Why Some Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is a State of Matter (2014)
Looking at the ArXIV article, the key ideas apparently come from &quot;Consciousness  as  Integrated  Information:  a  Provisional Manifesto,&quot; by Giulio Tononi, who is a psychiatrist in Wisconsin.[1]  His two big claims are that, for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to have two separate traits:<p>1. Information: It has to have a large repertoire of accessible  states, i.e.,  the  ability  to  store  a large amount of information.<p>2. Integration: This information must be integrated into a unified  whole, i.e.,  it  must  be impossible to decompose the system into nearly independent parts, because otherwise these parts would subjectively feel like two separate conscious entities.<p>1) is reasonable, although it doesn&#x27;t say much about how much memory is required.  2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don&#x27;t work that way. They have at least a hundred or so subunits handling different functions. Some are very specific, such as face recognition.  Tononi says that in his paper: &quot;different parts of the cerebral cortex are specialized for different functions, yet a vast network of connections allows these parts to interact profusely.&quot; So he admits it&#x27;s not one big component; it&#x27;s a network of components with explicit, limited connectivity.<p>Where Tonini is coming from is the concept of &quot;qualia&quot;.[2] This is a philosophical concept, roughly &quot;The &#x27;what it is like&#x27; character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.&quot;  Toroni hypothesizes that qualia can be (are?) represented as points in a space of 2^n dimensions.  He writes &quot;Each axis is labeled with the probability p for that state, going from 0 to 1, so that a repertoire (i.e.,a probability distribution on the possible states of the complex) corresponds to a point in Q (Fig. 5).&quot; This is similar to the internal state of an artificial neural network.<p>The physics paper conjectures that if only we had some materials (?) called &quot;computronium&quot; and &quot;perceptronium&quot;, we could get work done in qualia space, through a process where energy is removed from the system in a way vaguely similar to simulated annealing. There&#x27;s a lot of math and discussion around the idea that some randomness has to be applied to make the thing go; not enough, and it stalls out; too much, and it&#x27;s just noise. There&#x27;s a suggestion that certain forms of noise will make it work better.  All this sound vaguely similar to the way the random initialization of ANNs matters a lot, and recent work has made ANNs better by choosing the random initial conditions in certain ways.  Neither paper mentions what&#x27;s going on in the ANN world, yet they seem to be approaching some of the same concepts. I&#x27;m not an ANN expert; someone in that field may have a better idea of whether the concepts are related.<p>All this is from the &quot;consciousness is special and magic&quot; crowd. Both authors assume that is the case, and try to reason from there.  That&#x27;s closer to theology than physics.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biolbull.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;215&#x2F;3&#x2F;216.full.pdf+html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biolbull.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;215&#x2F;3&#x2F;216.full.pdf+html</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qualia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qualia</a>