IIT and TGD

Gary Ehlenberg sent a link to an article about Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) (see this). The article gives a nice summary of IIT. Gary wondered whether quantum theory is completely left out. The suspicion of Gary was correct: there is no mention of quantum theory.

It is good to attach here the abstract of the article "Consciousness: here, there and everywhere?" of Tononi and Koch published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in to give a general perspective.

The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioural and neuronal correlates of experience. However, while such correlates are important for progress to occur, they are not enough if we are to understand even basic facts, for example, why the cerebral cortex gives rise to consciousness but the cerebellum does not, though it has even more neurons and appears to be just as complicated. Moreover, correlates are of little help in many instances where we would like to know if consciousness is present: patients with a few remaining islands of functioning cortex, preterm infants, non-mammalian species and machines that are rapidly outperforming people at driving, recognizing faces and objects, and answering difficult questions.

To address these issues, we need not only more data but also a theory of consciousness one that says what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it. Integrated information theory (IIT) does so by starting from experience itself via five phenomenological axioms: intrinsic existence, composition, information, integration and exclusion. From these it derives five postulates about the properties required of physical mechanisms to support consciousness.

The theory provides a principled account of both the quantity and the quality of an individual experience (a quale), and a calculus to evaluate whether or not a particular physical system is conscious and of what. Moreover, IIT can explain a range of clinical and laboratory findings, makes a number of testable predictions and extrapolates to a number of problematic conditions.

The theory holds that consciousness is a fundamental property possessed by physical systems having specific causal properties. It predicts that consciousness is graded, is common among biological organisms and can occur in some very simple systems. Conversely, it predicts that feed-forward networks, even complex ones, are not conscious, nor are aggregates such as groups of individuals or heaps of sand. Also, in sharp contrast to widespread functionalist beliefs, IIT implies that digital computers, even if their behaviour were to be functionally equivalent to ours, and even if they were to run faithful simulations of the human brain, would experience next to nothing.

The article lists the 5 basic postulates of IIT leading to a numerical measure for the level of consciousness of a system. I wrote about IIT years ago and compared it with the TGD inspired theory of consciousness (see this and this). It is interesting to take a fresh look at IIT since the mathematical and physical understanding of TGD has evolved dramatically during these 8 years.

1. The basic criticism is already raised by the idea that conscious experience means property of a system, consciousness. This reflects the materialistic view that conscious experience is a property of the system just as the mass and leads to the well-known philosophical problems. Materialism leads to problems with free will for instance.
2. The key problem is what subjective existence means and here materialism, idealism and dualism fail. Here quantum theory comes to the rescue and allows us to assign subjective existence as experience to state function reduction (SFR), or rather the interval between two SFRs. The SFRs would be those which in standard wave mechanics correspond to repeated measurements of the same observables and in that context would have no effect on the system. In the zero energy ontology of TGD the state of system changes and "small" SSFRs give rise to the experienced flow of subjective time correlating with that of geometric time .
3. Also the assumption that the consciousness just exists or does not, is too simplistic. Already Freud realized Id-ego-super-ego triality and physics based picture strongly suggests that conscious entities form hierarchies just as physical systems do. There would exist very naturally a hierarchy of selves. They would have subselves, perhaps as mental images, etc.. and being subselves of higher levels selves. This would however be a dramatic deviation from the western world view. Although IIT assumes panpsychism, the lack of this realization reflects the brain centered view of neuroscience very analogous to the Earth centered world view before the emergence of astrophysics.
4. I saw no mention related to the problem of time: what is the relation between geometric time of physicists and the flow of subjective time which is the essential element of conscious experience.
5. About what death and sleep mean, IIT does not say anything at the philosophical level. Loss of consciousness can be explained as a reduction of the level of integration (more or less connectedness of the system) measured by the number Φ.
6. Metabolic energy feed is essential for life and consciousness and I saw no mention of this.

There are 5 postulates which are proposed to give rise to a criteria for when the system is conscious.

