I find the letter baffling. IIT is fundamentally a bunch of math. The math may be wrong or it may map inappropriately into the empirical world, but declaring it incorrect (which underlies a legitimate question) is entirely different from declaring it pseudoscience, which underlies a subjective judgment fraught with political and other types of debatable perspectives. To me, the critical point is that, by such standards, if someone tries hard enough, any theory can be argued to be pseudoscience. It smacks of prejudice. At least some of the theorists signing the letter should know better.
Pseudoscience is a rhetorically powerful word, perfect for deceiving people without adequate knowledge of philosophy, which includes the majority of scientists .
Well, you might then wonder about the various meanings and effects (causality) of the bizarre communication conventions we have. Reality is pretty weird!!
No doubt, a ton of prejudice! Doesn’t hold water with me. It appears to be like the land I was freed from when we arrived decades ago. Exactly the tactics used in fascism. Who knew?! 🤦🏽♀️
I think it's especially sad because at least some of the signees are supposed to be actively promoting the field of consciousness research and the effect of this letter will be the exact opposite.
That part which struck me here: that “some actually promote the studies of consciousness.” I fear for myself and humanity when presented with the latest attempt to destroy free- thinking, fun- loving life versus disaster upon disaster for personal and political gains. They all are “conscious” of the fact that we all have an end in the physical sense. Acting on such ignorance also makes empires fall. The best part about this and your wonderfully written words here is: that there is no such thing as life without consciousness. Nature. Such is Life. Thank you for producing such an excellent piece and sharing it with us! “Have no fear. Underdog is here!” ~Adriana
Sounds reflective of these times. As if the energy of fear has seeped into science, along with so many other fields of ideas Into the greater public. And, if anything is going lead humanity to an inglorious end at a fast pace, it's the energy of fear. Fear, the driver of greed, hate, and bias. I'm not a scientist but am alway fascinated by science. I spent some time with Nobel winner Feynman,. and was a friend of Jonas Salk. I worked with the latter, putting together a group of brilliant and notable from science, film, math, etc to talk about vision for a life affirming. Both were what I call renaissance personalities... active multiple interests from music to poetry. 3 of the group were Nobel winners. Jonas was a mystic. Feynman a practical joker which wasn't uncommon at Cal Tech in those days.
but that was then and this is now. As I see it, fear as expanded into a massive energy field, which of course includes greed, jealously and hate. I believe it's very important to step back, be calm,. I do believe in consciousness studies but it's scary to a lot of people.
Perhaps, we need to ignore or step back from other's insanity and keep moving forward with those of like mind. Sparking ideas, laughing. making music..Consciously holding healing energy for others, for nature, the wild places, the wild creatures,....
Looks like everyone is learning to play the same narrative game: present your group as the serious levelheaded consensus; denounce your enemies as misinformation or some hate crime; demand that media gatekeepers follow your recommendation and censor or disqualify your enemies.
Brilliant post. The letter is a travesty. On top of just craven jealousy, my guess is that the scientific establishment doesn’t like some of the metaphysical implications of IIT. They also detect how philosophically informed the theory is. IIT makes you really think hard about consciousness. Really, really hard. I think IIT demands one revise their thinking about mereological questions as well in a way that can feel threatening to the “standard way” science has thought about entities and existence. No one who internalizes the concept of qualia space I suspect can really look at their own consciousness the same way again. Great post.
Informative, as usual Erik. As a layman, I've learned so much recently from reading your Substack and The World Behind the World.
One question I would love to see you explore in more detail is the potential for consciousness in machines. This article in Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-chatbot/) compares IIT to "computational" theories of consciousness, and touches on how each might or might not support conscious AIs. I would love to see these ideas explored further, especially in extrapolating the most likely models and architectures (hardware and software) for sentient machines.
