Well said, though I have to note that analogies often oversimplify what is being compared, and I think that's true in this case. Tononi was misleading in his averring that his IIT takes account of the phenomenology of consciousness, which is far more than a description of 'what appears' -- it is primarily an investigation of how things appear to consciousness and result in conceptualizations of world, self, others, and being. A shallow, uncritical, sense of the term 'phenomenology' is often used in science to acknowledge 'how things or processes look' from an unacknowledged, presumptively 'objective', perspective. (These different uses of the word 'phenomenology' constitute another example of the limitations and resulting ambiguity of terminology we deal with continually in exploring consciousness and mind). In phenomenology as expressed in phenomenological philosophy and applied in many research disciplines, the interaction of consciousness with 'what appears' is already understood as a complex phenomenon involving the subjective as well as the objective poles of experience of things in the world, which is what requires investigation and explanation.
In information theory as Tononi builds upon it, as in objective science in general, lived experience in the world is not explored, nor is its ontological significance recognized. Rather, the 'objective' pole of reality is taken to be complete in itself and 'closed'. More than a century after the beginnings of quantum science it has finally become a commonplace in science and information theory that the perceiver affects that which he or she perceives and that that-which-we-can-know comes to us through the perspectives available to consciousness and mind (by 'mind' I mean reflective consciousness, thought based on the analysis of one's experience of things and world, and the construction of theories of reality built on that platform which, again, from a phenomenological perspective is where the rubber meets the road). Tononi's theory is postulated on a purely abstract concept of 'information' based only on 'data-in', and his claim is that a sufficient amount of incoming data {incoming where? in the brain, which he certainly appears to see as undifferentiable from an inorganic information-processing machine} generates consciousness.
It seems apparent to me that his approach works with only half of the equation involved in conscious experience, which in organic life requires temporally embodied experience of that which lies outside information-processing activities in the brain. No doubt information is processed in the brain, but the data processed there originates in the organism's lived experience in the world. The Froese paper I linked for Michael several days ago makes this critical difference very clear and traces the ways in which information theory as developed in Cybernetics and the computational interpretation of mind, side by side with the dominant objectivist paradigm in science, has taken our attention off the site at which we can, and must, understand the nature of 'reality' -- the site at which the world becomes knowable to us, the experience within which we are able to approach 'what-is' as a compresence, a being-together, of consciousness and the physical/phenomenal world in which it has evolved.
Sorry for the ramble, but I think the issues I raise are well-founded (and explained better in the Froese paper as well as in the articles and books published since the late 90s by Varela and Thompson).
Would you repost a link to that paper? Indeed, Tononi's model would have to be different from standard information-processing models in computers and robotics since he has to deal with the biological/neurological complexity of various levels of information processing which have clearly developed in the human brain as a result of the increasingly complex experiences of our evolutionary forebears. But his theory and his model remain reductive to the extent that for him everything takes place and has taken place computationally within the brain case rather than in the embodied transactions with the physical environment by and through which consciousness in biological evolution has reached the point we're at today.
I don't disagree and I doubt that anyone would.
I think Tononi acknowledges and perhaps clarifies the complexity of information processing in the brain, but his model is too abstract and isolated from experience to help us understand how consciousness evolved and continues to evolve through its increasing interactions with the environing world, i.e., the lifeworld.
Quantum interaction and entanglement clearly produce primordial interactions and relationships out of which physical systems develop, amplify, interact, and produce the physical universe as we see it today, and we are equally the result of that history given the generation of life at some point in the process of that history. What you call the 'macro-phenomenal' mind might be described, then, as an effect, an outcome, of the production of life, the inception of biological-informational processes in the universe, succeeding information processing of a more abstractable [purely physical] kind explained in physics. At that point, it seems to me, there is a qualitative change in information processing that generates protoconsciousness in the autopoiesis of the first cell. Some theorists think that protoconsciousness exists in nature even before the emergence of life (thus Chalmers' view that q particles might have 'mental' aspects). We can't know at this point, if ever, that that is the case, but we can certainly appreciate the reality of increasing subjectivity experienced in (and in a sense also experienced by) nature beginning in the autopoesis of the cell and developing over eons of time in the evolution of varieties of life on our planet. Do we respond to nature only at the experiential level of its macrophenomenal appearances to our species and our closest forebears, or do we respond also to information entangled and embedded permanently and holographically in the universe from its beginnings, information that somehow remains available to us subconsciously through the collective unconscious? Are paranormal experiences and psi capabilities perhaps ultimately explainable by the entanglement of information over vast distances and time in the evolution of the universe, to which each conscious being is connected, within which each consciousness is involved?
OK, I'll think of it as an analogy then.
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