Notes

tags: #IIT #Consciousness #Neuromorphic

In your own words, list and explain one strength of IIT, and one weakness

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) provides a comprehensive framework for understanding consciousness. It exploits an interdisciplinary approach that draws from neuroscience and mathematics to describe the structure of consciousness. Although such unifying capabilities represent a crucial strength of the theory by themselves, I find particularly convincing the way IIT draws its fundamental axioms directly from experience. These axioms allow for inferring which characteristics the physical systems must have to account for such essential properties. This line of reasoning reminds me of the approach followed by Carver Mead in rethinking information representation and computational primitives in classical circuits towards Neuromorphic hardware. In both cases, I regard such a bottom-up viewpoint as a fundamental strength of their theories. IIT has not yet been conclusively proven and is still under fine-tuning. As such, it is difficult to say definitively what its drawbacks may be. However, I believe that one weakness of IIT lies in the meagre amount of evidence supporting the theory. Indeed, limited evidence asks for a ”leap of faith” in accepting some of its not straightforward claims. Furthermore, some intuitively non-conscious systems can generate high phi values, which emphasize the need for an ”act of trust” in certain aspects of the theory.