1. Intrinsic existence

Cause-effect power is taken as a key criterion. Cause effect power is understood classically since quantum theory is not involved. Cause effect power has several corresponds in TGD.

1. In TGD the classical correlate of cause-effect power at the space-time level is holography stating that 3-D data (3-surface dictates the space-time surface as analog of Bohr orbit. There is however a slight failure of determinism and this forces us to take these 4-D Bohr orbits as basic objects. They are classical correlates for almost deterministic behavioral patterns and SSFRs between different superpositions of Bohr orbits give rise to subjective time evolution.
2. In TGD "small" SFRs (SSFRs) are t quantum correlates of cause-effect power. "Big" SFRs (BSFRs) give rise to the death (sleep state) of the system and reincarnation with an opposite arrow of geometric time. Second BSFR means wake-up.

   BSFRs are essential for understanding biological processes like homeostasis. A pair of BSFRs means sleep period during which the entropy of the system is reduced and the system wakes up as a less entropic system. This is essential in the battle of the living systems against second law.

3. Causal diamond (CD= cd×CP₂) is the correlate of the cause-effect power at the level of the H=M⁴×CP₂. cd has geometry of causal diamond and the two light-like boundaries are in asymmetric relation. At the passive boundary the states do nt changes in SSFRs. It can be said to be the causal agent. At the active boundary they change. Also the size of CD increases in statistical sense and geometric time corresponds to the increasing temporal distance between the tips of CD. In BSFR the roles of active and passive boundaries of CD change.

   I must admit that I did not understand the illustrations of cause-effect structure involving Boolean algebra. Boolean functions are one way to see causality. In physics, classical deterministic time evolution defines a more general cause-effect structure.

2. Composition

Systems are structured. In standard physics, where space-time is infinite and without topological structure, there is no fundamental definition for what this means and only phenomenological models are possible. In TGD, many-sheeted 3-space decomposes to a union of 3-surfaces which can fuse and decay and these processes occur also in scales essential for life and consciousness and also we perceive the many-sheeted space-time and these processes directly but our education make it impossible to realize this.

3. Information

Cause-effect repertoire is taken as a basic concept behind the notion of information.

1. In TGD, a cause-effect repertoire corresponds to different 4-D Bohr orbits associated with the same 3-surfaces holographic data. These are the space-time correlates for the behaviours.
2. As the algebraic complexity of the space-time surface increases, the size of the repertoire increases. The dimension of extension of rationals assignable to the space-time regions measures this complexity and is assumed to define effective Planck constant which in turn gives a measure for the scale of quantum coherence serving as a measure for the evolutionary level of the system. This means deviation from the standard quantum theory with single Planck constant. Field bodies as carriers of dark phases of ordinary particles means a second deviation made possible by the new view of classical fields.
3. Number theoretic view of TGD is something completely new and allows to define the notion of conscious information. p-Adization and adelization in turn gives correlates of cognition and one can assign to the system an entanglement negentropy as the sum of its p-adic variants. Entanglement negentropy is positive and increases with the complexity of the system. It is larger than real entanglement entropy and its increase implies the increase of the latter: cognition produces unavoidably ordinary entropy.
4. The number theoretic entanglement negentropy could be seen as a counterpart of an integrated information and measures the cognitive level of the system and the level of cognitive consciousness.

   Number theoretic evolution as an unavoidable increase of complexity in the sequence of state function reductions forces the increase of this entanglement entropy so that the potentially conscious information of the system necessarily increases.

5. The ZEO based view of quantum jump (see this, this and this) allows to understand how systems are able to have memories about their states before SSFRs: in standard quantum theory this is not possible. Therefore Universe making SSFRs and BSFRs learns more and more about itself and is able to remember what it has learned (see this).

   In IIT, the qualia space is identified as cause-effect space. In the TGD framework SSFR leads to a final state containing information about the previous quantum state since it is identified as a superposition of classical space-time surfaces leading from the fixed initial state at the passive boundary of the CD to the active boundary of CD. The original proposal that qualia are simply labelled by the quantum numbers measured in SSFR is not quite correct. The qualia also involve classical information about the SSFR via the superposition of space-time surfaces between initial (fixed) and final classical states: this would be the counterpart for the cause-effect.

