Emergentist Integrated Information Theory

The integrated information theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with integrated information, and is often interpreted as endorsing panpsychism—the view that consciousness is a fundamental, widespread feature of reality. This paper argues instead that IIT is better understood as a form of emergentism, which is incompatible with panpsychism. The author shows that the properties of integrated information that seem to support panpsychism—intrinsicality and fundamentality—actually align with emergentism. The paper then analyzes how integrated information can be seen as causally emerging from a physical substrate, depending on the fusion of cause-effect powers of that substrate while being autonomous through global-to-local determination. Consciousness, on this view, is the constraining power of a system as a whole upon itself, emerging from the fusion of its components' powers.

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Abstract

AbstractThe integrated information theory (IIT) is an ambitious theory of consciousness that aims to provide both a neuroscientific and a metaphysical account of consciousness by identifying consciousness with integrated information. In the philosophical literature, IIT is often associated with a panpsychist worldview. In this paper, I show that IIT can be considered, instead, as a form of emergentism that is incompatible with panpsychism. First, I show that the panpsychist interpretation of IIT is based on two properties of integrated information: intrinsicality and fundamentality. I show that the way IIT deals with these two properties, however, aligns better with emergentism than panpsychism. Then, after plugging some anti-panpsychist assumptions into IIT’s structure, I analyse different philosophical options for interpreting the formal result of causal emergence of integrated information in terms of dependence on and autonomy from its physical substrate. The upshot is that integrated information can be seen as dependent upon the fusion of the cause-effect powers of a physical substrate, and as autonomous in virtue of global-to-local determination. According to this interpretation, consciousness is the constraining power of the system as a whole upon itself, when this power emerges from the fusion on the cause-effect powers of the system’s components.