The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience

“…The study of consciousness is among the most challenging of all (cf. Seth & Bayne, 2022), and perhaps not coincidentally, among the most contentious (see Fleming et al, 2023). In this context, we note that marked departures from healthy functioning, in addition to being worthy of study in their own right, may also prove illuminating with regard to the nature of healthy functioning itself.…”

“…The authors concluded that of two major theories examined, neither the IIT nor the global neuronal workspace theory accounted for all of the results; both theories would have to be modified. IIT-Concerned (2023) posted a letter about the collaboration signed by many scientists from 151 listed institutions, entitled "the integrated information theory of consciousness as pseudoscience," complaining largely about the press reaction to the collaboration, which they said was too favorable to IIT, and complaining about some information integration theorists declaring victory. A declaration of victory is difficult for us to see in the cited Science article (Finkel, 2023) or Nature article (Lenharo, 2023), though it may apply slightly more to articles in the Economist (2023) or the New York Times (Zimmer, 2023).…”

“…1 The last step of developing intelligent machines, and for some researchers, the holy grail of computational neural modeling, would be to have systems that are conscious (Carter et al, 2018;Dehaene et al, 2021;Oliveira, 2022). It is extremely difficult to define consciousness properly, and given the controversies in this domain (e.g., Finkel, 2023;Fleming et al, 2023), we do not seek to do so here. Instead, we can look at some conditions that would make machines more closely approximate the knowledge, capacities, and subjective experiences humans have that are often associated with consciousness.…”