We consider a collection of distributed units that interact with one another through the sending of messages. Each message carries a positive ($+1$) or negative ($-1$) tag and causes the receiving unit to send out messages as a function of the tags it has received and a threshold. This simple model abstracts some of the essential characteristics of several systems used in the field of...
We study the emergence of information integration in cellular automata (CA) with respect to states in the long run. Information integration is in this case quantified by applying the information-theoretic measure known as total correlation to the long-run distribution of CA states. Total correlation is the amount by which the total uncertainty associated with cell states surpasses the...
An information-theoretic framework known as integrated information theory (IIT) has been introduced recently for the study of the emergence of consciousness in the brain [D. Balduzzi and G. Tononi, PLoS Comput. Biol. 4, e1000091 (2008)]. IIT purports that this phenomenon is to be equated with the generation of information by the brain surpassing the information which the brain's constituents...