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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.