[HN Gopher] Integrated Information Theory
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Integrated Information Theory
Author : andsoitis
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-06-27 14:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scholarpedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scholarpedia.org)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| For similarly silly ideas: see these articles
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I don't think IIT is a correct theory or even on the right
| track. Nevertheless I fail to see how it's "silly". It's no
| sillier than any other putative scientific theory of
| consciousness -- less silly, since IIT actually makes a
| testable prediction.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| I cant even find anything resembling an explanation if what
| "speculative realism" posits in that wiki article.
|
| What is it and why is it silly?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| "Thus, all object relations, human and nonhuman, are said to
| exist on an equal ontological footing with one another"
|
| They are ideas from people who don't like Anthropocenterism,
| which Integrated Information Theory is also opposed to.
|
| It's worth noting that all of the people who believe in any
| of this are philosophical wingcucks like Nick Land.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| LOL Chill with the Land hate.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| He's openly fascist and a charlatan. I shouldn't be
| surprised that people here like him.
|
| Also no surprise that people influenced by him, i.e. Mark
| Fischer, killed themselves.
| goatlover wrote:
| I don't see what makes them silly. Metaphysics is hard, and
| speculative realism is a proposed answer to modern
| transcendental idealism stemming from Kant, where the worry is
| that we can't say objective things about the world independent
| of human thought. Things like dinosaurs existing before humans
| evolved is seen as correlated to our experiences with fossils
| in the ground, and not an objective truth about the universe.
| Speculative realism is a way around that while respecting the
| philosophical arguments of the Kantians.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Our mental experiences seem to be subjective, so what
| prospect is there of making _any_ objective statement about
| the world if correlations are inadequate for the purpose?
| goatlover wrote:
| I think the argument is that it can't just be correlations
| because then we get stuck in the framework of the world
| looks as if things were going on before humans existed
| without being able to say that's true. Realists want to be
| able to say there are fossils in the ground because
| dinosaurs really did exist before us and not just that it
| appears that way to humans. Thus the speculative part of
| how to define reality in a way that isn't just correlated
| to our experiences.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Response from Scott Aaronson:
|
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
| wzdd wrote:
| This issue with Aaronson's response is that it comes from the
| perspective of first accepting Chalmers' "Hard Problem of
| consciousness". The "Hard Problem of consciousness", despite
| the name, is actually a statement of position. Briefly, it
| states that:
|
| a) We have experiences, like being hungry, tasting a
| strawberry, seeing blue, etc.
|
| b) It's possible to imagine a being which located food when
| hungry, ate when necessary, used colours to navigate the world,
| etc, but did not have these conscious experiences. To put it
| another way, what we've learnt so far about how the brain works
| gives us great insight into how we would eat, navigate, etc,
| but does not give us any insight into either how or why we
| would have conscious experiences.
|
| c) Therefore conscious experiences are not explicable by
| physical brain processes.
|
| This is a belief arising from an appeal to intuition and does
| not present a testable or falsifiable proposition.
|
| Integrated Information Theory (which I am not a vigorous
| proponent of) posits that the experience of consciousness is
| related to the level of "integration" of a system. However, if
| you come to this while believing in the "Hard Problem", that
| cannot possibly be true, because IIT relates consciousness to
| physical properties of the system such as connectivity, but the
| "Hard Problem" defines consciousness as something which does
| not arise from any physical property of the system.
| jhedwards wrote:
| I think the answer to a) and b) is actually quite obvious: we
| are not an automaton that simply eats when the need arises.
| The experience of hunger decouples our behavior from the need
| to eat, and we can plan according to the strength of our
| hunger relative to other needs.
|
| We are not an automaton that simply eats a strawberry because
| it is edible. We are decision making organisms that can
| adjust the composition of our diet based on the chemical
| properties of the food. We can presume that there is an
| evolutionary advantage to being able to taste and therefore
| select from multiple dietary options.
|
| It is clear that the conscious experiences as described are
| extremely subtle forms of information that allow us to plan
| and make decisions based on the information they provide us,
| and not simply blindly react to the world, and I think it is
| pretty obvious that that is a massive advantage and also more
| in line with my experience as a conscious being.
