• Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0: Formulating the properties of phenomenal existence in physical terms
    with Larissa Albantakis, Leonardo Barbosa, Graham Findlay, Matteo Grasso, Andrew Haun, William Marshall, William G. P. Mayner, Alireza Zaeemzadeh, Melanie Boly, Bjørn Juel, Shuntaro Sasai, Keiko Fujii, Isaac David, Jeremiah Hendren, and Giulio Tononi
    Arxiv. 2022.
    This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0. IIT aims to account for the properties of experience in physical (operational) terms. It identifies the essential properties of experience (axioms), infers the necessary and sufficient properties that its substrate must satisfy (postulates), and expresses them in mathematical terms. In principle, the postulates can be applied to any system of units in a state to determine whether it is conscious, to what degree, and in what way. IIT of…Read more
  •  63
    Causal reductionism and causal structures
    with Matteo Grasso, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi
    Nature Neuroscience 24. 2021.
    Causal reductionism is the widespread assumption that there is no room for additional causes once we have accounted for all elementary mechanisms within a system. Due to its intuitive appeal, causal reductionism is prevalent in neuroscience: once all neurons have been caused to fire or not to fire, it seems that causally there is nothing left to be accounted for. Here, we argue that these reductionist intuitions are based on an implicit, unexamined notion of causation that conflates causation wi…Read more
  •  328
    Consciousness and the Fallacy of Misplaced Objectivity
    with Francesco Ellia, Jeremiah Hendren, Matteo Grasso, Csaba Kozma, Garrett Mindt, Andrew Haun, Larissa Albantakis, Melanie Boly, and Giulio Tononi
    Neuroscience of Consciousness 7 (2): 1-12. 2021.
    Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically— its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be…Read more
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    Can semi-supervised learning explain incorrect beliefs about categories?
    with Charles W. Kalish, Timothy T. Rogers, and Xiaojin Zhu
    Cognition 120 (1): 106-118. 2011.
    Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences—learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership—influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then made a large number of unsupervised categorization decisions about new items. In all three experiments, the unsupervised experience altered participants’ …Read more