"Consciousness Theory Showdown" Shows Mainly Shady Neuroscientist Sleight-of-Hand

When talking about the problem of explaining human minds, those in academia love to use the term "problem of consciousness." But is is a huge fallacy to think there is merely some "problem of consciousness" when there is a trillion times bigger "problem of explaining human minds, human mental capabilities and human mental phenomena."  Once you realize this, you may realize that presenting some "theory of consciousness" can never do much to solve the explanatory problems in the philosophy of mind, which are huge and "all over the place."  

The trick of posing a mere "problem of consciousness" is a ridiculous ruse. A human being is not merely "some consciousness." A human being is an enormously complex reality, and the mental reality is as complex as the physical reality.  You dehumanize and degrade human beings when you refer to their minds as mere "consciousness." The problem of human mentality is the problem of credibly explaining the forty or fifty most interesting types of human mental experiences, human mental characteristics and human mental capabilities.

It is always a silly, stupid trick when someone tries to reduce so complex a reality to try and make it sound like the faintest shadow of what it is, by speaking as if there is a mere "problem of consciousness," and talking as if humans are just "some consciousness" that needs to be explained.  Such a shabby, pathetic trick (which can be called consciousness shadow-speaking) is as silly as ignoring the vast complexity of the organization of the human body, and speaking as if explaining the origin of human bodies is just a task of explaining how there might occur "some carbon concentrations." 

The person attempting so pathetic a trick is acting as silly as a person who stands at the seashore, fills a glass with seawater, and says, "Oceans are easy to explain -- they're just water."  Just as the ocean includes trillions of deep, baffling complexities such as all of the organization and biochemistry of sea creatures -- something infinitely more complex than mere water -- the human mind and human mental experiences involve trillions of complexities, and such a reality is something almost infinitely more complex than mere "consciousness."  The reductionist who engages in consciousness shadow-speaking is someone engaging in a trick as misleading as someone who says, "Mathematics is real simple -- it's just counting." 

The majority of people who try to reduce the mountain-sized problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences in all their variety into the mouse-sized problem of explaining some mere dry abstraction of "consciousness"  are people who were too lazy to very deeply study minds and brains, and who used this stupid trick of consciousness shadow-speaking to try to make their explanation job a million times easier.  People who lack credible explanations for very complex realities (whether physical or mental) love to use poorly descriptive language in which they try to make the complex realities sound a million times simpler than they are. 

The dialog below illustrates the stupidity of trying to explain human minds by describing a human mind as mere "consciousness" and then trying to create a "theory of consciousness" that applies to everything conscious. 

James: John, I've made great progress in explaining how the human body arises during a mother's pregnancy. John: Great, tell me about it. James: I call my explanation a “theory of solidity.” John: A theory of solidity? James: Yes, because that's the essential nature of human bodies, that they are solid. So my theory attempts to explain how solidity arises. John: I think you've gone in the wrong direction, and made a big mistake. James: Why? John: Because a human body is something gigantically greater than mere “solidity.” A human body is a state of vast hierarchical organization, with a oceanic level of functional complexity. For example, in our bodies are 20,000 different types of protein inventions, most very special arrangements of many thousands of atoms. And we have 200 types of cells, each so complex they are compared to factories. You would do nothing to explain so impressive a reality of physical organization by merely explaining “solidity.” Your body is something gigantically more than mere “solidity.”

James: John, I've made great progress in explaining how the human mind arises. John: Great, tell me about it. James: I call my explanation a “theory of consciousness.” John: A theory of consciousness? James: Yes, because that's the essential nature of human minds, that they are conscious. So my theory attempts to explain how consciousness arises. John: I think you've gone in the wrong direction, and made a big mistake. James: Why? John: Because a human mind is something gigantically greater than mere “consciousness.” You and I are not merely “some consciousness.” We are thinking, believing, seeing, reading, hearing, loving imagining minds with insight, emotions, viewpoints, and a great variety of mental powers such as instant learning ability, the ability to hold memories for decades, and the ability to instantly recall knowledge when only hearing a word or seeing a face. Human minds and human mental experiences are a reality of oceanic depth, so much more than mere “consciousness.”

A recent study attempted to do a "showdown" between two different theories called "theories of consciousness," in an attempt to reveal a winner and a loser. The experimental study should be regarded with the greatest of suspicion, because of all the suspicions we should have about any thing at all calling itself a "theory of consciousness." An experimental showdown between two different theories calling themselves a "theory of consciousness" is rather like trying to do an experimental showdown between the theory of palm-reading and the theory of astrology. The paper is entitled "Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness."

The paper makes quite a few dubious claims about predictions made by one or the other of these theories.  We should treat with suspicion claims made about what is predicted by either of these theories (the global workspace theory and the integrated information theory). Scientists often make unwarranted claims that this or that theory predicts something. Often such claims are made to try to achieve some aura of predictive success for some theory. It works like this:

(1) A scientist claims that some theory he favors predicts the observation of X. 

(2) The scientist then tries to show that X was observed. 

(3) The scientist then says we should have confidence in the theory because it made a successful prediction. 

Very often this is misleading in one way or another. The claim that the theory predicted the observation of X may be untrue. The claim that X was observed may be untrue. And just because some theory predicts something does not mean the theory is true or likely to be true. There are all kinds of false theories that may predict 1001 things, and some of those things may be true. 

