Why? The Purpose of the Universe

by Philip Goff

In fact, as far as I know, there is only one extant theory of the neural correlates of consciousness that passes this test: the integrated information theory.23 This theory revolves around a certain measurable characteristic of a system, which the theory refers to as ‘integrated information’. We don’t need to worry too much about what integrated information is, but we can roughly think of it as how much the system’s parts work together to constrain its possible past and future states. For example, the retina of the eye has low integrated information, as its state at any given time is compatible with a wide variety of possible states at the next moment, dependent on what light hits it. The brain, in contrast, has very high levels of integrated information, as the range of states it could enter into at the next moment is very narrow. The crucial point for our purposes is that this theory offers us an utterly precise threshold that marks the difference between a system having and lacking consciousness. According to integrated information theory, at the precise moment when there comes to be more integrated information in the system as a whole than there is in its parts, the system becomes conscious. Conversely, at the exact moment when there ceases to be more integrated information in the system as a whole that there is in its parts, the system ceases to be conscious. By avoiding the incoherent idea that some organisms are neither definitely conscious nor definitely non-consci...