I’d been arguing for decades that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.18 IIT agrees with this and replaces my vague phrase “certain complex ways” by a precise definition: the information processing needs to be integrated, that is, Φ needs to be large. Giulio’s argument for this is as powerful as it is simple: the conscious system needs to be integrated into a unified whole, because if it instead consisted of two independent parts, then they’d feel like two separate conscious entities rather than one. In other words, if a conscious part of a
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