We read in the paper claims about predictions of two rival theories of consciousness:

"We tested three preregistered, peer-reviewed predictions of IIT and GNWT for how the brain enables conscious experience (Fig. 1a). Prediction 1 addresses the cortical areas holding information about different aspects of conscious content. IIT predicts that conscious content is maximal in posterior brain areas, whereas GNWT predicts a necessary role for PFC. Prediction 2 pertains to the maintenance of conscious percepts over time. IIT predicts that conscious content is actively maintained by neural activity in the posterior ‘hot zone’ throughout the duration of a conscious experience, whereas GNWT predicts ignition events in PFC at stimulus onset and offset, updating the global workspace, with activity-silent information maintenance in between. Prediction 3 examines interareal connectivity during conscious perception. IIT predicts sustained short-range connectivity within the posterior cortex, linking low-level sensory (V1/V2) with high-level category-selective areas (for example, fusiform face area and lateral occipital cortex), whereas GNWT predicts long-range connectivity between high-level category-selective areas and PFC."

We should treat with skepticism all of these claims that such statements are actually predictions of such theories, and we should note that none of the claimed "predictions" qualify as precise predictions or exact numerical predictions. The claimed "predictions" are wooly kind of statements that are vague enough to be claimed as true no matter what is observed. Also the claimed "predictions" are not clearly at odds with each other, meaning you don't actually have a situation which is suitable for doing observations and announcing that one of the theories is the winner and the other the loser. 

To perform this dubious "showdown" of these two theories of consciousness, a large number of subjects had their brains scanned in fMRI machines, and another group had their eyes scanned while their brain waves were read using invasive brain-implanted electrodes.  Different images were shown to these observers, with each sight appearing for only about a second. We read this:

"To test critical predictions of the theories, five experimental manipulations were included in the experimental design: (1) four stimulus categories (faces, objects, letters and false fonts), (2) 20 stimulus identities (20 different exemplars per stimulus category), (3) three stimulus orientations (front, left and right view), (4) three stimulus durations (0.5 s, 1.0 s and 1.5 s), and (5) task relevance (relevant targets, relevant non-targets and irrelevant)."

So apparently subjects were shown pictures for a tiny instant, ranging from between half a second and 1.5 seconds. The pictures might have been a picture of a face, an object, a letter such as A or B, or a "false font."  The authors claim to have done "decoding of conscious content" from analyzing data obtained from these subjects: fMRI brain scan data, EEG brain wave data, eye movement data using an eye movement tracker, and magnetoencephalography  brain scan data. The claim is misleading. No robust evidence of any "decoding of conscious content" has occurred. 

To try to back up this claim of "decoding of conscious content," we have a Figure 2 that shows us some result obtained by an AI-type pattern recognizer after analyzing both EEG brain wave data and eye movement data gathered using an eye tracker device (the Eyelink 1000 Plus system shown in a photo below).  We see a "decoding accuracy" graph in which accuracy above 50% completely dies off after 1 second of someone seeing the visual stimulus. This is for 29 subjects who had intracranial electrodes inserted into their brains. The analytics are black-box analytics, and it is hard to unravel what flaws or tricks may have gone on to get these results. A look at the programming code used shows a byzantine maze of spaghetti code. No evidence is provided of being able to predict from brain data alone what a person is thinking or imagining. All we have is some attempt to show that by analyzing brain wave data and eye movement data taken at the instant someone was seeing something, you can predict the category of what the person was seeing. 

It is well known that EEG readings are extremely sensitive to muscle movements, which cause blips in the lines picked up electrodes. So imagine some experiment in which you get EEG readings while someone is shown a picture that may be a recognizable face, a picture of a cute or scary animal, or something neutral like the letter "X" or "Y."  A person might more often make muscle movements when seeing certain types of images. He might give a smile of recognition or appreciation when seeing a celebrity's face or a kitten, or he might squint when seeing some puzzling image, or he might raise his eyebrow when seeing some scary image; or he might grimace when seeing an offensive image. No such muscle movements might occur when the person sees something like the letter X or the letter Y. From such muscle movements alone, an AI pattern classifier might be able to guess higher than 50% what the category was of the thing the person saw. But that would not be "decoding of conscious content." 

Then there's the fact that the eye movement data gathered by some hi-tech eye movement device could have tended to pick up eye movement differences when different categories of images were shown.  Show a human a picture of face, and his eye will tend to focus on the face, or his eye may widen if he is surprised. Show a human a picture of a mere character (such as X) or some meaningless symbol, and the person's eye will not tend to focus as strongly, and it will not widen. 

So the evidence presented for "decoding of conscious content" in this paper is not robust evidence of being able to detect the type of thing someone is thinking about or seeing by analyzing brain data. The evidence the paper presents is all data based on "the moment of perception," when different type of muscle movements or eye movements may have occurred when different type of things are seen. 

Figure 3 in the paper is very similar to Figure 2. We are shown a line graph which seems to indicate some above-average predictive success coming from analyzing iEEG brain wave data (and also eye movement data) coming from 31 patients with implanted electrodes. The claimed success is purely in predicting the category of a type of image someone saw.  But the predictive success only occurs at the half-second mark, vanishing at the one second mark.  The result is consistent with the idea that the claimed predictive success comes purely from picking up different types of muscle movements (such as eye movements) which occur differently when a person has different types  of facial expressions in reacting to things he sees. 

