Separating weak integrated information theory into inspired and aspirational approaches

Angus Leung; Naotsugu Tsuchiya

doi:10.1093/nc/niad012

Separating weak integrated information theory into inspired and aspirational approaches

Neurosci Conscious. 2023 May 17;2023(1):niad012. doi: 10.1093/nc/niad012. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Angus Leung¹, Naotsugu Tsuchiya^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia.
² Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), 1-4 Yamadaoka, Suita-shi, Osaka 565-0871, Japan.
³ Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan.

Abstract

Mediano et al. (The strength of weak integrated information theory. Trends Cogn Sci 2022;26: 646-55.) separate out strong and weak flavours of the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. They describe 'strong IIT' as attempting to derive a universal formula for consciousness and 'weak IIT' as searching for empirically measurable correlates of aspects of consciousness. We put forward that their overall notion of 'weak IIT' may be too weak. Rather, it should be separated out to distinguish 'aspirational-IIT', which aims to empirically test IIT by making trade-offs to its proposed measures, and 'IIT-inspired' approaches, which adopt high-level ideas of IIT while dropping the mathematical framework it reaches through its introspective, first-principles approach to consciousness.

Keywords: IIT-inspired; aspirational-IIT; consciousness; integrated information theory; weak-IIT.

Publication types

Review