You are correct about the quote by Tononi, which is actually from the paper we've been discussing:
This quotation is good because it clarifies how IIT in this conception approaches the fundamental property aspect of conciousness. It is a property of matter such as mass, charge, energy - not some independent "stuff" that in turn produces matter (such as posited in idealism).
I will have to read some more because I am not sure I am clear on this. In one sense, I feel that he says that consciousness or integrated information is the only thing that one cannot doubt and that one could doubt the material world, but what, then, is the integrated information a result of? He says that it is a result of material mechanisms. Perhaps I am just confused, but his exact position is not really clear to me yet. Perhaps I have interpreted it differently because my own ideas, since I think that neuroquantology principles are needed for a truly integrated perception (which is the quantum state of the whole system) and that fundamental to quantum theory is quantum information.
Arouet said:
Bernardo makes a similar argument that consciousness being the only thing we can know for certain should lead us to start from the assumption that consciousness is the basis for everything and only depart from this if we find a more parsimonious approach. Now, Bernardo doesn't frame it in terms of Cogito (which is I think is a bit cheap, not giving Descartes his due ;)) but doing so brings up the point that the existence of consciousness is not the only thing we can know for certain - let's not forget the sum part! To take the same argument we should presuppose solipsism as well and not give it up unless we come up with something more parsimonious. Now, I don't think Bernardo applies parsimony correctly, but using the way he does it, we could frame it as solipsism requires nothing other than me and consciousness to exist and thus nothing could be more parsimonious than that! (again, I don't think this is an appropriate use of parsimony, as I understand it, but this is the way he seems to apply it).
I would argue that sum is much more important and fundamental than cogito, and as per IIT, thought is not needed for conscious experience. Tononi mentioned in one of his papers that it is the potential for the activity of integrated information that can result in experience, not activity itself. So essentially the system could be quiet, yet it could result in experience because of the potential for integrated information. He mentions essentially mystical experience in this context, which I find fascinating since perhaps this is the potential for the experience of "pure being" without any contents of consciousness (cogito), and without actual activity of certain portions of the brain that create a feeling of separation between self and not self, it could be a unitive experience of pure being. This mystical experience seems more fundamental than Decarte's introspection, in my opinion.
I have not yet read Bernardo's books so I cannot comment on his application of parsimony to these ideas.
Now for my own ideas at least, I do not posit idealism because of parsimony. I tend to be a bit cautious with using parsimony as an argument, because I am not convinced that it is a valid reason to reject a particular theory. I think that it may be a guide, but alone I don't find it very convincing. I came to idealism because of theoretical necessity: If I feel the VMI is the most consistent interpretation with respect to experimental data, it requires a unitive consciousness to avoid the Wigner's Friend paradox, and also requires that the consciousness transcends spacetime. I could be wrong that this is the best interpretation, but at least it is necessary to be consistent and coherent.
Arouet said:
So if we're going to postulate that consciousness is most likely primary due to Cogito we also have to stop at solipsism. Because, I think, any reason that one would use to postulate that there probably is some other things that exist apart from "me" (for whatever "I" am) those same reasons would lead us to drop the necessity of consciousness being primary as well.
I disagree: In principle, at least, I feel that proper variations of retroPK experiments could potentially provide evidence of Von Neumann chains, and therefore the VMI, since the measurement could be separated from the observation. Now if one were to imagine that the evidence supported this notion, and someone other than myself ran these experiments, how could I attribute this separation of measurement and observation and subsequent collapse of the wave function if I am supposed to be the only consciousness that exists, and all Von Neumann chains end at me? In other words, how could Wigner's friend demonstrate collapse when Wigner is the only one supposed to cause collapse?
Another twist to solipsism is that in my opinion, solipsism is true, but it is not the ego self (mind-body and ego) that is all that exists, but the single fundamental self that is pure existence.
Arouet said:
I think cogito more properly applied should rightly put consciousness as fundamental and solipsism on the table for serious discussion. Though there's not much we can do about solipsism - it's the one thing that we do, I believe, have to basically just treat on a practical level as not true because there is absolutely no way to prove or disprove it. Really, once you accept solipsism, where is there to go? But I digress!
I think that in principle it may be possible to disprove as I mentioned with the PK experiments above. Certainly it requires a lot of "ifs," but in principle it seems possible. I would think if the evidence indicated retroPK and conscious collapse, and someone other than the ego self could empirically demonstrate this, I would have to say that QM is then inconsistent if I wanted to maintain solipsism. At that point, I would think solipsism should be rejected.