The paper is one of many neuroscience papers which makes false claims about neural representations. There is no evidence that the brain contains any representations of anything anyone learns, recalls or sees. But neuroscientists love to claim that this or that thing they see in the brain is a "representation" of something. In this case the authors again and again refer to "representations" in the brain, without producing any good evidence for any such thing. 

An example of the paper's misrepresentations about representations is its statement "In posterior cortex ROIs, cross-temporal RSA revealed sustained face–object categorical representation." The evidence given for this claim is Figure 3D, which shows no sign of anything beyond the 1.5 second mark after someone saw something.  Whatever is being graphed is some momentary response to a stimulus, and it is  misleading to refer to that as either "sustained" or a "representation."  A similar misstatement would occur if I showed you a picture of something disgusting, and then claimed that your momentary facial expression was a representation of what I showed you. Momentary responses are not representations. 

The authors of this study have failed to produce any robust evidence for either the global workspace theory or the integrated information theory, and the authors give a kind of "it's a draw" verdict about their results, without saying that either theory was the winner. The global workspace theory is not a credible theory of consciousness, for reasons discussed here. The integrated information theory theory is not a credible theory of consciousness, for reasons discussed here and here. 

We have in this study a classic example of how neuroscientists resort to "something else" kind of cheats. Here's how it works:

(1) A neuroscientist will produce a study claiming to have determined something or predicted something based on brain data. 

(2) Sneaked into the study design will be some other source of data other than brain data.  That "something else" may be some software facility that the study is using, such as a database that has text annotations corresponding to images subjects were shown. Or the "something else" may be an eye-tracking system, which allows the study to make predictions not merely on brain data, but on how a person's eyes are behaving. Or the "something else" may be any number of other things, such as some AI system that predicts words someone is about to state, based on historical tendencies of people to say one word after saying a previous word. 

(3) Misleadingly it will be claimed or insinuated (in either the paper itself or the paper's press release) that the study predicted successfully based only on brain data, when any predictive success was crucially dependent on something other than just brain data. 

In this study the sleazy "something else" was eye movement data gathered by some high-tech eye tracker in addition to the EEG data  being taken to detect brain waves. The paper tells us that the Eye Link 1000 Plus system was used. Below is how that system looks (from a page promoting that system). 

Figure 4 of the paper shows the same defects as Figure 3 and Figure 2, as no predictive success beyond the 1.5 second mark is shown, and there is the same reliance on a combination of EEG brain wave data and eye-scanning data, which cannot be called a prediction from brain states alone. Figure 4 is even less reliable as evidence that Figure 2 and Figure 3, because the sample size used is much less than 31. 

In the Supplementary Notes, we read about this funny business going on:

"In the preregistration document, it is stated that iEEG patients with poor behavioral performance, defined as <70% hits or >30% FAs, were to be excluded (Data quality checks and exclusion of subjects, page 15). This threshold was considered based on a target recruitment of 50 patients. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic and despite our best efforts, only 34 patients were collected at the time of manuscript completion. To weigh the pros and cons of data inclusion and to increase sample size and coverage to better test the theories, it was decided to include in the analysis three iEEG patients whose behavior fell marginally short of the predefined behavioral criteria (i.e., hits < 70%, FA > 30%) to compensate for the lower number of participants."

So the authors set a standard for subjects that would be included, and found that they did not have enough subjects if that standard were to be followed. So the standard was then lowered.  But even with that  bit of malfeasance, was the study group size adequate for a good statistical power? We don't know, because no sample size calculation was done. 

The results in this study were highly dependent upon the patients with implanted electrodes, referred to in the paper as iEEG subjects. These were very sick patients with treatment-resistant epilepsy, who were being evaluated for surgery, through a method in which electrodes were implanted to try and find suitable spots for surgery. We are told, "A total of 4,057 electrodes (892 grids, 346 strips and 2,819 depths) were implanted across 32 patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy undergoing clinically motivated invasive monitoring."  So each of these patients had an average of about 126 electrodes implanted in their brains. Most of the times people have electrodes implanted for epilepsy surgery evaluation, it is a much smaller number of electrodes such as only 20.  

A key question is: were all these electrode implantations medically necessary? Or was there only a medical need to implant a much smaller number of electrodes?  Were many of the risky electrode implants into the brains of these sick patients done purely for the sake of this poorly designed study? We do not know the answer to these questions, because the authors have not told us. They have not made any claim that all of the electrode implants were medically necessary. 

The abuse of very sick epilepsy patients is one of the most appalling scandals of modern experimental neuroscience. Neuroscientists hungry for brain data are luring very sick epilepsy patients into agreeing to implants inside their brains of more electrodes than are needed for surgical evaluation. When this happens, the patient undergoes very serious risks that are not medically necessary, for the sake of the research needs of the neuroscientist and not the needs of the patient. A paper tells us this:

"A recent meta-analysis reviewed complication rates and types of complications in patients undergoing subdural grid implantation for seizure mapping [41]. The most common complication which was reported was intracranial haemorrhage with a mean rate of 4% closely followed by other complications such as neurologic infections, superficial infections and elevated intracranial pressure. They also found that an increased number of electrodes (>67 electrodes) was independently associated with complications."

