Integrated Information Theory: A Consciousness-First Approach to What Exists

TL;DR

This paper presents an overview of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), emphasizing its 'consciousness-first' approach to defining what exists through cause-effect structures that account for experience and consciousness.

Contribution

It introduces a formal, operational framework linking phenomenal properties of consciousness to physical cause-effect structures, offering a new ontological perspective.

Findings

Cause-effect structures explain all properties of experience

IIT's framework applies to consciousness in humans, animals, and artifacts

Implications for understanding perception, meaning, and free will

Abstract

This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT's "consciousness-first" approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists--experience--and reveals its essential properties--the axioms of phenomenal existence. IIT formulates these properties operationally, yielding the postulates of physical existence. To exist intrinsically or absolutely, an entity must have cause-effect power upon itself, in a specific, unitary, definite and structured manner. IIT's explanatory identity claims that an entity's cause-effect structure accounts for all properties of an experience--essential and accidental--with no additional ingredients. These include the feeling of spatial extendedness, temporal flow, of objects binding general concepts with particular configurations of features, and of qualia such as colors and sounds. IIT's intrinsic ontology has implications for understanding meaning, perception, and free will, for assessing consciousness in patients, infants, other species, and artifacts, and for reassessing our place in nature.