S01E03 Christof Koch: The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
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- čas přidán 21. 06. 2021
- Christof Koch is a neuroscientist and proponent of the integrated information theory of consciousness, or 'IIT". In this episode we explore with Christof the science and philosophy of IIT. Unfortunately Philip forgot to press 'record' at the start (!) but all that's missing is introductions. The video starts just as Christof starts to explain the essence of IIT.
I love Phil and Keith’s recap at the end (1:20) about Koch’s “impatience with Philosophy”. Phil wishing he’d pressed the Hard Problem more. Both of them fretting over whether or not the maths cache out. Keith sympathetic to Koch’s impatience and how phenomenal realism aught indeed be amenable to a neurological approach. The recap is my favorite peek behind the professional curtain.
Interview Andy Clark and Donald Hoffman!
This is fantastic. Thank you.
Awesome, so excited to see this!
What does the theory do about local maxima of phi? Any complex system will have a large number of local maxima, or even degenerate maxima. Is one going to jump between large numbers of conscious states, as 'noise' varies the local maxima?
Koch was brilliant: sharp, knowledgeable, clear - except for the part where he tried to tackle the 'hard problem of consciousness'. It seems as if he did not really fully grasp the nature of that problem. Nonetheless, a splendid conversation all round.
Conscious particles would be integrating information on a different timescale and spatial scale than the brain; exclusion counts only on the granularity scale in space and time that that system is integrating in.
Different people has their own definitions of Consciousness.
20:14
nature of information
Why would the difference between the unconscious liver and the conscious brain arise from differences that can be specified in terms of general organizational properties ?
Because the liver, strictly speaking does not exist as a single causal entity (due to lack of integration of its parts). Livers are collections of much smaller integrated entities (like its molecules perhaps) but exist as single things only in the minds of integrated brains which extract out causal patterns in the world, in this case the pattern that we discriminate and represent as a liver. (Just as a cloud is a collection of water molecules which we perceive IN OUR CONSCIOUSNESS as a cloud. Clouds only exist in the mind, and not for themselves, yet cloud perceiving minds do exist for themselves, irreducibly, full stop.) Livers need not exist intrinsically because in absolute terms they are causally reducible in a way that integrated systems aren’t. IIT is really an ontological metaphysical theory which describes how nature is really constructed at its joints. It also answers deep mereological questions about when an entity truly is a single entity as opposed to collection of parts (for the reasons mentioned above.)
To talk of consciences as an essence is to give up on defining consciences. consider the color red it is a wavelength externally but has no definition internally as a mind state only on it ability to affect . The effect of red in the mind is part cultural and part biological similarly for consciences
Red is cultural?!?!
Phillip should have pressed the point harder: if the connection between integrated information and consciousness is not identity, but merely some contingent natural law, then IIT seems dualistic: there is integrated information, and by some law of the universe, something else, consciousness, is connected with it. I think Koch is thinking that integrated information and consciousness are identical as a contingent law of nature, but identity can't be contingent in that way, as philosophers have emphasized.
The theory is clear: integrated information is consciousness as an identity. That is IF consciousness IS integrated information then the IIT can explain how consciousness is embedded in the natural world. It doesn’t claim to prove this fact but assumes it. Indeed, that can’t be proven. But if it provides a parsimonious explanation of the phenomenon in question then that is good reason to believe it true. It’s always logically possible, (and perhaps true) that consciousness is entirely supernatural but then there’s not much one can say about it scientifically. The IIT doesn’t “solve” the hard problem but answers it by biting a big ontological bullet at the start: consciousness exists, is necessarily informative and, if we assume IS integrated information then we can explain the relation of mind to mechanism coherently.
Koch says that since the liver is not conscious but the brain is there has to be something special about the physics of the brain which is what results in consciousness. In one sense this is true, but trivially so. The liver is definitely different from the brain (different structure etc.). But to imagine that the functional difference is something that can be meaningfully understood in terms of the type of dynamics that's involved is just as unwarranted as assuming that the difference between my computer playing music or copying files reflects the involvement of different dynamics. At the level of atoms the sequence of events in the computer is of course different during the 2 tasks, but what makes the difference is the order in which the SAME kind of dynamic steps are put in action, not the dynamics itself. The dynamics is the wrong level of analysis.
