properties cannot be derived from each other; not possibly contradict one another (Tononi, 2015). Thus, the first axiom is intrinsic existence – that consciousness exists, intrinsically, and undeniably. The most certain fact to any conscious entity is that it is experiencing and therefore consciousness exists. The second axiom is composition – that consciousness has structure which is composed of subjective distinctions (e.g., spatiotemporal arrangements within a percept). The third axiom is that consciousness involves subjective information – although capable of describing aspects of the experience, information can holistically describe the particular subjective experience as one of many possible experiences differing by particular elements. For example, one experience can differ from another because of the artificial lighting of a room has a white vs. a yellow hue; the experience can also be described by the kinds and degrees of emotions one is feeling in that room, where their emotional configuration differentiates their current experience from other possible ones experiences. The fourth axiom is integration – that each experience is irreducible (Tononi, 2015). The subjective information in consciousness is interdependent, such that changing certain information changes others. For example, viewing a red ball is irreducible to perceiving the colour red and a sphere. Changes to the colour of a ball or changes to its shape affect the perception of the concept (i.e., the ball). Furthermore, consciousness is integrated such that all its information is experienced from a single viewpoint. The fifth axiom is exclusion – consciousness is experienced from a particular viewpoint which thereby excludes other past, potential, and future viewpoints, each of which are described by their own set of information which is particular to them.
4 The Postulates: From Phenomenology to Physics
IIT argues that anyone can introspect to find that the essential properties of experience apply whereas one can always find room to doubt the physical bases of
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experience (e.g., in perceptual illusions); therefore, theories of consciousness must start with the former subjective information to argue what the physical causes of consciousness are (Tononi, 2015). From the axioms (i.e., the essential properties of subjective experience), IIT postulates the particular physical properties which must exist in a physical system for it to produce experience.
To begin, it is important to understand the basic anatomy of a physical system. Physical systems are composed of a set of elements, which are the most basic units of the system (e.g., logic gates, neurons) (Tononi, 2015). Elements combine into subsets of elements (e.g., neural networks). For a component of a system to be considered an element, it requires at least two potential states (i.e., internal states), for example firing/no firing in a neuron. The states of an element must also depend on inputs from other elements in the system, and its states must be able to influence the states of other elements in the system. This is what it means for an element to be integrated into the system. At a holistic level, the patterns of states in a system and how those states affect one another, in relation to time, is the integrated objective information of the system.
The first postulate is that a system must exist to produce an intrinsic experience (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2015). This means that the system needs to have an internal cause-effect power. In other words, the states of elements within the system can influence the states of other elements within the system.
The second postulate is that the system must have subsets of elements with internal cause-effect power, supporting the axiom of composition (Tononi, 2004, Tononi, 2015). This means that the states of any subset of the system’s elements (causes) can influence the states of the components of the subsystem (effects). In a neuronal system, this could mean that the patterns of activation in a group of neurons (e.g., a neural network) can directly affect other neurons within the neural network. Similarly, a brain could have larger subsystems which involve neural networks interacting with one another, such the pattern of activation from one neural network has the potential to alter the patterns of activation of other neural networks. This postulate essentially suggests that conscious physical systems require subsystems with their own internal cause-effect power. Subsystems allow for groups of information to have effects on other groups of information of various levels of structure. To have subsystems means that the system has a hierarchical organization of integrated objective information which parallels the hierarchical structure of its integrated subjective information (i.e., consciousness).
The third postulate is based on the axiom of subjective information (Tononi,
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2004, Tononi, 2015). Conscious experience is composed of subjective information: a particular subjective state, differing holistically from many other potential states because each of which differ by the particular states of the components of experiences (qualia; for example, the kinds and degrees of emotions felt, the shades of colours seen). Ergo, the physical system supporting the conscious experience must involve objective information. The physical system is described by the expression of its particular states (relative to its potential states) across time. These system states are composed of many particular states among its subsystems and elements. The particular physical state of the system differs holistically from its other potential system states according to the particular states of the components of the system which differ from other potential states. The differentiated nature of the expression of the system from its potential expression is described in terms of objective information.