| Blahah wrote:
| Plants, bacteria, and fungi can do equivalent planning and
| decision making about nutrient intake. What we experience
| as consciousness is indistinguishable from evolved
| fecundity preservation in a complex and dynamic
| environment, based on the conditions you highlight.
| goatlover wrote:
| I don't think you need b) to make the argument work. You just
| need to point out that a) isn't present in physical theories,
| except as labels or correlations. The zombie argument is b),
| which is just one of several thought experiments to
| illustrate the argument being made, but it's not necessary to
| make the argument work. Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn and Block
| have all made arguments that don't rely on b).
|
| Nagel states it most clearly in that science is the view from
| nowhere. The world doesn't feel like, taste like, look like
| anything on it's own, because those are creature-based
| sensations which depend on the kind of sensory organs and
| nervous systems an animal has.
| wzdd wrote:
| The position still seems to boil down to "Reducing
| experience to labels or correlations doesn't feel right to
| me", which actually dovetails nicely with your Nagel quote,
| since you can't rely on your intuition when attempting to
| understand a system from the inside.
| goatlover wrote:
| The fact that it feels like something at all is enough of
| a rebuttal to reducing experience to labels or
| correlations. That's not an intuition, it's just a
| statement of empirical fact, since empiricism relies on
| phenomenal observations.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Aaronson's point later in the post that it is possible to
| construct a function which has an arbitrarily high phi but is
| nonetheless obviously not conscious-- which wrecks IIT
| completely, at least in its current formulation-- does not
| depend on anything to do with the hard problem of
| consciousness.
| photonthug wrote:
| > is nonetheless obviously not conscious
|
| This argument has played out before so I'll just link to
| that discussion. quoting from
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf
|
| > There's two responses to this. The easiest response is to
| say that ph is merely necessary for C --problem solved.
| GT's response would be to challenge your intuition for
| things being unconscious. Here's a historical analogy;
| imagine when the Kelvin temperature scale was introduced.
| Here Kelvin was saying that just about everything has heat
| in it. In fact, even the coldest thing you've touched
| actually has substantial heat in it! Think of IIT as
| attempting to put a Kelvin-scale on our notions of C . I
| find this "Kelvin scale for C " analogy makes the
| panpsychism much more palatable.
|
| Then, Scott's response to that:
|
| > Suppose, again, that I told you that physicists since
| Kelvin had gotten the definition of temperature all wrong,
| and that I had a new, better definition. And, when I built
| a Scott-thermometer that measures true temperatures, it
| delivered the shocking result that boiling water is
| actually colder than ice. You'd probably tell me where to
| shove my Scott-thermometer. But wait: how do you know that
| I'm not the Copernicus of heat, and that future generations
| won't celebrate my breakthrough while scoffing at your
| small-mindedness?
|
| Ok, pretty dismissive, but this doesn't actually address
| what the first quote mentions. Maybe phi's necessary but
| not sufficient for consciousness; that would still be
| pretty interesting. (I.e. maybe the pesky function _does_
| have high phi, but phi is not itself consciousness, because
| Consciousness(system) = phi(system) + Corrective_factor).
|
| Or suppose we add an axiom like "feedback loops that affect
| future trajectory" to exclude such a pesky static function
| definition, or better still suppose IIT moves towards
| something that generally accounts for more subtle dynamics
| as well as structure. I can't help but think of the
| relationship between euclidean/noneuclidean geometry here,
| especially when "obviousness" comes up in these
| discussions. It seems productive to play with
| adding/discarding axioms and looking for
| richness/consistency. And isn't lots of modern physics
| about exploring model parameter-space (
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/using-the-bootstrap-
| physicist... ) to zero in on "the" model given "a" model?
| Like 1D-Ising won't phase-transition, maybe current 1D-IIT
| won't cut it but has some fruitful generalization.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Maybe phi's necessary but not sufficient for
| consciousness; that would still be pretty interesting.
|
| Would it be interesting? Why?
