Link to Theory of Consciousness – Part 1
I’m really excited about Integrated Information Theory (IIT). It takes a simple and logical approach to forming a theory about consciousness. Treat consciousness the way we do physics, describe our observations about consciousness using equations.
At one time I believed we understood physics to such an extent that we could just sit down with a piece of paper and reason out the equations. In fact it is necessary to go into the world, build experiments, and see what happens or at least believe the results other people have observed.
This realization happened for me as a high school student taking Electromagnetics at a Community College. I was obsessed with knowing the proofs for all the equations in my Calculus and Physics textbooks. In this Electromagnetics class, I was following the proofs deeper and deeper, from equation to equation, until I got to Biot-Savart’s Law (a basic law relating magnetic fields to current). Here the text book merely said, experimentally derived. Wait, what?
A brave hobbyist tests the theories of electromagnetics with a home-made Tesla Coil
I thought perhaps they were just taking the easy way out and this was a clever way of omitting the proof. But in fact, as my professor told me, physics simply describes our observations of nature with equations.
IIT takes the same approach to understanding consciousness that physicists take to understanding how the world behaves. It starts from basic observations about consciousness instead of trying to explain how it arises from various phenomena like neural activity or the movement of particles. IIT takes consciousness as a given in much the same way as physics takes gravity as a given.