But Tononi has not yet taken his theory to the phenomenological/experiential level and it is doubtful, given his current definition of 'information', that he can ultimately do so. Searle clarifies this in his NYT review.
What Searle clarifies is what I originally pointed out regarding IIT:
IIT provides a theory of how living organisms produce experiences (qualia) but not how this experience (qualia) becomes aware of itself. Indeed, this goes way, way back to my first posts in this thread where I outline streams of experience vs self-aware streams of experience.
Dropbox - Searle 2013 NYRB - review Koch Tononi IIT.pdf
@Searle
There is no doubt some information in every conscious state in the ordinary content sense of
information. Even if I just have a pain, I have information, for example that it hurts and that I
am injured. But once you recognize that all the cases given by Koch and Tononi are forms of
information relative to an observer, then it seems to me that their approach is incoherent. The
matching relations themselves are not information until a conscious agent treats them as such.
But that treatment cannot itself explain consciousness because it requires consciousness. It is
just an example of consciousness at work.
But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater!
IIT may not explain self-aware experience, but it may provide a good working hypothesis of how experience arises. I believe this is what Chalmers meant when he said it was a good theory, but didn't answer the hard problem of how cognition and experience interact.
Note: This is exactly why Jaynes says organisms which produce experience can still have a "nothing" what it's like to be. Recall blindsight: the information can be there, but if there is no awareness, there is no "what it's like."
The paradox of the tree falling in the forest is relevant here. Does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it? Here
hear means to give the sound waves/information
meaning.
Can information be considered "experience" if no
one is there to experience it (give it meaning)? That is what Searle is saying.
Tonini says the information/experience is there, but Searle says "not if no one is there to give it meaning."
So perhaps rather than "stream of experience" it's more accurate to say "stream of integrated information." But, once this "stream of integrated information" becomes aware of itself, "it
then becomes as "stream of experience."
I think this relates to the Phenomenological position that all experience requires self-awareness.
IIT explains the experience, but not the awareness of the experience.
(As a side note, Searle has interesting ideas about consciousness. He is what I might call an Uber Monist. Not only does he think consciousness is a purely biological phenomena, he believes only biological processes can give rise to consciousness. He view AI/AGI as a form of dualism! Thus, I'd love to hear Searle's response to David Deutsch.
David Deutsch – On Artificial Intelligence
Despite this long record of failure,
AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the
universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. ...
What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains
how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which
algorithmspossess that functionality and which do not.
I'm not done with this article yet, but it is an interesting one.
I believe what DD is saying is just what Searle - indeed many thinkers - is asking: How can information make meaning of
itself (another way of saying
self-aware experience)?
Edit: I need to take a step back; Looks like DD is asking: How does information make
meaning!
I had said earlier that I hadn't read any books on consciousness, but indeed I have. In college I read two books by
Hofstadter. One of them being, "I am a strange loop." In the book, he talks about self-aware experience (my phrase) arising via the phenomena of a
strange loop. An idea that is clearly not mine (a la Peterson) but which has influenced my thinking on how consciousness arises.
Hofstadter via wiki:
In
I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows:
And yet when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (pp. 101-102)
) that life and self-aware experience are like nothing else in our universe.