Also if you transplant someone’s liver into someone else, you can effect the conscious experience of the new host. They can develop preferences or personality traits that the donor had. No joke
@@mrbwatson8081 Definitely not !
Same goes for heart transplants the reasons postulated would also apply to liver hence all the anecdotal evidence:)….. Personality changes following heart transplantation, which have been reported for decades, include accounts of recipients acquiring the personality characteristics of their donor. Four categories of personality changes are discussed in this article: (1) changes in preferences, (2) alterations in emotions/temperament, (3) modifications of identity, and (4) memories from the donor’s life. The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to occur via the transfer of cellular memory, and four types of cellular memory are presented: (1) epigenetic memory, (2) DNA memory, (3) RNA memory, and (4) protein memory. Other possibilities, such as the transfer of memory via intracardiac neurological memory and energetic memory, are discussed as well. Implications for the future of heart transplantation are explored including the importance of reexamining our current definition of death, studying how the transfer of memories might affect the integration of a donated heart, determining whether memories can be transferred via the transplantation of other organs, and investigating which types of information can be transferred via heart transplantation. Further research is recommended.
Check out Michael levin you can thank me later :)
@@mrbwatson8081 There are no serious studies that demonstrate this. I don't know what the "transfer" of cellular memory refers to. Cells, DNA, proteins, do of course maintain information but that information either has anything to do with personality (e.d. protein structure) or there is no mechanism though which the information could be decoded within the recipients system. The DNA in the donor organ is indeed specific to the donor and carries the genetic aspects of the donor's personality but accessing or reading out that information is only possible by the developmental mechanisms that create the person !. I would not be surprised if recipients developed complex psychological reactions to the realization that they received part of the physical organism that is another person. But the same would happen under sham conditions ( re-implant a persons on organ) while making him believe that the organ was from another person.
"Unfolding causal power" is mumbo jumbo. What ITT fails to address is WHAT consciousness is.
Wrong. According to IIT, explicitly, a conscious state is an n-dimensional polytope made of information constructed by the integrated causal mechanisms which “ground” the generation of this shape. These shapes can be mapped isomorphically onto phenomenology. This intrinsic “unfolding causal power” of an integrated system is the generation of this shape and, according to the bedrock ontological identity thesis of theory, integrated information is consciousness (indeed all information is conscious but when not integrated generates only a maximally simple conscious shape/state). Agree or disagree, IIT DOES explain what consciousness IS.
The axioms are mostly nonsense, to a plain reading.
Intrinsic existence is meaningless because literally everything exists in that sense. Or to be less subtle, there's no Information in that axiom.
Composition - once again, literally every thing shares this attribute. Every thing is a set of boundary conditions, and made up of smaller parts, by which it is differentiated, according to purpose, from every other thing.
Information - identical to the former.
Integration - merely means or experience is OF something in a sense that is larger than a non-reducible thing. Which isn't even always true. If you have tried sensory deprivation, and managed to not-think for a moment in the process, you've experienced non-integrated experience.
Exclusion - literally all things follow this principle. If a thing is this, it isn't that instead.
Even if they didn't come to a conclusion of free will, which is absurd, as some do, this is still not a workable definition of anything at all.
If i read those wrong, show me your version and i'll show you why it's still invalid.
You have a shitty attitude, get over yourself
Everything about your comment is wrong. The whole mathematical framework of IIT is a demonstration of how some systems can be shown to be existent, integrated, and causally irreducible, (indeed these things imply each other) while others can’t. (Indeed, they, according to the IIT, aren’t even real existent systems.) what is real is what is causally irreducible, and what is causally irreducible is conscious.
Poorly marketed a very good interview that resulted into least participation. Further spoiled by carelessness in recording.