{"id":1893,"date":"2014-06-25T17:27:39","date_gmt":"2014-06-25T21:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1893"},"modified":"2017-01-13T09:22:40","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T14:22:40","slug":"integrated-information-theory-virgil-griffith-opines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1893","title":{"rendered":"Integrated Information Theory: Virgil Griffith opines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1799\">two<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1823\">discussions<\/a>\u00a0about Integrated Information Theory that we had a month ago on this blog? \u00a0You know, the ones where I argued that IIT fails because &#8220;the brain might be an expander, but not every expander is a brain&#8221;; where IIT inventor Giulio Tononi wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scottaaronson.com\/tononi.docx\">14-page response<\/a> biting the bullet with mustard; and where famous philosopher of mind David Chalmers, and\u00a0leading consciousness researcher (and IIT supporter) Christof Koch, also got involved in the <a href=\"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1823#comments\">comments section<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>OK, so\u00a0one more\u00a0thing about that. \u00a0Virgil Griffith recently completed his\u00a0PhD under\u00a0Christof Koch at Caltech&#8212;as he puts it, &#8220;immersing [him]self in the nitty-gritty of IIT for the past 6.5 years.&#8221; \u00a0This morning, Virgil sent me two striking letters about\u00a0his thoughts on the recent IIT exchanges on this blog. \u00a0He asked me to share them here, something that I&#8217;m\u00a0more than happy to do:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.scottaaronson.com\/response-p1.pdf\">Virgil&#8217;s first letter<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.scottaaronson.com\/response-p2.pdf\">Virgil&#8217;s second letter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Reading these letters, what\u00a0jumped out at me&#8212;given Virgil&#8217;s long apprenticeship\u00a0in the heart of IIT-land&#8212;was the amount of <em>agreement<\/em> between my views and his. \u00a0In particular, Virgil agrees with my central contention that \u03a6, as it stands, can at most be a <em>necessary<\/em> condition for consciousness, not a <em>sufficient<\/em> condition, and remarks that &#8220;[t]o move IIT from talked about to accepted among hard scientists, it may be necessary for [Tononi] to wash his hands of sufficiency claims.&#8221; \u00a0He agrees that a lack of mathematical clarity in the definition of \u03a6\u00a0is a &#8220;major problem in the IIT literature,&#8221; commenting that &#8220;IIT needs more mathematically inclined people at its helm.&#8221; \u00a0He also says he agrees &#8220;110%&#8221; that the lack of a derivation of the form of\u00a0\u03a6 from IIT&#8217;s\u00a0axioms is &#8220;a pothole in the theory,&#8221; and further agrees 110% that the current prescriptions for computing \u03a6 contain many unjustified idiosyncrasies.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, given the level of\u00a0agreement here, there&#8217;s not all that\u00a0much\u00a0for me to rebut, defend, or clarify!<\/p>\n<p>I suppose\u00a0there are a few things.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Just as a clarifying remark, in a few\u00a0places where it looks from the formatting like Virgil is responding to something <em>I<\/em> said (for example,\u00a0&#8220;The conceptual structure is unified&#8212;it cannot be decomposed into independent components&#8221; and &#8220;Clearly, a theory of consciousness must be able to provide an adequate account for such seemingly disparate but largely uncontroversial facts&#8221;), he&#8217;s actually responding to something <em>Giulio<\/em> said (and that I, at most, quoted).<\/li>\n<li>Virgil says, correctly, that Giulio\u00a0would respond to my central objection against IIT by challenging my &#8220;intuition for things being unconscious.&#8221; \u00a0(Indeed, because Giulio <em>did<\/em> respond, there&#8217;s no\u00a0need to speculate about how he <em>would<\/em> respond!) \u00a0However, Virgil then goes on to explicate Giulio&#8217;s response using the analogy of temperature (interestingly, the same analogy <em>I<\/em> used for a different purpose). \u00a0He points out how counterintuitive it would be for Kelvin&#8217;s contemporaries to accept that &#8220;even the coldest thing you&#8217;ve touched actually has substantial heat in it,&#8221; and remarks: &#8220;I find this &#8216;Kelvin scale for C&#8217; analogy makes the panpsychism much more palatable.