Another paper tells us this:

"There are definite medical risks associated with the use of intracranial electrodes. The complication rate of subdural electrodes has been reported to range between 6% and 26%.19–23) Relatively common adverse events associated with subdural electrodes are fever, headache, and nausea.24) Another group reported transient cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leakage (13–31%), infection (6–8%), intracranial bleeding (8%), and cerebral edema in addition to an intracranial mass effect.25) Nair et al. reported that complications included (in the order of their frequency) infection, transient neurological deficit, epidural hematoma, increased intracranial pressure, and infarction.2) An increase in the complication rate was associated with (a) a greater number of grids/electrodes, (b) longer duration of monitoring, (c) older age of the patient, (d) left-sided grid insertion, (e) the use of burr holes in addition to craniotomy, and (f) an earlier year of monitoring (most likely a reflection of the aforementioned surgeon’s experience)."

The authors of any paper that reports on readings of electrodes implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients  have a duty to fully inform us about whether epilepsy patients were endangered by the implantation of additional electrodes that were not medically necessary, and which were implanted mainly for the research purposes of the paper authors.  Any such paper authors that fail to do that are authors we should tend to distrust. 

Postscript: A paper on pre-registration in psychology research finds some dismal results. We read this:

"In this paper, we have investigated adherence and  disclosure of deviations for all articles published with the Preregistered badge in Psychological Science between February 2015 and November 2017 and shared our findings with the corresponding authors for feedback. Two out of 27 preregistered studies contained no deviations from the

preregistration plan. In one study, all deviations were disclosed.

Nine studies disclosed none of the deviations."

What is supposed to go with a pre-registered paper is that scientists publish an exact plan for how they will gather and analyze data, before gathering data, and that they adhere to such a plan. The paper suggests that almost all pre-registered studies actually deviate from their pre-registered plan, and that a large fraction (maybe one third) of studies that deviate from their pre-registered plan fail to report that they deviated from their plan. 

The Biggest Blunders of Theories Such as Integrated Information Theory

In an earlier post "Integrated Information Theory's Tangled Metaphysics Does Nothing to Explain Consciousness," I gave a critique of a paper describing Version 3.0 of something called Integrated Information Theory, which the press has repeatedly touted as a "theory of consciousness" or a "scientific theory of consciousness." I gave some criticisms of the abstruse tangled metaphysics of a paper presenting that  theory, a paper entitled "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0." It is very dubious indeed to be making a claim of a scientific theory when the theory is presented in a paper filled with dense metaphysical jargon. That type of theory is more properly referred to as a metaphysical theory. I pointed out that a key claim of the paper was factually incorrect.  Contrary to the claims of that paper, it is not at all true that when you cut the tissue connecting  the two hemispheres of the brain, you are left with two minds. Instead you still have a single unified mind, as I discuss in my post here.  The flagrant misrepresentations of materialist thinkers about split-brain patients is one of the most egregious examples of misleading speech in literature discussing the cause of minds or the philosophy of mind.  A 2020 paper states this about split-brain patients: " Apart from a number of anecdotal incidents in the subacute phase following the surgery, these patients seem to behave in a socially ordinary manner and they report feeling unchanged after the operation (Bogen, Fisher, & Vogel, 1965; Pinto et al., 2017a; R. W. Sperry, 1968; R. Sperry, 1984)." 

Recently a new version of the Integrated Information Theory appeared, one called Version 4.0 of that theory, in a paper entitled "Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0: Formulating the properties of phenomenal existence in physical terms." I seem to find no example of the bogus previous claim that split-brain patients have two minds or two units of consciousness. Hopefully the authors realized how spurious and inaccurate such a claim was when it was made in the previous paper. We have a theory presented in a paper of more than 50 pages, but the authors say this about their theory: "the entire framework of IIT is based on just a few axioms and postulates." Oops, wouldn't it be much better to have a theory based on facts and observations, rather than "axioms and postulates," which sounds very metaphysical? 

Without diving very deeply into the very dense reasoning presented in the paper, I can discuss the two largest errors of papers such as these: (1) trying to present a mere "theory of consciousness" rather than a theory of the mind that can account for the main aspects of the mind; (2) wrongly presuming at the onset that there is such a thing as a "substrate of consciousness."   

The problem of human mentality is the problem of credibly explaining the thirty or forty most interesting types of human mental experiences, human mental characteristics and human mental capabilities. These include things such as these:

• imagination
• self-hood
• abstract idea creation
• appreciation
• memory formation
• moral thinking and moral behavior
• instantaneous memory recall
• instantaneous creation of permanent new memories
• memory persistence for as long as 50 years or more
• emotions
• speaking in a language
• understanding spoken language
• creativity
• insight
• beliefs
• pleasure
• pain
• reading ability
• writing ability
• ordinary awareness of surroundings
• visual perception
• recognition
• auditory perception
• attention
• fascination and interest
• the correct recall of large bodies of sequential information (such as when someone playing Hamlet recalls all his lines correctly)
• eyes-closed visualization
• extrasensory perception (ESP)
• dreaming
• volition
• out-of-body experiences
• apparition sightings 

Reductionist theorists love it when people do not raise the big problem of explaining human mentality but instead raise a much tinier problem of the problem of consciousness. Then such theorists can attempt to offer some little neural explanation and then say, “You see, the brain can explain consciousness.” Whenever such theorists attempt to do that, we should always point out that the problem of explaining human mentality is very many times larger and harder than a mere problem of consciousness.

