The strength of weak integrated information theory.

The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is divisive: while some believe it provides an unprecedentedly powerful approach to address the 'hard problem', others dismiss it on grounds that it is untestable. We argue that the appeal and applicability of IIT can be greatly widened if we distinguish two flavours of the theory: strong IIT, which identifies consciousness with specific properties associated with maxima of integrated information; and weak IIT, which tests pragmatic hypotheses relating aspects of consciousness to broader measures of information dynamics. We review challenges for strong IIT, explain how existing empirical findings are well explained by weak IIT without needing to commit to the entirety of strong IIT, and discuss the outlook for both flavours of IIT.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences

• Publication date

  2022-06-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tics.2022.04.008PMID 35659757
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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