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Integrated Information Theory, Searle, and the Arbitrariness Question

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Abstract

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) posits a new kind of information, which, given certain constraints, constitutes consciousness. Searle objects to IIT because its appeal to information relies on observer-relative features. This misses the point that IIT’s notion of integrated information is intrinsic, the opposite of observer-relative. Moreover, Searle overlooks the possibility that IIT could be embraced as an extension of his theory. While he insists that causal powers of the brain account for consciousness, he maintains that these causal powers aren’t tied to protoplasmic material. Whatever these causal powers are (Searle doesn’t offer a positive account), they don’t consist in mere information-processing or computation. IIT agrees, and also positively characterizes the relevant causal powers as those involved in generating integrated information. Examining the further commitments of each theory reveals that IIT renews a fundamentally ontological challenge to information-processing and computational theories of mind.

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Notes

  1. My thanks to two anonymous referees, and to the editors, for helpful and constructive comments.

  2. What exposition is offered here is only enough to motivate the discussion of IIT’s relation to Searle and its implications, and is not intended to be either justificatory or reductive. My hope is that this is adequate for a general readership, but for less dense exposition, see Fallon (2016, 2018) as well as various papers cited below.

  3. Phi measures only the quantity of integrated information; the organization of the causal dynamics determine its nature. Structures of very different organization can generate the same amount of phi, while still specifying different information qualitatively. So, integrated information, while measured by phi, is not identical to it, and subsets of integrated information that are conscious are measurable by phi, but also are not identical to their phi values. (It should be noted that it is pragmatically impossible to calculate phi values precisely for complex systems; an ongoing project within IIT involves refining methods of approximating it.)

  4. While it is possible to imagine a variation on IIT that refrains from identity claims (e.g. List 2018, Section 6), Tononi (personal communication) has confirmed that he maintains the commitment to such claims made explicit throughout the IIT literature. This paper will treat the canonical IIT position.

  5. Peressini (2013) offers an expressly philosophical critique; the main claim there involves arguing that IIT focuses on the qualitative nature of experience and not on consciousness as such (see also Cerullo 2011). The current paper will bracket this issue, instead addressing IIT as it describes itself, relating it to further debate.

  6. Page numbers for the electronic version of the exchange between Searle (2013a, b) and Koch and Tononi (2013) are not available, but the pieces are brief.

  7. Searle also objects to IIT’s treatment of free will, which does constitute another part of the theory. Here we focus on consciousness because it is primary to IIT, and any claims about free will hinge upon it anyway. For a good synopsis of IIT on free will, see (Tononi 2015, Section 7).

  8. Searle seems ambiguous on whether consciousness or mere mentality is necessary for intrinsic information. We have seen Searle (2013a, b) claim that information presupposes consciousness. Searle (1992, 156) claims that unconscious mental states are still intrinsically intentional. Because intentionality is a form of information, this is in tension with the claim that information presupposes consciousness. Perhaps the latter is the dominant interpretation of Searle: Manson, e.g., (2003, 140) states: “Searle insists that only conscious states have intrinsic intentionality”. Searle (1992, 226) describes unconscious mental states as “dispositional,” which may support this reading.

  9. Elsewhere (1998, 43), Searle allows characterization of conscious states by reference to access, but makes clear that this access is not epistemic, but a matter of the “inner character” (i.e. intrinsic nature) of experience.

  10. In a very similar context, Searle writes “The aim of the Chinese room example was to try to show this” (1981, 368).

  11. For Searle, the relationship between intentionality and consciousness is especially close. Only the mental is intrinsically intentional, and consciousness is the crucial factor: consciousness is by its nature intentional, and non-conscious mental states are intentional only by virtue of their connection to consciousness (specifically, their capacity to become conscious). Anything outside the mental (if it has intentionality at all) only has intentionality derivatively, i.e. it depends upon the (conscious) mind for its intentionality. See Section 4, Note 8, and Section 6 for how this fits into Searle’s overall ontology.

  12. One might use the word “mysterious” to describe IIT’s posited new physical law, but the term does not apply in the same way as it does to Searle’s position. All brute physical facts are ipso facto mysterious. IIT argues for the identity claim, given the rest of the framework of IIT, as an inference to the best explanation. Whether or not the abductive justification ultimately succeeds, these are far deeper resources than Searle’s mere invocation of the brain’s causal powers.

  13. Piccinini (2007, 94) relates Searle’s claim to pancomputationalism: While pancomputationalism claims that everything is a computing system, Searle’s claim is stronger: that “everything implements every computation”. For the historical background of pancomputationalism, as well as a response to it, see Copeland (1996). For a response to Searle, see Melnyk (1996), as well as Copeland (1996). Putnam (1988, 120–125) makes an argument very similar to Searle’s. My thanks to David Chalmers for pointing out this similarity. See Chalmers (1996, 2011) for a reply to Putnam, similar to Melnyk’s response to Searle; see Egan (2012) for commentary on Chalmers.

  14. IIT does have to contend with another kind of reductio argument: see (Aaronson 2014a, b) and (Tononi 2014). These blog posts are the only published primary source for this debate.

  15. Jaworski (2016) defends an ontology that includes fundamental non-structured material, and structure; the latter is paradigmatically exemplified by living things, and has emergent causal powers not explicable by reference to material.

  16. Incidentally, the exclusion postulate may be a plausible constraint for conscious existence, ruling out, as it does, conscious mice-groups and the like, but it is not clear why the MICS’s “claim to maximal existence” is necessary for existence as such. It would seem that even non-MICS integrated information satisfies the conditions for intrinsicality, because it involves a system making a difference to itself.

  17. It is also the exact opposite of the project Koch engaged in for years, in regular cooperation with Francis Crick, attempting to find the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) in an attempt to explain experience. Koch’s endorsement of IIT is a remarkable departure.

  18. IIT’s rather dramatic ontological step may be viewed as serving to avoid the circularity charge that Page (2004) levels against Searle’s comparatively pedestrian ontology. (Dramatic as such a step might be – at least in contemporary Anglophone cognitive science – it is not alone: the recently concluded project New Directions in the Study of Mind (at Cambridge; for which Tim Crane was Principal Investigator) avowed a skepticism of physicalism.)

  19. At an NYU workshop (November 2015) entitled “The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness: Foundational Issues,” Tononi confessed that Koch sometimes jokes that he (Tononi) is secretly a Berkeleyan.

  20. Larissa Albantakis (personal communication)

  21. Edelman and Tononi (2000, 7 and 48) offer some points intended to critique it; Edelman (1989) in remarks perhaps related to later work with Tononi, dismisses functionalism, but confines his remarks to machine-state functionalism only. Koch (2012) glosses functionalism as non-explanatory in the same way that the identification of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) does not explain consciousness.

  22. Functionalism here does not just include machine-state functionalism (even if IIT literature only addresses the latter).

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    Francis Fallon

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Fallon, F. Integrated Information Theory, Searle, and the Arbitrariness Question. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 629–645 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0409-0

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