Pluses and minuses of new take on consciousness (1)
Integrated information theory (IIT), identified in your article as the best bet for a mathematical model of consciousness, may not point towards panpsychism, the universal consciousness of matter, as suggested (2 May, p40). This is for the simple reason that it points clearly towards something else entirely. The way that IIT focuses on information may not be its greatest weakness, but its greatest insight.
As far as IIT is concerned, it isn’t the brain that is conscious, but the information flowing through it. A close, if not perfect, parallel may be drawn with the meaning of this letter being a property not of my computer, but of the information that flowed through it. We may simply have been looking for the origin of consciousness at the wrong level of neural activity.
If this is so, then electrons remain as devoid of consciousness as ever. Instead, we should be looking at the information encoded in the patterns of activity of those electrons.
Pluses and minuses of new take on consciousness (2)
As a model to inform our understanding of consciousness, integrated information theory sounds promising. Yet usually when a theory produces a conclusion that seems absurd 鈥� in this case that both the universe and simple data processing algorithms are conscious 鈥� the sensible working hypothesis is to suppose it is false.
Pluses and minuses of new take on consciousness (3)
It seems a shame for the proposed integrated information theory (IIT) model of consciousness to stipulate that for something to be considered conscious this way, its consciousness has to be bigger than the degree of consciousness you could ascribe to any of its component parts.
This appears to exclude what would seem an interesting and useful area for such research: the emergence of consciousness-like behaviours in flocks of starlings, the coordination of a beehive’s activities or the general behaviour of crowds.
However, perhaps IIT has a bigger problem with its definitions, if it yields the same degree of what it calls consciousness whether someone is conscious or unconscious.
Pluses and minuses of new take on consciousness (4)
With consciousness, it seems that anything goes: no need to define terms or respect hard-fought-for philosophical distinctions.
I disagree with the idea that integrated information theory is “our mathematically most mature theory of consciousness”. It isn’t a theory of consciousness, it is a theory of integrated information. It may conceivably have a bearing on intelligence, but it has nothing to say about the quality of consciously felt sensory experience. That is the hard problem of consciousness: to explain what it is like for creatures such as us to feel the pain of a bee sting or see the redness of a poppy.
Mathematics shows no sign of being unreasonably 鈥� or even reasonably 鈥� effective here. I’ll continue to put my money on neuroscience and evolutionary psychology for answers.
Pluses and minuses of new take on consciousness (5)
It was kind of you to lift some of the covid-19 gloom by publishing a whimsical article suggesting inanimate objects could possess consciousness. If I may be so bold as to propose a subject for a future article in the same vein: how about asking if electrons have free will? That might shed new light on quantum weirdness.
Lockdown could give us many insights
It is clear that our understanding of the coronavirus, and how it spreads through networks of people, is related to the quantity and quality of data we collect. This is rightly a point of focus.
But it would be a great shame if, while focusing on covid-19, we missed the opportunity to gather detailed information on the spread of other communicable diseases during lockdown, not to mention non-health aspects of life. That data could yield never-to-be-seen-again insights.
Sunshine may not be Australia's saving grace
Diana George asks whether the increased uptake of vitamin D in Australia has resulted in our low infection rates from coronavirus (Letters, 2 May). I’d say no, for two reasons.
Firstly, most Australians avoid the sun because of the heat and its cancer-causing effects. Secondly, the lack of cases here probably has more to do with a fairly quick and severe lockdown that cut the country off from most overseas arrivals. Most of our cases are linked to several cruise liners and aircraft that arrived before the closure was fully in place.
By all means get some sunshine, but I don’t think it will help that much.
Going cold on a new definition of life
Hillary Shaw suggests a definition of what constitutes life (Letters, 25 April). It is defined as “a bounded system containing a readable information code that can locally decrease entropy”. This seemed to me to succinctly encapsulate all forms of life that we know about, and reduced a complicated concept to a simple idea in a really satisfying way 鈥� I liked it a lot.
Then, two weeks later, I opened my fridge and realised that it, too, decreases entropy locally and contains readable (binary) information that tells its “body” how to do it 鈥� how annoying! Can we extend the definition to exclude systems that were created by other readable information-encoded, entropy-decreasing systems?
Perhaps we could, but while such an extension would rule out fridges, I assume it would also exclude babies and genetically modified organisms. I fear I may be back to square one.
Every dog may not have its day
As the National Parks and Wildlife Service threatened species officer in Broken Hill, Sturt national park is in my patch (25 April, p36). The idea you reported of fencing the park as an experimental plot for dingo introduction is of interest to me.
The claims that dingoes have a positive effect on small mammal survival, and the desire to test this by fencing the park, fail to see the obvious: that this experiment has been going on for over 100 years either side of the dog fence that protects south-eastern Australia. Small mammals have suffered equally on both sides. The higher density of dingoes north of the fence hasn’t resulted in better outcomes for small mammals.