The paper entitled "Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0: Formulating the properties of phenomenal existence in physical terms" commits the blunder of "looking through a straw hole" by trying to present a mere "theory of consciousness."  Since the human mind and its experiences are almost infinitely more complicated than mere "consciousness," this is a huge mistake. The person trying to explain a human mind with a mere "theory of consciousness" is like a person trying to explain planet Earth (a planet with such a diversity of life forms and minds) by presenting a mere "theory of roundness." 

The title of the paper should alert us that the authors have gone way wrong. They refer in their title to "formulating the properties of phenomenal existence." Human mental experiences are things of the utmost complexity and richness. It is folly to think that such things can be explained by referring to "properties." A property is a simple characteristic of something, typically one that you can measure with a single number. Examples of properties are things such as width, depth, height, length and weight. Human mental experiences are not properties, and the vast majority of them cannot be measured with numbers. 

You can do some word counts on the "Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0" paper to show just how badly it has failed to pay attention to what it should have paid attention to. The paper uses the term "consciousness" 87 times and "substrate" 144 times, but never once uses any of these terms:

• memory
• memories
• insight
• imagination
• appreciation
• recall
• recognition
• perception
• perceiving
• emotion
• belief
• idea
• ideas
• believing
• love
• thinking
• think

The term "thought" is used three times, but never in a meaningful reference to the human ability to think. It should be rather clear from the failure to use any of the words listed above that the authors have not done anything to credibly explain the human mind. We are thinking, recalling, remembering, imagining, perceiving, recognizing, appreciating and loving beings who have emotions, ideas and beliefs. Such minds are not explained by papers that fail to use any such words. You can never get to first base in explaining a mind if your search is limited to looking for "properties." 

It is a fool's errand to try to develop a "theory of consciousness" that considers consciousness in isolation while paying little or no attention to most of the main aspects and experiences and capabilities of human minds. That is as silly a quest as trying to explain the origin of cities by developing some abstract "theory of structure" that pays no attention to roads or streets or buildings or houses or parks. We don't need any mere "theory of consciousness," and when someone presents such a theory you should suspect your time is being wasted. What we need are theories of the human mind that can offer some credible idea about how such a mind can exist, and how humans can have all the mental experiences and mental capabilities they have.  

The second biggest blunder of theories such as Integrated Information Theory is the presumption that there is such a thing as a "substrate of consciousness." The word "substrate" means "an underlying substance or layer." We have no basis for assuming that there is any such thing as a "substrate of consciousness."  There is no obvious reason why a mental thing such as a mind would have a physical substrate. Also, we know that many physical things have no substrate. Planets don't have a substrate; the Sun and other stars don't have a substrate; and galaxies don't have a substrate.  So it is anything but obvious that there should exist any such thing as a "substrate of consciousness."

In the "Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0" paper the authors simply assume that there is such a thing as a physical "substrate of consciousness," without doing anything to back up such a claim. The paper uses the term "substrate" 144 times, but never justifies its presumption that there is any "substrate of consciousness." The idea that the brain is a substrate of consciousness is erroneous.  During cardiac arrest, after the brain has shut down and EEG signals show a flat line, human minds often continue to have very vivid mental experiences known as near-death experiences. Such an observational reality strongly suggests that the brain is not actually a substrate of consciousness, and that human minds can continue to function when brains have shut down. 

Talking about a "substrate of consciousness" is fallacious. A substrate is an underlying layer, and when you assume a "substrate of consciousness" you are assuming the mind is a bottom-up phenomenon.  Because of all the brain physical shortfalls discussed on this blog and in my previous post, there is no credibility in the idea that the human mind is something arising from mere "bottom-up" causes such as brain activity. The only credible explanation for a human mind is a "top-down" explanation, in which we think that a human mind arises from some reality greater than a human or any of its parts. 

Alas, the 50+ page paper mainly written by neuroscientists suggests that our theorizing neuroscientists still are not paying halfway decent attention to the characteristics of brains; for in the paper I read not one single mention of synapses. A proper study of the physical shortfalls of brains (such as the very short lifetimes of synaptic proteins, the slow average speed of brain signals and the noisy unreliable transmission of signals in synapses) leads to the conclusion that the brain is not any credible cause of human mental experiences.  Humans can instantly recall with perfect accuracy large bodies of memorized information they learned years ago, something that would not be possible through synaptic activity, synapses being too noisy, unreliable and unstable. 

The widely read blogger Scott Aaronson (a quantum computing expert) says this about Integrated Information Theory:

"It unavoidably predicts vast amounts of consciousness in physical systems that no sane person would regard as particularly 'conscious' at all: indeed, systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data.  Moreover, IIT predicts not merely that these systems are 'slightly' conscious ...but that they can be unboundedly more conscious than humans are."

Integrated Information Theory's Tangled Metaphysics Does Nothing to Explain Consciousness

A theory called "integrated information theory" purports to be a theory of consciousness. We should always be suspicious of any theory claiming to be a "theory of consciousness."  "Consciousness" is the most reductive term you could use to describe human minds and human mental experience.  A person trying to explain  a human mind by advancing what he calls a "theory of consciousness" is rather like a person trying to explain planet Earth by advancing what he calls a "theory of roundness." Just as roundness is only one aspect of planet Earth,  consciousness is only one aspect of the human mind and human mental experience. What we need is not a "theory of consciousness" but something very much harder to create: a theory of mentality that includes all of the main aspects of human mentality (including consciousness, comprehension, thinking, memory, imagination and creativity). 

