27. Integrated Information

This octopus is inspecting the camera gear of my collaborator David Scheelat Octopolis, off the coast of Australia.Animal encounters machine. Did this feel like something for the octopus? How about for the machine? Perhaps the two of them together?

“Integrated Information Theory” (IIT) is a theory of the physical basis of consciousness developed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and endorsed also by Christof Koch.Tononi has been at work on it since around 2008. This year there’s a new pape...