4. Integration

The counterpart of integration in the TGD framework is entanglement.

1. Entanglement entropy to which one can assign adelic negentropy measures the degree of entanglement and integration. In SFR the entanglement is reduced: the system decomposes to two parts. This is the basic aspect of conscious experience. About this says IIT nothing.
2. Monopole flux tubes connecting parts of the system to a single coherent whole provide a classical correlate for the entanglement and in SFRs the flux tube connections between the two parts of the system could split. More precisely, pairs of flux tubes connecting the subsystems reconnect to U-shaped flux tubes associated with the systems: the connection is split, SFR has occurred.
3. In biology reconnection is fundamental, for instance for bio-catalysis and for the recognition of molecules by the immune system. Death of the system means splitting of these flux tubes. These flux tubes carry dark matter as large h_eff phases. There must be a metabolic energy feed to prevent the values of h_eff from decreasing. This leads to reduction of the cognitive level and geometrically to the shortening of the U-shaped flux tubes so that the system loses the control of its environment and receives information from a smaller volume.

5. Exclusion

Exclusion postulate states that cause effect structure must be definite. The notion is described in terms of a phenomenological set theoretic picture. I did not understand the Boolean illustrations of the cause effect structure. The notion of maximal irreducibility can be understood in TGD as maximal connectedness or at least connectedness of the 3-surface by connecting flux tubes (or in the weakest sense, the 4-surfaces as analog of Bohr orbit).

What precisely defined cause-effect structure could mean in ZEO? The state at the passive boundary of CD remains fixed during the sequences of SSFRs determining the life-cycle (wake-up period of self) so that one can can say that classically the almost deterministic evolution of the space-time surface is implied by the 3-surface at the passive boundary, it acts as a causal agent. The small failure of determinism means that there are also intermediate "agents" slightly affecting the time evolution. They also make possible memory and force ZEO solving the basic problem of the quantum measurement theory and allowing also free will.

What is missing from IIT?

The postulates of IIT are inspired by computationalism and materialistic neuroscience and have no connection to (quantum) physics or biology. The hierarchy of selves is a central notion missing completely in IIT and this hierarchy is essential for a real understanding of conscious entities. The levels of the hierarchy interact. For instance, the field body (magnetic body) carrying dark matter as large h_eff phases of dark matter serves as a boss of the biological body carrying ordinary matter. Cognitive hierarchies as hierarchies of extensions of rationals giving rise to directed entanglement hierarchies are also something not possible in the standard physics.

These hierarchies are also essential for understanding evolution. In particular, classical gravitational and electromagnetic fields give rise to field bodies with very long quantum coherence lengths, even of astrophysical size and these scales are predicted to be fundamental for understanding life and consciousness in ordinary living matter.

The somewhat surprising prediction of IIT is that ordinary computers need not be conscious. In TGD this is possible only if the quantum coherence time is longer than the clock period but the contents of consciousness need not correlate with the program. The change of the arrow of time in BSFRs makes possible the analogs of feedback loops at various layers of the self hierarchy and learning by trial and error and would be the basic aspect of living systems.

Whether ordinary computers could be conscious is an interesting question and in TGD one ends up with a quantitative criterion for this in terms of the clock frequency (see this). For the Earth's gravitational body, the lower bound for the clock frequency is 67 Hz. For the solar gravitational body, the clock frequency should be above 50 Hz which is the average EEG frequency and satisfied for the ordinary computers. Does this mean that the users of computers can entangle with them? It has been claimed that when a chicken entangles with a robot whose motion is based on a random number generator, the robot seems to take the role of Mother.

See TGD as it is towards end of 2024: part I and TGD as it is towards end of 2024: part II. See also the article About Langlands correspondence in the TGD framework describing the connection between number theoretic and geometric visions of physics.

See also the chapter Questions about IIT.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.