Koch Compares Integrated Information Theory with Panpsychism

Neuroscientist Christof Koch states that Integrated Information Theory (IIT) shares many intuitions with panpsychism, in particular that “consciousness is an intrinsic fundamental property of reality, is graded, and can be found in small amounts in simple physical systems.” Unlike panpsychism, Koch continues, IIT “articulates which systems are conscious and which ones are not [partially] resolving panpsychism's combination problem and why consciousness can be adaptive.” The systemic weakness of panpsychism, or any other-ism, he says, “is that they fail to offer a protracted conceptual, let alone empirical, research program that yields novel insights or proposes new experiments” (Koch, 2021).

Shared Intuitions and Key Differences

While uncertainty in theoretical development and inconceivability of empirical experiments are indeed weaknesses, should they ipso facto disqualify the theory? Experimental verification of string theory seems impossible because the energy levels required are many orders of magnitude larger than instrumentation could ever be built, and while some argue that this incapacity to be falsified should indeed disqualify string theory as a scientific theory, many string theorists disagree, betting their careers on it.

Koch's comparing IIT with panpsychism provides insight into both. Although admitting “I've always had a secret crush on the singular beauty of panpsychism,” Koch counts himself among those surprised by its resurgence. He claims that IIT addresses several major shortcomings of panpsychism—“it explains why consciousness is adaptive, it explains the different qualitative aspects of consciousness (why a ‘kind of blue’ feels different from a stinky Limburger cheese), and it head-on addresses the combination problem”—per IIT's exclusion postulate, only systems with a maximum of Φ have intrinsic existence and are conscious” (Koch, 2021).

The Exclusion Postulate and Proof-of-Principle

The exclusion postulate, Koch explains, “dictates whether or not an aggregate of entities—ants in a colony, cells making up a tree, bees in a hive, starlings in a murmurating flock, an octopus with its eight semi-autonomous arms, and so on—exist as a unitary conscious entity or not.”

Koch claims that IIT “offers a startling counter-example to Goff's claim that qualitative aspects of conscious experience cannot be captured by quantitative considerations”—“a detailed, mathematical account of how the phenomenology of two-dimensional space, say an empty canvas, can be fully accounted for in terms of intrinsic causal powers of the associated physical substrate, here a very simple, grid-like neural network” (Koch, 2021, quoting Huang, n.d.). Integrated Information Theory may well be wrong, Koch says, but it “provides proof-of-principle for how quantitative primary qualities (here intrinsic causal power of simple model neurons that can be numerically computed; it doesn't get more quantitative than that) correspond to secondary qualities—the experience of looking at a blank wall” (Koch, 2021). (For Goff's response, see “Goff’s Panpsychism.”)