When I go a website devoted to selling integrated information theory (www.integratedinformationtheory.org), I get a home page that has at its first link a link to a paper behind a paywall. But the second link is to a paper that anyone can read. Let's take a close look at that paper, entitled, "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0," and authored by Masafumi Oizumi, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi . 

The abstract of the paper should leave us very discouraged about integrated information theory:

"This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness 3.0, which incorporates several advances over previous formulations. IIT starts from phenomenological axioms: information says that each experience is specific – it is what it is by how it differs from alternative experiences; integration says that it is unified – irreducible to non-interdependent components; exclusion says that it has unique borders and a particular spatio-temporal grain. These axioms are formalized into postulates that prescribe how physical mechanisms, such as neurons or logic gates, must be configured to generate experience (phenomenology). The postulates are used to define intrinsic information as 'differences that make a difference' within a system, and integrated information as information specified by a whole that cannot be reduced to that specified by its parts. By applying the postulates both at the level of individual mechanisms and at the level of systems of mechanisms, IIT arrives at an identity: an experience is a maximally irreducible conceptual structure (MICS, a constellation of concepts in qualia space), and the set of elements that generates it constitutes a complex. According to IIT, a MICS specifies the quality of an experience and integrated information ΦMax its quantity. From the theory follow several results, including: a system of mechanisms may condense into a major complex and non-overlapping minor complexes; the concepts that specify the quality of an experience are always about the complex itself and relate only indirectly to the external environment; anatomical connectivity influences complexes and associated MICS; a complex can generate a MICS even if its elements are inactive; simple systems can be minimally conscious; complicated systems can be unconscious; there can be true 'zombies' – unconscious feed-forward systems that are functionally equivalent to conscious complexes."

We have heard in this abstract no sign that any compelling reasoning will appear in the paper. To the contrary, we have got two signals that the paper will be pushing nonsense. The first signal is the  absurd insinuation that logic gates (a low-level building block of a digital system) can be somehow configured to generate conscious experience.  The second signal is the claim that "simple systems can be minimally conscious."  There are minimally conscious organisms on our planet, but none of them are simple systems. When we consider all of the complexity of its cells, each as complex as a factory, we should realize that even the simplest maybe-barely-conscious ant is not at all a simple system. 

After the paper asks a bunch of questions, in the section entitled "Models" we read this: "The main tenets of IIT can be presented as a set of phenomenological axioms, ontological postulates, and identities." That sounds like metaphysics, not anything like a scientific theory. 

After the paper defines an "axiom" as a self-evident truth, we read some "axiom" defined by the paper.  One of these "axioms" is listed as follows:

"COMPOSITION: Consciousness is compositional (structured): each experience consists of multiple aspects in various combinations. Within the same experience, one can see, for example, left and right, red and blue, a triangle and a square, a red triangle on the left, a blue square on the right, and so on."

It is not true that "each experience consists of  multiple aspects in various combinations," although many experiences do consist of such a thing. A person can have a simple experience consisting of a single aspect. For example, you may lie on a beach looking up at a clear blue sky, while thinking of nothing. Such consciousness has only one aspect: your perception of the blueness above you.  Similarly, while waiting to fall asleep at night with your eyes closed, you may perceive nothing and be thinking of nothing.  Such an experience does not consist of  "multiple aspects in various combinations."

We then read this "axiom":

"INFORMATION: Consciousness is informative: each experience differs in its particular way from other possible experiences. Thus, an experience of pure darkness is what it is by differing, in its particular way, from an immense number of other possible experiences. A small subset of these possible experiences includes, for example, all the frames of all possible movies." 

No, it is not correct that "consciousness is informative." Something is informative if it supplies information.  Consciousness by itself does not supply information. A conscious person may or not be involved in supplying information.  

We then read this "axiom":

"INTEGRATION: Consciousness is integrated: each experience is (strongly) irreducible to non-interdependent components. Thus, experiencing the word 'SONO' written in the middle of a blank page is irreducible to an experience of the word 'SO' at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word 'NO' on the left border of another half page – the experience is whole. Similarly, seeing a red triangle is irreducible to seeing a triangle but no red color, plus a red patch but no triangle."

The word "integrated" means "with various parts or aspects linked or coordinated."  The human mind may be thought of as being integrated (for example, consciousness is linked with memory and understanding). But mere consciousness is not intrinsically integrated. At some moment I may be aware of the blue sky ahead of me, but such awareness does not consist of multiple parts.  An experience does not have to consist of multiple parts.  As for the logic about "SONO" written on a blank page, of course that is "irreducible to an experience of the word 'SO' at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word 'NO' on the left border of another half page," because that would give you "NOSO" not "SONO."  

So we have a very shaky foundation. We have three supposedly "self-evident axioms" that are not actually self-evident at all. Next we have a section called "Mechanisms" that suddenly starts dogmatizing about three characteristics that would be possessed by a "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  The results sounds like extremely dubious metaphysics.  No foundation has been laid establishing that there can be any such thing as a "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  

To the contrary, we can imagine no physical "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  Consciousness is an immaterial thing, and mechanisms are material things. We can get no plausible idea of how it can be that material things or material mechanisms could "contribute to consciousness."  If I have one neuron existing by itself, there is no reason why such a neuron should "contribute to consciousness." If I have 100 billion neurons that are all connected, there is no reason why such an arrangement should "contribute to consciousness."  If we think that connected neurons should somehow give rise to consciousness, that is only because we have been brainwashed into thinking such a thing by endless repetitions of such a groundless claim.  Similarly, if we had been endlessly told all our lives that consciousness was caused by electron collisions, then we might think that some glass jar with lots of colliding electrons would produce a conscious mind. 

