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What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference

Any successful naturalistic account of consciousness must state what consciousness is, in terms that are compatible with the rest of our naturalistic descriptions of the world. Integrated Information Theory represents a pioneering attempt to do just this. This theory accounts for the core features o...

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Autor principal: Cooke, James E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8391140/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34441172
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23081032
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author Cooke, James E.
author_facet Cooke, James E.
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description Any successful naturalistic account of consciousness must state what consciousness is, in terms that are compatible with the rest of our naturalistic descriptions of the world. Integrated Information Theory represents a pioneering attempt to do just this. This theory accounts for the core features of consciousness by holding that there is an equivalence between the phenomenal experience associated with a system and its intrinsic causal power. The proposal, however, fails to provide insight into the qualitative character of consciousness and, as a result of its proposed equivalence between consciousness and purely internal dynamics, into the intentional character of conscious perception. In recent years, an alternate group of theories has been proposed that claims consciousness to be equivalent to certain forms of inference. One such theory is the Living Mirror theory, which holds consciousness to be a form of inference performed by all living systems. The proposal of consciousness as inference overcomes the shortcomings of Integrated Information Theory, particularly in the case of conscious perception. A synthesis of these two perspectives can be reached by appreciating that conscious living systems are self-organising in nature. This mode of organization requires them to have a high level of integration. From this perspective, we can understand consciousness as being dependent on a system possessing non-trivial amounts of integrated information while holding that the process of inference performed by the system is the fact of consciousness itself.
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spelling pubmed-83911402021-08-28 What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference Cooke, James E. Entropy (Basel) Article Any successful naturalistic account of consciousness must state what consciousness is, in terms that are compatible with the rest of our naturalistic descriptions of the world. Integrated Information Theory represents a pioneering attempt to do just this. This theory accounts for the core features of consciousness by holding that there is an equivalence between the phenomenal experience associated with a system and its intrinsic causal power. The proposal, however, fails to provide insight into the qualitative character of consciousness and, as a result of its proposed equivalence between consciousness and purely internal dynamics, into the intentional character of conscious perception. In recent years, an alternate group of theories has been proposed that claims consciousness to be equivalent to certain forms of inference. One such theory is the Living Mirror theory, which holds consciousness to be a form of inference performed by all living systems. The proposal of consciousness as inference overcomes the shortcomings of Integrated Information Theory, particularly in the case of conscious perception. A synthesis of these two perspectives can be reached by appreciating that conscious living systems are self-organising in nature. This mode of organization requires them to have a high level of integration. From this perspective, we can understand consciousness as being dependent on a system possessing non-trivial amounts of integrated information while holding that the process of inference performed by the system is the fact of consciousness itself. MDPI 2021-08-11 /pmc/articles/PMC8391140/ /pubmed/34441172 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23081032 Text en © 2021 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Cooke, James E.
What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference
title What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference
title_full What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference
title_fullStr What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference
title_full_unstemmed What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference
title_short What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference
title_sort what is consciousness? integrated information vs. inference
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8391140/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34441172
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23081032
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