The fourth postulate is that the system’s cause-effect structure must be unified to support the axiom of integration (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2015). In other words, the system is irreducible to any subgroup of its elements or subsystems because the states of any part of the system may affect and be affected by the states of other parts of the system. This can be referred to as internal cause-effect power. To elucidate the importance of this postulate Tononi (2004) considered the difference between a human observer and the photodiodes in a camera. Photodiodes either do or do not detect a given light source and react accordingly with one of two potential states, and then affect an output corresponding to a pixel. However, a camera involving an arbitrarily large number of photodiodes is not a system as it can be reduced to each photodiode and its pixel because the states of each photodiode are unaffected by the states of the other photo diodes and the states of each photodiode do nothing to affect the states of other photodiodes. All of the photodiodes are independent, in other words, the collection of photodiodes have no internal case-effect power. This means that all of the camera’s photodiodes have no integration of information; they still have information by expressing one of two states, but because the information for each photodiode fails to be affected by and affect the information pertaining to other photodiodes, none of the information is integrated. Conversely, a human perceiving a light source involves patterns neurons firing/not firing affecting other neurons’ firing/not firing, which affects other neurons’ firing/not firing, and so on. Importantly, there are many bidirectional cause-effect relationships. This is what it means to have a high degree of internal cause-effect power, or an integration of information, and this high degree of information integration corresponds to a
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high degree of consciousness. The integration of objective information in a system is essential to supporting consciousness because consciousness is an irreducible experience of integrated information (as discussed earlier).
It should be noted that the degree of a system’s integrated objective information is measured by Φmax, determined from lengthy calculations which essentially quantify the system’s internal cause-effect power (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2015). Φmax is thought to correspond with the quantity of subjective information in the system (i.e., how conscious the system is). It should also be noted that, if any element or group of elements has no bidirectional cause-effect power relative to other components of a given system, then it is not a component of the system. This accounts for how sensory inputs can feed into neural networks without being conscious, how motor outputs can themselves be unconscious, how unconscious brain regions can interact with conscious brain regions, how two brain regions can be affected by another or affect another but belong to different conscious systems, and how brain regions with many neurons can be unconscious whereas brain regions wither fewer neurons can be conscious. If a group of neurons can either affect or be affected by, but not both affect and be affected by another group of neurons, then these are two or more reducible systems; in other word, they are not belonging to the same system. Therefore, inputs which only affect the system, and outputs which are only affected by the system, do not belong to that conscious system. IIT suggests that brain region which are less conscious/unconscious have less/no integrated information or cause-effect power.
The fifth postulate is intended to support the axiom of exclusion; at any given time or time frame, a system has a particular set of states, with a particular internal cause-effect power, ultimately specified by its set of elements, with there being no more or no less (Tononi, 2004; 2015). This allows each composition of integrated objective information in a system to correspond with the particular amount of integrated subjective information in the system’s particular experience, not its past, future, other potential experiences.
5 Failing to Provide a Causal Connection
Arguably the crucial shortcoming of IIT is that it fails to offer a causal mechanism to bridge the explanatory gap. How does objective information produce subjective information? This may seem like an unimportant question, or one which seems to make little sense. One may be tempted to ask: is there a meaningful difference
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between these two kinds of information or are they trivial semantics which obscure intellectuals fuss over? Consider the thought experiment of Mary the Neuroscientist (Jackson, 1986). If a neuroscientist, Mary, was passionate about studying colour vision and read everything that was written about the topic, objective (externally observable) information about how photon wavelengths relate to visual processing systems to produce different coloured percepts, she would still lack a kind of understanding under certain conditions. If she learned everything she knew about colour vision from radio lectures, black and white TV or books, and if she was raised exclusively in a black and white room, with no red stimuli, then she would never understand what red means in terms of subjective information. She could only understand what red means in terms of subjective information if she experienced red subjectively. If Mary was totally colourblind, then she could never understand from objective information alone what colour is subjectively. This difference in subjective and objective information, as depicted by Jackson’s 1986 thought experiment suggests a nontrivial difference between subjective and objective information which must be accounted for in a complete theory of consciousness.
As alluded to earlier, Chalmers (1995) has identified an explanatory gap in cognitive approaches to the study of consciousness. He suggests that such paradigms can theoretically study/explain “easy problems”, how certain cognitive functions are mediated or even produced by neurophysiology/information-processing. This is not to say that studying these problems are actually simple or even practically possible within hundreds of years of study; however, they are possible to understand through study guided by current theory. However, he claims cognitive paradigms have never come close to theoretically explaining how consciousness is causally produced from neuronal activity/information-processing, how it is objective information becomes/produces subjective information. This is what he calls the hard problem of consciousness.
IIT suggests that the consciousness difference between something like an Alexa and a human is due to the integration of information (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2015). However, in doing this IIT is not providing a complete causal explanation. Rather, IIT is observing that subjective experience is some amount of integrated subjective information which covaries with some amount of integrated objective information pertaining to an objective system. IIT is not explaining how the objective information produces/becomes subjective information, rather it simply assumes a causal direction and then it attempts to quantify the relationship between physical and subjective information. To solve the hard problem is to solve one of the most difficult
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but important problems for any neuroscientific/materialist theory of consciousness (Robinson, 1998). In doing so, a revolutionary change in belief could potentially occur such that ethical/legal thought and related punishment becomes radically empathetic entirely concerned with making behaviour prosocial, rather than partially concerned with retribution.