We then have in the paper (under a title of "Systems of Mechanisms") three paragraphs making dogmatic claims such as the claim that "a set of elements can be conscious only if its mechanisms specify a conceptual structure that is irreducible to non-interdependent components (strong integration)." We are deeply mired now in arbitrary metaphysics, as we would be if we were reading a work of G.W. Hegel. Nothing has been done to show that "a set of elements can be conscious," so the writers have no business making such claims.  Organisms are not correctly described as "a set of elements." 

A little later in Box 1 of the paper we have a glossary, which defines more than thirty terms that will be used in the paper.  The glossary is very dense metaphysical gobbeldygook.  An example is the term "cause-effect repertoire" which is defined with this gibberish  definition: "The probability distribution of potential past and future states of a system as constrained by a mechanism in its current state." 

The paper then has a whole bunch of strange diagrams that have many circles, circles within circles, diagram, arrows pointing from one circle to another, and so forth. None of this does anything to clarify how humans have consciousness. 

Below (in italics) are some of the dubious metaphysical claims we read in the paper:

• "Recall that IIT's information postulate is based on the intuition that, for something to exist, it must make a difference. By extension, something exists all the more, the more of a difference it makes." No, it is not true that for something to exist, it must make a difference. Dust clouds in interstellar space exist, and rocks in the center of distant planets exist, without making any difference. And something does not exist "all the more" depending on the difference it makes. A person with no influence on the world exists just as much as some influential person. 
• "The integration postulate further requires that, for a whole to exist, it must make a difference above and beyond its partition, i.e. it must be irreducible." No, a whole does not have to be irreducible. A whole consisting of three people can be reduced to three individuals, and a molecule consisting of five atoms can be broken up and reduced to its individual atoms. 
• "Complexes cannot overlap and at each point in time, an element/mechanism can belong to one complex only." No, complexes can overlap; for example, the brain complex overlaps with the circulatory system in the body. And an element can belong to more than one complex. A blood vessel in the brain belongs to both the brain system and the circulatory system.  
• "The exclusion postulate at the level of systems of mechanisms says that only a conceptual structure that is maximally irreducible can give rise to consciousness – other constellations generated by overlapping elements are excluded."  Since humans have no understanding at all of how any structure can give rise to consciousness, it is unwarranted to be making some claim with the form "only X can give rise to consciousness."  Describing such a claim as a postulate (an assumption) indicates its weakness. 
•  "The exclusion postulate requires, first, that only one cause exists. This requirement represents a causal version of Occam's razor, saying in essence that 'causes should not be multiplied beyond necessity', i.e. that causal superposition is not allowed." Occam's razor is not the principle that something cannot have multiple causes. It is the principle that in general we should  prefer a simpler explanation that requires postulating fewer things in order to explain something.  Many things do have multiple causes, and it is dead wrong to claim that causal superposition (assuming multiple causes of a single effect) is not allowed. Very many things do have multiple causes. 
• "Simple systems can be conscious: a minimally conscious photodiode."  This is a followed by text claiming that a tiny unit called a photodiode is minimally conscious.  Since a modern digital camera contains very many such photodiodes (one for each pixel captured), integrated information theory would seem to predict that every digital camera is substantially conscious -- an idea that is extremely nonsensical.  

No, this is not conscious

Later in the article we have an inaccurate appeal to one of the phoniest myths of neuroscientists: the claim that split brain patients have two different minds. We read this:

"Under special circumstances, such as after split brain surgery, the main complex may split into two main complexes, both having high ΦMax. There is solid evidence that in such cases consciousness itself splits in two individual consciousnesses that are unaware of each other."  

No such evidence exists. A similar bogus claim is made in another article on integrated information theory appearing on the www.integratedinformation.org site (one authored by Giulio Tononi, one of the three authors mentioned above): "It is well established that, after the complete section of the corpus callosum—the roughly 200 million fibers that connect the cortices of the two hemispheres—consciousness is split in two: there are two separate 'flows' of experience, one associated with the left hemisphere and one with the right hemispheres." That claim is untrue. To the contrary, in 2014 the wikipedia.org article on split-brain patients stated the following:

"In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults."

In the video here we see a split-brain patient who seems like a pretty normal person, not at all someone with “two minds." And at the beginning of the video here the same patient says that after such a split-brain operation “you don't notice it” and that you don't feel any different than you did before – hardly what someone would say if the operation had produced “two minds” in someone. And the video here about a person with a split brain from birth shows us what is clearly someone with one mind, not two. 

A  scientific study published in 2017 set the record straight on split-brain patients. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”

The press release states the following: “According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients.” The paper states, “These findings suggest that severing the cortical connections between hemispheres splits visual perception, but does not create two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.”  The recent article here in Psychology Today describes the bizarre experiment that was used to make the groundless claim that split-brain patients have two minds. It was some experiment based only on visual perception, using some strange experimental setup unlike anyone normally encounters. The article shreds to pieces claims that results from such an experiment show that split-brain patients have two minds:

"Not so fast. There are several reasons to question the conclusions Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others sought to draw. First, both split-brain patients and people closest to them report that no major changes in the person have occurred after the surgery. When you communicate with the patient, you never get the sense that the there are now different people living in the patient's head.

