Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind online Seminar

We will welcome Azenet Lopez (CVBE, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), for the following presentation :

Integrated Information Theory and the windows of conscious integration
According to the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), high amounts of informational integration indicate presence of consciousness within a system of interacting physical units. Yet, a well-known objection is that this account ascribes conscious experiences to systems that should not have any, such as electrical grids or social networks. Even in the human brain, our paradigmatic consciousness-bearing system, many integrative processes occur without any accompanying experience. In this talk, I argue for what I think is the most promising avenue for IIT to tackle these worries in line with the cognitive science of informational integration. Building on Liad Mudrik and colleagues’ windows of integration hypothesis, I argue that only those physical systems that have (something like) an attentional mechanism can be candidate substrates of consciousness. While this proposal might certainly not be welcome by IIT’s orthodoxy, I argue that it is a friendly supplementation that preserves the theory’s core tenets while at the same time strengthening its empirical grounds.

Link:https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/j/92782580594?pwd=a5p3WfunQQxJICrjJaUenFJFzmllbx.1