6 Toward an Ethical Revolution
Kurt Lewin, influenced by his background in physics, argued that one’s behavioural responses are exclusively determined by their dispositions interacting with the field of physical/social forces (i.e., the actions of others) affecting them; more generally, Lewin argued that the activity of any physical system is determined by a combination of its own properties and the forces affecting it (Lewin, 1936 as seen in Gilovich et al. 2016). One may immediately refute this equation on the reasoning that Lewin failed to include the influence of one’s volition resulting from their soul/mind (or some other nonphysical force controlling their behaviour which does not follow the laws of nature). Although the informational gap (Chalmers, 1995) provides some strong basis for believing an immaterial mind, soul, or other nonphysical force which important for determining our thoughts/behaviour, the problem of volition still remains. To clarify, consider the follow Sam Harris quote:
I have to admit that if I were to trade places with [a gruesome criminal], atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that [would think or act differently]. Even if you believe that every human [has a soul], the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for [not inheriting] the soul of a psychopath. . . if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did (Harris, 2012).
The IIT (Tononi, 2015; Tononi, 2004) and Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) invokes one to consider the metaphysical nature of mind, and subsequently the nature of free will. Under the assumption that reality is entirely physical, Lewin (1936; as seen in Gilovich et al., 2016) suggests that all behaviour is predetermined by physical processes. A purely physical composition of reality and therefore the human mind would necessitate that the entirety of the human experience (e.g., behaviour, thoughts, feelings, etc.) is subject to the laws of nature and is therefore predetermined entirely by antecedent conditions (Philosophy Vibe, 2014). As disheartening as that possibility is, Harris (2012) alternatively argues that free will is ultimately an illusion regardless of whether reality is ultimately monistic or dualistic. The plausibility of free will being illusory is then something
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which must be deeply considered.
Given that ethics presuppose free will, as one can only be considered immoral if they had the choice to act morally and vice versa, the absence thereof would have significant implications for how we ethically assess/respond to behaviour (Harris, 2012). If there is no free will, punishment should then strictly serve to better society by correcting behavior through conditioning and be unconcerned with retributing degrees of evil with equal punishment. Therefore,’ criminal behaviour should be met with punishment (or conditioning more broadly) to encourage behaviour that is compatible with prosocial societal values. In this sense, the plausibility of determinism should steer ethics and punishment to become primarily rehabilitative systems. Similarly, the current social perspective of criminals being monsters – undeserving equally humane treatment as the innocent, should shift towards a view of them mostly being damaged individuals requiring care and repair and/or victims of social injustice(s).
The view that criminals are not monsters by nature or choice, the view that social forces like poverty, systemic racism, etc. are of prime importance in determining one’s transgression, is useful in explaining the overrepresentation racial groups or lower socioeconomic individuals (Barrow, 2020). A rehabilitative view on punishment might lead to government funding being diverted from prisons and police forces, such that the former no longer serve as a form of punishment but rather as a means of protecting society from active threats. In lowering the prison population, prison systems can become more manageable and therefore less violent, cleaner, etc. With a changed view on the nature of criminality permeating the management of these systems, prisons can become generally more humane. Similarly, if excessive funding was diverted from police forces towards preventative systems for housing the homeless, treating addictions and mental illness, restorative interventions for community violence, etc. the prevalence of crime could be reduced (Barton, 2021).
Beyond criminality, a radical empathy could penetrate our daily lives to allow for us to forgive those who have wronged, and subsequently heal ourselves without being bound by resentment or hate. Moreover, a radical empathy, considering the plausibility of determinism and greater certainty that social forces have a large influence on our behaviour could allow us to recover from failure. Such that, one can continue to strive for goals, revaluate their approach of them and continue to aim for said goals or even reasonably change such goals in the face of failure: rather than suffering excessive damage to their self-esteem. Conversely, if one takes seriously the notion that all outcomes may be predetermined, this could prevent them from
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having their ego overinflated upon the achievement of goals.
Although there do exist benefits of seriously considering the possibility of determinism, there also exists an important risk to one’s self-efficacy. Perhaps a preferable threat to one’s well-being than the harshness of conventional ethics and punishment, this threat is still nothing to be taken lightly. The only solution may be to pursue one’s idealized life, embrace the possible illusion of free will. The solution may be living a kind of duality, simultaneously acting freely while considering that one may not at all be free, allowing one to maintain the benefits of both deterministic radical empathy and possibly illusory perceptions of autonomy.
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