|
| Coming up with conditions that are neccesary but not
| sufficient is pretty easy. Sure they are interesting if
| the conditions are non-intuitive and you've actually
| proven they are neccesary. I'm not sure either criteria
| is met here.
| photonthug wrote:
| I mean.. doesn't your logic here advocate throwing away
| every "lower-bound" type of result in math, suggest that
| it's boring/trivial to answer the smallest LLM that
| speaks english ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759 ), etc?
| photonthug wrote:
| other related stuff: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1823
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5pYPdmKMzDLZHe4zx/link-scott...
| and probably lots from hacker-news too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158502
|
| that said i'm still keen to see more/better discussion of IIT,
| and/or more modern extensions. IIT is certainly quantitative,
| and arguably elegant, despite problems. so it puzzles me how
| eager some people are to just junk it rather than repairing it.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I rarely see IIT characterized as complete junk. Personally,
| I don't see much value in it as I don't think it answers, or
| even grapples with, the hard problem of consciousness. Tell
| me _how_ integrated information gives rise to subjective
| experience and maybe I 'll start buying what they're selling.
| photonthug wrote:
| I think what they are selling is not answers, but more like
| a non-metaphysical platform to propose answers within, i.e.
| a decent start at a scientific framework. Frameworks
| shouldn't be confused with answers, although they might
| represent some way of getting closer to answers. Besides
| IIT, is there an alternative scientific/quantified
| framework that could even _try_ to grapple with your
| question?
|
| For purposes of comparison, here's another approach that's
| super interesting (
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4168033/ ). So
| both frameworks are looking at system structure/dynamics
| and then attempting to deduce/quantify some aspect of them
| that (hopefully) gives us some insight into "Mind" or
| "Consciousness". But to me, grounding such inquiries
| directly in neuroscience seems awkward, because brain only
| _runs_ Mind. Uncovering a bunch of implementation details
| about that from FMRIs probably won 't give us a lot of
| interesting insight at the right level. To an extent some
| implementation details are important and might shed light
| on the architecture/algorithm of Consciousness/Mind, but
| evolved systems are also going to be cluttered up with
| total hacks that evolution brute-forced where
| implementation is kinda arbitrary.
|
| All of which is to say, IIT being "platform agnostic" and
| proposing stuff like a thermostat is more conscious than a
| rock, a dog moreso than a thermostat, and a human more than
| a dog is not just a cool trick. Being able to approach this
| kind of intuitive problem in a somewhat rigorous way seems
| like a _necessary requirement_ for a serious scientific
| theory of mind. I like the Ising and graph theory modeling
| approach, but the implementation details of {neuron-
| counting, FMRI, lesions on functional areas, etc} is
| probably a distraction if you 're trying to understand mind
| rather than medicine.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| You could ask the same kind of question about General
| Relativity. Sure mass/energy causes the curvature of
| spacetime but tell me how it does or your theory is
| worthless. Even without the "how" GR still makes testable
| predictions that are born out by experiment. And this is
| the shape of all our physical theories. I think this is the
| kind of theory IIT is trying to be.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Well, there's a reason it's called " _the_ hard problem
| of consciousness " and not "just some incidental
| observation about models of consciousness". When
| evaluating general relativity it's not important to ask
| how mass/energy causes the curvature of spacetime; that's
| not the point of general relativity. But a theory of
| consciousness that doesn't explain the most intriguing,
| important component of consciousness doesn't explain
| what's important to me.
| cpsempek wrote:
| How does deja vu, that is the re-experiencing an experience, fit
| into this theory? It appears that the Information axioms fails to
| be Essential when one considers deja vu.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I don't see that deja vu poses a problem. Deja vu is simply a
| feeling of familiarity associated to an experience. It doesn't
| involve actually _having_ an experience more than once.
| transfer92 wrote:
| I'm either not smart enough to understand it, or I'm too smart to
| be bamboozled by it.
|
| (Physics A.B. from Harvard & PhD. from UC Berkeley, FWIW)
| akhayam wrote:
| From someone who has dabbled in information theory (the real
| one), I am just as confused as you. What I have observed in the
| past decade is that calling things "information theory of
| something" makes it somehow more palatable for a broader
| audience.
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