This would be very puzzling if the mind was really split. Currently, you are the only conscious person in your neocortex. You consciously perceive your entire visual field, and you control your whole body. However, if your mind splits, this would dramatically change. You would become two people: 'lefty' and 'righty.' 'Lefty' would only see what is in the right visual field and control the right side of the body while 'righty' would see what’s in the left visual field and control the left side of the body. Both 'lefty' and 'righty' would be half-blind and half-paralyzed. It would seem to each of them that another person is in charge of half of the body.

Yet, patients never indicate that it feels as though someone else is controlling half of the body. The patients’ loved ones don’t report noticing a dramatic change in the person after the surgery either. Could we all — patients themselves, their family members, and neutral observers — miss the signs that a single person has been replaced by two people? If you suddenly lost control of half of your body, could you fail to notice? Could you fail to notice if the two halves of your spouse’s or child’s body are controlled by two different minds?"

A 2020 paper states this about split-brain patientis: " Apart from a number of anecdotal incidents in the subacute phase following the surgery, these patients seem to behave in a socially ordinary manner and they report feeling unchanged after the operation (Bogen, Fisher, & Vogel, 1965; Pinto et al., 2017a; R. W. Sperry, 1968; R. Sperry, 1984)."  Misleading statements by neuroscientists are extremely common, and claims by some of them that normal-speaking and normal-acting split-brain patients have two minds (based merely on differing results produced in very weird artificial experimental setups not like real-world cases) is one of the most egregious examples of inaccurate speech by neuroscientists. 

What we have in the "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0" paper is mainly metaphysics following the opague oracular style of Hegel and Heidegger, often careless and poorly reasoned metaphysics. The claim often made that integrated information theory is a "scientific theory of consciousness" is untrue. Integrated information theory is a very errant metaphysical theory that includes a few appeals to scientific observations, to give a little scientific flavor to its gibberish gobbledygook.  The most important reference the theory makes to an alleged scientific observation is a bogus claim that splitting a brain by severing the corpus callosum produces two  minds, something that has never actually been observed, with the actual observations telling us that no such thing occurs. 

Besides inaccurately predicting that split-brain patients should have two minds, integrated information theory inaccurately predicts that "widespread lesions" of the cortex should cause unconsciousness. In the scholarpedia.org article on the theory, Giulio Tononi states this: 

"IT provides a principled and parsimonious way to account for why certain brain regions appear to be essential for our consciousness while others do not. For example, widespread lesions of the cerebral cortex lead to loss of consciousness, and local lesions or stimulations of various cortical areas and tracts can affect its content (for example, the experience of color)."

To the contrary, it is a fact that many epileptic patients with severe seizures underwent hemispherectomy operations in which half of the brain (including half of the cortex) was removed, without any major effect on either consciousness or intelligence.  Many of John's Lorber's patients with good intelligence and normal consciousness had lost most of their cortex.  A French person who held a job as a civil servant was found to have "little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue." In the paper here we read on page 1 of a case reported by Martel in 1823 of a boy who after age five lost all of his senses except hearing, and became bed-confined. Until death he 'seemed mentally unimpaired.'  But after he died, an autopsy was done which found that apart from “residues of meninges" there was "no trace of a brain" found inside the skull. This was good consciousness, with little or no cortex. In the same paper we read of a person who had a normal life despite having "very little cortex"  because of hydrocephalus in which brain tissue is replaced by fluid:

"A man was examined because of his headache, and to his physicians' surprise, he had an 'incredibly large' hydrocephalus. Villinger, the director of the Cognitive Neurology Department, stated that this man had 'almost no brain,' only 'a very thin layer of cortical tissue.' This man led an unremarkable life, and his hydrocephalus was only discovered by chance (Hasler, 2016, p. 18)"

Postscript:  Below is a quote from a scientific paper "The integrated information theory of

consciousness: A case of mistaken identity," a paper that refers to the theory's "failure to provide

a credible account of consciousness"::

"Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by

directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of

IIT’s measure of consciousness, phi (Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to

key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances.

Our analysis shows that IIT’s identification of consciousness with the causal efficacy with

which differentiated networks accomplish global information transfer (which is what Φ in

fact measures) is mistaken. This misidentification has the consequence of requiring the attribution of consciousness to a range of natural systems and artifacts that include, but are not

limited to, large-scale electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, some electronic circuit

boards, and social networks. Instead of treating this consequence of the theory as a disconfirmation, IIT embraces it. By regarding these systems as bearers of consciousness ex hypothesi,

IIT is led toward the orbit of panpsychist ideation. This departure from science as we know it

can be avoided by recognizing the functional misattribution at the heart of IIT’s identity

claim."

In the paper "On the axiomatic foundations of the integrated information theory of consciousness" a philosopher makes criticism similar to some of mine above, saying that the theory's "axioms" are invalid:

" I then examine the five axioms of IIT, asking: what each axiom means, whether it is indeed axiomatic and whether it could constrain a theory of consciousness. I argue that none of the five alleged axioms is able to play the role that is required of it, either because it fails to qualify as axiomatic or because it fails to impose a substantive constraint on a theory of consciousness."