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- ANU Centre for Consciousness Special Seminar
- Friday July 25, 4pm, Coombs Building Seminar Room A
- Giulio Tononi (Wisconson), Consciousness and cause-effect power
- The ANU Centre for Consciousness is sponsoring a special seminar this
- Friday July 25 at 4pm in Coombs Building Seminar Room A, by Giulio
- Tononi of the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of
- Wisconsin. Tononi is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who has put
- forward the integrated information theory of consciousness, perhaps
- the theory that has attracted the most attention in the science and
- philosophy of consciousness in recent years. IIT is a formal theory
- of consciousness grounded in phenomenology, neuroscience, and
- mathematical analysis. The seminar will focus on the theory and the
- connections it draws between consciousness and causation.
- Abstract: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness
- addresses the hard problem of consciousness by starting from
- experience itself rather than from the physical world. IIT identifies
- five axioms of experience: intrinsic existence, composition,
- information, integration, and exclusion. From these it derives five
- postulates about the properties required of physical mechanisms to
- support consciousness, which translate into requirements concerning
- cause-effect power. Finally, IIT formulates an identity: an experience
- is a conceptual structure, which is a maximum of cause-effect
- power. 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 can explain a range of clinical and laboratory findings,
- makes a number of testable predictions, and extrapolates to a number
- of unusual conditions. The theory vindicates some intuitions often
- associated with panpsychism - that consciousness is an intrinsic,
- fundamental property, is graded, is common among biological organisms,
- and even some very simple systems may have some of it. However, unlike
- panpsychism, IIT implies that not everything is conscious, for example
- aggregates such as heaps of sand, a group of individuals or
- feed-forward networks. Also, 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 nothing.
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