The core idea is that for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to be integrated into a unified whole that can’t be decomposed into nearly independent parts.2 This means that all parts need to compute jointly with lots of information about each other—otherwise there would be more than one independent consciousness, such as in a room full of people or, perhaps, in the two brain halves of a patient whose connecting corpus callosum has been cut. If there are fairly independent parts that are too simple, then these won’t be conscious at all, like the independent pixels of a
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