Arouet said:
I'm not familiar with VMI (what does it stand for?) or Type B materialism (other than having just googled and skimmed the section in Chalmers'
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness)
Sorry, VMI = von Neumann Interpretation. I just got tired of typing that out. Type B materialism is that phenomenal states and physical states are identical, viz. the specific electrical signals
are the pain. It's like saying consciousness is to integrated information as water is to H2O. To me it seems that this is more like Tononi's position, but like Chalmer's, I feel that it still leaves the hard problem. Now instead of relying on purely philosophical reasoning, when I combined IIT with the VMI, this type B materialism is untenable because of the requirements of the consciousness in VMI, and I am left with the type F monism which is compatible with both IIT and VMI.
Arouet said:
Tononi seems to be describing consciousness as a property of matter that is additional to structure and dynamics (see the quotation above). On the other hand, information theory seems to present information as structural as I understand it, and it is clear that structure and dynamics play an important part in his version of consciousness. So I'm not quite sure on this. I get the sense he is including something else that works with structure and dynamics in similar ways that mass and energy play different functions but work together. The structural description of qualia in that paper is pretty interesting - and pretty well blew me away. I don't have the acumen to evaluate the soundness of it.
He does stress the point that the information in IIT is different from the Shannon concept of information. Information in this sense is distinctions or differences that are intrinsic, and as he says, differences that make a difference. To me this sounds an awful lot like quantum information. Information processing builds on more fundamental information processing, and it seems one cannot go more fundamental than quantum information processing that occurs which is more fundamental than matter. To me this only makes sense--the universe itself is processing and integrating information quantum mechanically, which allows for quantum processes to occur that undoubtedly do in the brain, and at the same time, with a quantum state of the whole system (as opposed to classical independent parts), it allows for there to be a truly unified perception within the mind.
Arouet said:
Nor do I know if we have to have non-material consciousness to collapse the wave function. Does a detector have integrated information? Maybe. I understand the jury to be out on this at present in any event.
That is an awesome question! I never really thought about it that way! According to Tononi, certain electrical devices can have minimal phi, like the photodiode that has one bit of phi. Is this enough consciousness to cause collapse? Is there a greater collapse influence with greater consciousness? Could a photodiode cause collapse of very minimal systems, where a human can have very wide ability to collapse (like looking at the moon)? Awesome questions; I think you may be on to something there.
Perhaps certain measuring devices
can cause collapse because of how they integrate information. This seems testable in principle, where retroPK experiments could be done with using measuring devices that have zero phi and another that has a level of phi and seeing if the retroPK effect goes away with the device with phi since it already collapsed the result.
Arouet said:
I'm not sure if you're doing this, but your argument here also has a hint of "I don't think it's X (ie: Type B materialism) so therefore it must be Y (ie: consciousness is primary).
In a way it is, but I think it is more nuanced than this, since I am in a way applying the falsification principle to empirical evidence. First start with our most fundamental physics, try to eliminate interpretations that don't seem consistent with empirical evidence, and continue from there, eliminating ideas that don't fit. Now if the interpretation of QM ends up being wrong, I have to start over, but there still remains data that needs to fit into whatever hypothesis that may result in. It is speculative, but in my mind it is consistent so far with a lot of data from many different areas.
I feel this speculation is important since observations are always theory laden. Without some sort of framework to interpret data, you just have a collection of seemingly random and conflicting data, and I feel that is what is occurring in science to a degree since we have a jumble of data from things like parapsychology, NDEs, quantum theory, neuroscience, and consciousness research that just doesn't seem to make any sense or fit. With trying to formulate some sort of structured hypothesis, it can offer a frame in which to interpret the data, and at the same time offering predictions that could in principle be tested to see if it is on the right path. Without some sort of speculative attempt at a structured hypothesis, predictions that offer a way to test things and make progress in understanding are much more difficult, being more shots in the dark and hoping something might hit at some point. In this sense, I believe in what Kuhn speaks of with respect to paradigms being needed to practice science properly, and without it, you have very disordered data collection that makes progression of knowledge difficult because you're really not even sure what you're looking for.
Arouet said:
What I'm not clear on, I guess, is how IIT is compatible with consciousness being primary and therefore everything existing within consciousness, at least on the way Tononi seems to describe it in the paper (I haven't watched the video you're referring to though I admit I much prefer to go through this stuff slowly with a highlighter and taking notes and cutting and pasting into google than to watch a video that makes it inconvenient to stop, rewind, go back up, down, etc.)
You go through things like I do! But I don't think you will find Tononi saying what I am saying. As I mentioned I am heavily influenced by the VMI, which is what started me on all this more than 12 years ago. Since then the computational models of QM have become much more popular as the field of quantum information theory is developing. A lot of these speculative ideas that use the analogy of video games are very compatible with the Copenhagen interpretation, and really just seem to be a more fundamental description of the Copenhagen interpretation. Using computational models to describe what is going on in the VMI is what led me to think that the information exists within consciousness, and IIT was what then brought the two together to describe how our conscious awareness may arise within this type of world. Qubits are the "differences that make a difference," and that difference is made to consciousness itself.