This is one of those cases where suddenly the science of consciousness has become super relevant! I never expected that in my lifetime, to be honest - suddenly we need to make judgments about consciousness for entities that are (a) very different from us, and (b) capable of claiming consciousness (they can be prompted to claim the opposite as well). I think the key take-away from an IIT perspective is that AI architecture would have to much more neuromorphic (that is, like a brain), compared to current systems, before the theory itself would grant them any consciousness.
I'm an evolutionarily-oriented behavioral biologist also actively interested in contemplative traditions. Although some days I might call myself a "mystical materialist," partly just due to the staggeringly infinite awesomeness of nature, I'm fundamentally a materialist. So, it looks to me like WE are conscious machines. Natural and artificial selection, the latter including high tech artificial selection (our reckless seeding of AGI, ASI), is bound to create many additional conscious machines. // Most of the time, being me, is "like being something." But describing what it's like results in unsatisfactory and impoverished verbal stumblings, which, moreover, are full of lies! Our descriptions of ourselves are socially efficacious ones, made up (nonconsciously?), and draw upon a lot of social coaching (somebody below mentions Chat GPT4 being coached on how to represent its consciousness - maybe not so different than humans). Our claims of consciousness generally are quite inflated, IMO. // With effort and help, however, we can have a much higher quality of consciousness in which more information is dynamically integrated, and therefore we think, feel, and sense more in the moment of experience than when we just are running passively, practically in a state of waking sleep, where what it's like being us is almost a blank compared to what's actually possible for a human. The hard problem of consciousness is actually getting some. Not that I'm not all for the scientific study of consciousness that the letter risks discouraging, and that was written in a state of low consciousness, conscientiousness, and conscience. FWIW.
I suspect that the problem here is trying to have the mental cake and eat it too. To explain consciousness on terms friendly to natural science means doing without subjective and qualitative properties. But since the target of explanation is subjective and qualitative properties, they've got to be in there somewhere. As soon as you attempt to squeeze blood from a stone, you're attracting partisans of blood and stones alike.
This is roughly the same backlash that Dennett attracts with his intentional stance, and for broadly the same reasons. There's not really a consistent theoretical position that gets you both a) the phenomenon of subjective awareness and b) an objective, observer-neutral theory of such. You either have to grant that the methods of natural science have to be open to new kinds of properties, or else you grant that experience is not how it appears. Both are tough sells.
A number of the most prominent signees of this letter are literally the sort of people whose careers have significantly centred around deflating the qualitative and subjective aspect of consciousness or promoting eliminative materialism more broadly.
Very much so. They're wrong, and the kind of wrong that can't be fixed by "doing more experiments", but that's where we are now with the understanding of mind. They don't want to understand it. That's just the excuse as they replace it by artificial mechanisms.
How did all those people come to agree on doing this? It seems like a contagion, like mob behavior. I suppose from now on scientists will sometimes defend or attack en masse like this instead of just doing science. We have entered the era where any publicly discussed issue is a matter of two (+) factions, each of which is the only one on the side of human decency.
Thank you for covering this sorry episode. The label of scientific misinformation seems to apply to the authors of the letter. I have no expertise in the field but everything you say about the rendition in the media of the results of the cooperative competition between the two theories corresponds to the impression from what I read.
I can imagine only two reasons behind the initiative: one is hostility toward Giulio Tononi (as one reader said, academics may find convenient to hide attacks on a colleague behind attacks on journalistic representations of his work); the other is hostility toward the practico-political implications that someone might draw at some point from the theory. The first explanation does not do honor to the authors of the letter as human beings; the other does not do honour to them as scientists. The two explanations may well coexist.
Oh dear! This seems like a disaster! The researchers seem like, rather than arguing against IIT (which is reasonable--I think IIT is false!), trying to just smear it publicly. This is not how science or philosophy ought to be done.
Sep 17, 2023·edited Sep 17, 2023Liked by Erik Hoel
I wonder whether some of the signatories are going to walk it back, given that some of the claims about us science journalists are clearly wrong. It often happens in academic disputes that, hesitant to criticize their colleagues directly, scholars aim their fire instead at journalists.