&#8221; \u00a0The trouble\u00a0is that I never\u00a0objected to IIT&#8217;s panpsychism <em>per se<\/em>: I only objected to its seemingly <em>arbitrary and selective<\/em> panpsychism. \u00a0It&#8217;s\u00a0one thing for a theory\u00a0to ascribe some amount of consciousness to a 2D grid or an expander graph. \u00a0It&#8217;s quite another for a theory to ascribe <em>vastly more<\/em> consciousness to those things than it ascribes to a human brain&#8212;even while denying consciousness to things that are intuitively similar but organized a little differently (say, a 1D grid). \u00a0A better\u00a0analogy here would be if Kelvin&#8217;s theory of temperature had predicted, not merely that all ordinary things had some heat in them, but that\u00a0<em>an ice cube was hotter than the Sun<\/em>, even though\u00a0a popsicle was, of course, colder than the Sun. \u00a0(The ice cube, you see, &#8220;integrates heat&#8221; in a way that the popsicle doesn&#8217;t&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>Virgil imagines\u00a0two ways that an IIT proponent could respond to my argument involving the cerebellum&#8212;the argument that accuses IIT proponents of changing the rules of the game according to convenience\u00a0(a 2D grid has a large \u03a6? \u00a0suck it up and accept it; your intuitions about a grid&#8217;s lack of consciousness\u00a0are irrelevant. \u00a0the human cerebellum has a small \u03a6? \u00a0ah, <em>that&#8217;s<\/em> a victory for IIT, since the cerebellum is intuitively unconscious). \u00a0The trouble\u00a0is that both of Virgil&#8217;s imagined responses are by reference to the IIT axioms. \u00a0But I wasn&#8217;t talking about the axioms themselves, but about whether we&#8217;re allowed to <em>validate<\/em> the axioms, by checking their consequences against earlier, pre-theoretic intuitions. \u00a0And I was pointing out that Giulio seemed happy to do so\u00a0when the results &#8220;went in IIT&#8217;s\u00a0favor&#8221; (in the cerebellum example), even though he lectured me against doing so in the cases of the expander and the 2D grid (cases where IIT does less well, to put it mildly, at capturing our intuitions).<\/li>\n<li>Virgil chastises me for ridiculing Giulio&#8217;s phenomenological argument for the consciousness of a 2D grid by way of\u00a0nursery rhymes: &#8220;Just because it feels like something to see a wall, doesn&#8217;t mean it feels like something to be a wall. \u00a0You can smell a rose, and the rose can smell good, but that doesn&#8217;t mean the rose can smell you.&#8221; \u00a0Virgil amusingly comments: &#8220;Even when both are inebriated, I&#8217;ve never heard [Giulio] nor [Christof] separately or collectively imply anything like this. \u00a0Moreover, they&#8217;re each far too clueful to fall for something so trivial.&#8221; \u00a0For my part, I agree that neither Giulio nor Christof would ever advocate\u00a0something as transparently\u00a0silly\u00a0as, &#8220;if you have a rich inner experience when thinking about X, then that&#8217;s evidence X itself is conscious.&#8221; \u00a0And I apologize if I seemed to suggest they would. \u00a0To clarify, my point was not that Giulio was making such an\u00a0absurd statement, but rather that, assuming he wasn&#8217;t, <em>I didn&#8217;t know what he <strong>was<\/strong> trying to say in the passages of his that I&#8217;d just quoted at length.<\/em>\u00a0 The silly thing seemed like the &#8220;obvious&#8221; reading of his words, and my hermeneutic powers were unequal to the task of figuring out\u00a0the non-silly, non-obvious reading that he surely intended.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Anyway, there&#8217;s much more to Virgil&#8217;s letters than the above&#8212;including answers\u00a0to some of my subsidiary questions about the details of IIT (e.g., how to handle unbalanced partitions, and the mathematical meanings of terms like &#8220;mechanism&#8221; and &#8220;system of mechanisms&#8221;). \u00a0Also, in parts of the letters, Virgil&#8217;s main concern is neither to agree with me nor to agree with Giulio, but rather to offer\u00a0his own ideas, developed in the course of\u00a0his PhD work, for how to move forward and fix\u00a0some of the problems with IIT. \u00a0All in all, these\u00a0are\u00a0recommended reads for anyone who&#8217;s been following this debate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the\u00a0two discussions\u00a0about Integrated Information Theory that we had a month ago on this blog? \u00a0You know, the ones where I argued that IIT fails because &#8220;the brain might be an expander, but not every expander is a brain&#8221;; where IIT inventor Giulio Tononi wrote a 14-page response biting the bullet with mustard; and where [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphysical-spouting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1893"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1895,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893\/revisions\/1895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}