Arouet said:
If you're going to posit consciousness as the primary unit then you're going to have to consider integrated information to be funamental and Tononi is very clear that he does not consider all information to be integrated. In fact, Tononi argues that a single fundamental unit cannot be integrated. You need at least two units to integrate. Those two units could form an integrated system that is conscious, but the primary unit itself cannot be conscious.
I think there may be a level of incommensurability with respect to the term consciousness. In western science, consciousness has many definitions, but none of them include the definition of consciousness that is needed in the VMI or as used in spiritual literature such as Hindu Vedantic texts. Consciousness is defined usually by the content of consciousness, and pretty much synonymous with awareness. Perhaps the term protoconsciousness would be more appropriate for the most fundamental consciousness, or perhaps to use the phrase 'conscious awareness' to denote what we have, and consciousness is the baseline capacity for experience in which conscious awareness can arise. I am not sure which might be better.
Another interesting distinction is found in Hindu Vedantic literature, where there are four states of consciousness: Waking, dream, deep sleep, and the forth, turiya, is the fundamental capacity for experience in which the other three states occur. Perhaps what I mentioned with the consciousness without any brain activity (due to the potential) that Tononi mentioned might allow for experience of this baseline state of protoconsciousness or "pure consciousness." Regardless of whether or not these distinctions are the best way to describe this is hopefully secondary to trying at least describe the differences in the use of the word consciousness. In the way it is used in western science, it is stupid to say that consciousness is the ground of all being.
Arouet said:
Tononi describes consciousness as a fundamental property of whatever is primary, not as the primary unit itself. Just like "dynamics" is not the unit itself, but a fundamental property of the unit.
Hopefully the paragraphs immediately prior to this one might help clarify what I mean.
Arouet said:
Heh, reading the paper I got the sense that Tononi thought that we were a long way off (if it is even possible) from mapping this stuff in real time in real living systems. The approach I think the IIT guys are taking are developing basic predictions based on very simple models and seeing whether they allow for accurate predictions on the larger system scale (I had a good paper that provided a good summary of the progress being made in IIT research to date but I can't seem to find it now, I'll post it if I manage to find it).
Oh yeah, they are nowhere close. Even relatively simple systems are extraordinarily complex. Mapping qualia spaces for a human seems almost impossible at this point (I don't think it is, I am just saying it seems really far off). I think if considering the liklihood of quantum processing in the brain, this complexity then increases by orders of magnitude. We would need powerful quantum computers to possibly be able to compute all this.
Arouet said:
While I agree it doesn't quite solve the hard problem (in terms of describing exactly how the actual experience manifest) I think it does as good or better a job as simply declaring consciousness to be primary. Doing do tends to invoke a Bernardo-style Mind-at-Large type of consciousness which very well might exist, but seems to have little in common with the type of consciousness that we seem to experience. Now, that doesn't mean its false, but if the reason to believe MAL exists derives from our conscious experience it seems like a stretch. It's a good hypothesis, but the decision to accept it as a likely contender for being true needs a lot more!
I agree. For a long time I was saying consciousness was primary because of influence from the VMI, but it wasn't at all clear how anything really occurred. This is where I think quantum computational models and IIT really helped me to bring it together to explain how any of it might occur. Saying consciousness is primary is, frankly, an extremely old idea and it would be sad if we just left it at almost the same spot that Hindus did over 3000 years ago. The concept of mind at large is similar to the Hindu belief in Brahma or Hiranyagarbha. I never thought that much of this idea, but if IIT is true and if it is all unified at a level of non-local information fields and consciousness, is it possible that minds are all interconnected to a degree (like evidenced by telepathy) and that it might be possible for the universe itself to integrate all our information? I don't know about that, and I am doubtful, but the idea popped in my head.
Arouet said:
I mentioned above the part of the paper dealing with qualia. I think everyone on this forum should read it to get a sense of the how Tononi is conceiving it. At the very least, it serves as a good reminder that just because we may not be able to imagine alternative ways to see these things doesn't mean we should assume that no-one will ever be that clever! His approach to the Mary thought experiment is also well worth reading. I'm not sure it quite solves the hard problem but in terms of detail it sure goes a lot farther than other proposals.
I agree. It is a huge step forward, even if not really correct. It shows that consciousness could be quantitative and mathematical even if approached from the phenomenological end.
Arouet said:
Right, the human brain/body system is simply an integrated system. As he states in the paper, nothing prevents non-human systems from also being integrated. In fact, it is likely that many other living systems are also integrated, to one extent or another.
I agree. I wonder how far down it goes. Do cells have consciousness? Not in the sense that we do, but in a weak sense like he talks about photodiodes having one bit of consciousness. I am inclined to think that this is the case, and it wasn't human minds that were needed to collapse the wave function of the universe in Wheeler's participatory anthropic principle.