To focus for a moment on the actual science, what do you think of the Blums’ formalization of GWT?
I think attempts at formalization are to be applauded. I read it when it first came out. I think it would probably be very easy to construct a rather meaningless, behaviorally-dead system that satisfied the conditions (just like what people say invalidate IIT), but I'd have to look into the specifics.
Very astute analysis. I am totally a layperson on these topics, but I can't see how you are wrong about any of the arguments you make. Especially the last part, about the politics. I mean, really? If a scientific investigation leads us to question a politically popular belief, we should "cancel" that investigation?
You're right. I don't think that IIT is correct but it doesn't mean that iit is Pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is usually the term that describes charlatans that tries to sound like scientists, something like Deepak Chopra. It's wrong to call a scientific theory pseudoscience even if it's unfalsifiable. Science needs to be open for new creative and brave ideas.
Always a pleasure reading this, even if somewhat embattled.
I wonder how the "near world-famous" guys got roped into signing this thing, but yeah it seems irresponsible and sadly kinda lazy with regards to its critique.
I'm barely aware of the mentioned theories of consciousness (IIT included), but the appeal to media and academic politics instead of a constructive reproach is just low as far as science in general is concerned. With how much formalism (hence, points to engage with) IIT in particular exposes, it's doubly sad and kinda baffling.
Sep 17, 2023·edited Sep 17, 2023Liked by Erik Hoel
I appreciate your commentary on the silly letter. // "A Universe of Consciousness," by Edelman and Tononi, is one of the most impressive and perhaps profound books I've read by neuroscientists. I'm curious why Tononi gets credit for IIT in your commentary on the letter. Maybe the math of it, yes, and some minor (?) conceptual advances (like?). But the foundational conceptual model of IIT presented in U of C is principally attributable to Edelman, no? I'm not nit-picking; I would really like to understand why you give the credit to Tononi.
Well scientific credit is very difficult. Tononi is the sole author of the clearest origination of the theory, which is a paper from 2004 where the theory gets named. However, certainly if you go back and read, say, A Universe of Consciousness, you will indeed notice a lot of the same ideas are there, earlier, and with different names ("dynamic core" gets replaced with "integrated information complex" and so on). However, Tononi and Edelman are both co-authors of that work anyways, and Edelman didn't do much with it after Tononi left - Tononi, however, has continued developing the line of work for years. So I'm comfortable saying that he "originated" it.
"My competitor is getting media attention and I'm not!"
IIT has plenty of flaws, to be sure, but calling it pseudoscience seems like petty jealousy to me. Consciousness science will get nowhere if we're afraid to present bold theories.
W-T-F?! How did so many rational people get into this pitchfork brigade? Perhaps some of them did so unwittingly or too trustingly? I hope this is the case. What are they protecting the public from? What possible harm to the public episteme would accepting IIT as a legitimate hypothesis bring? I cannot think of a single one. Maybe I am not insightful enough to see the “danger”.
Perhaps it is the popularity of the “contest” that was staged? Maybe? But I certainly see harms from accepting their weak sauce argument. Basically they are just name-calling: “panpsychist commitments”.
But the attractiveness of the IIT theory is that it is NOT panpsychist. It is giving an operational “cell level” measure to assess no matter what the interpretive substrate actually is made of. This is the exact opposite of panpsychist hand waving. Or did I miss something?
I find the letter baffling. IIT is fundamentally a bunch of math. The math may be wrong or it may map inappropriately into the empirical world, but declaring it incorrect (which underlies a legitimate question) is entirely different from declaring it pseudoscience, which underlies a subjective judgment fraught with political and other types of debatable perspectives. To me, the critical point is that, by such standards, if someone tries hard enough, any theory can be argued to be pseudoscience. It smacks of prejudice. At least some of the theorists signing the letter should know better.
Pseudoscience is a rhetorically powerful word, perfect for deceiving people without adequate knowledge of philosophy, which includes the majority of scientists .
