CogNation Episode 52: The IIT controversy with Felipe De Brigard
Nov 29, 2023
In this discussion, Felipe De Brigard, a philosophy and psychology professor at Duke University, critiques Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as pseudoscience. He delves into the complexities of consciousness and the shortcomings of existing computational theories in neuroscience. The conversation also covers the roles of glial cells and the challenges of scientific validation in consciousness research. De Brigard reflects on the evolving understanding of consciousness and introduces thought-provoking insights on memory, forgiveness, and their implications in real-world contexts.
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Felipe's Interdisciplinary Background
- Felipe De Brigard shares his background straddling philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, highlighting early struggles with ambiguous definitions of attention and consciousness.
- He illustrates confusion in consciousness studies due to conflicting operational definitions affecting experimental results.
IIT's Top-Down Approach
- Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is unique because it starts from consciousness itself and tries to formulate self-evident axioms to explain it.
- Felipe sees IIT as a metaphysical theory that attempts a top-down approach unlike empirical brain-based ones.
Challenges in Applying Phi
- IIT proposes a quantifiable measure of consciousness called phi, but calculating phi for real brains is intractable and biologically oversimplified.
- The theory struggles to identify what neural units it applies to and how to measure causality realistically in the brain.