The Emergence of Integrated Information, Complexity, and 'Consciousness' at Criticality.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) March 16, 2020 Nicholas J M Popiel, Sina Khajehabdollahi, Pubuditha M. Abeyasinghe et al.
Integrated information, a measure proposed by Integrated Information Theory as a correlate of conscious experience, behaves as an order parameter that undergoes a phase transition at the critical point in generalized Ising models of small neural networks. In simulations of 159 random, positively weighted five-node excitatory networks, integrated information peaked at the critical temperature, where its generalized susceptibility was maximal. At this point, the system was maximally receptive and responsive to perturbations of its own states. The findings show that integrated information can capture critical behavior in an empirical dataset derived from the generalized Ising model.