I don't see how a knowledge of philosophy would help.
Well, you might then wonder about the various meanings and effects (causality) of the bizarre communication conventions we have. Reality is pretty weird!!
No doubt, a ton of prejudice! Doesn’t hold water with me. It appears to be like the land I was freed from when we arrived decades ago. Exactly the tactics used in fascism. Who knew?! 🤦🏽♀️
what a sad sad thing. another example of the humanity of scientists and the eagerness to condemn the unfamiliar.
I think it's especially sad because at least some of the signees are supposed to be actively promoting the field of consciousness research and the effect of this letter will be the exact opposite.
That part which struck me here: that “some actually promote the studies of consciousness.” I fear for myself and humanity when presented with the latest attempt to destroy free- thinking, fun- loving life versus disaster upon disaster for personal and political gains. They all are “conscious” of the fact that we all have an end in the physical sense. Acting on such ignorance also makes empires fall. The best part about this and your wonderfully written words here is: that there is no such thing as life without consciousness. Nature. Such is Life. Thank you for producing such an excellent piece and sharing it with us! “Have no fear. Underdog is here!” ~Adriana
Sounds reflective of these times. As if the energy of fear has seeped into science, along with so many other fields of ideas Into the greater public. And, if anything is going lead humanity to an inglorious end at a fast pace, it's the energy of fear. Fear, the driver of greed, hate, and bias. I'm not a scientist but am alway fascinated by science. I spent some time with Nobel winner Feynman,. and was a friend of Jonas Salk. I worked with the latter, putting together a group of brilliant and notable from science, film, math, etc to talk about vision for a life affirming. Both were what I call renaissance personalities... active multiple interests from music to poetry. 3 of the group were Nobel winners. Jonas was a mystic. Feynman a practical joker which wasn't uncommon at Cal Tech in those days.
but that was then and this is now. As I see it, fear as expanded into a massive energy field, which of course includes greed, jealously and hate. I believe it's very important to step back, be calm,. I do believe in consciousness studies but it's scary to a lot of people.
Perhaps, we need to ignore or step back from other's insanity and keep moving forward with those of like mind. Sparking ideas, laughing. making music..Consciously holding healing energy for others, for nature, the wild places, the wild creatures,....
Scientists largely run on faith, it is fundamental to consciousness.
Looks like everyone is learning to play the same narrative game: present your group as the serious levelheaded consensus; denounce your enemies as misinformation or some hate crime; demand that media gatekeepers follow your recommendation and censor or disqualify your enemies.
Brilliant post. The letter is a travesty. On top of just craven jealousy, my guess is that the scientific establishment doesn’t like some of the metaphysical implications of IIT. They also detect how philosophically informed the theory is. IIT makes you really think hard about consciousness. Really, really hard. I think IIT demands one revise their thinking about mereological questions as well in a way that can feel threatening to the “standard way” science has thought about entities and existence. No one who internalizes the concept of qualia space I suspect can really look at their own consciousness the same way again. Great post.
Informative, as usual Erik. As a layman, I've learned so much recently from reading your Substack and The World Behind the World.
One question I would love to see you explore in more detail is the potential for consciousness in machines. This article in Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-chatbot/) compares IIT to "computational" theories of consciousness, and touches on how each might or might not support conscious AIs. I would love to see these ideas explored further, especially in extrapolating the most likely models and architectures (hardware and software) for sentient machines.
Fascinating...
This is one of those cases where suddenly the science of consciousness has become super relevant! I never expected that in my lifetime, to be honest - suddenly we need to make judgments about consciousness for entities that are (a) very different from us, and (b) capable of claiming consciousness (they can be prompted to claim the opposite as well). I think the key take-away from an IIT perspective is that AI architecture would have to much more neuromorphic (that is, like a brain), compared to current systems, before the theory itself would grant them any consciousness.
I'm an evolutionarily-oriented behavioral biologist also actively interested in contemplative traditions. Although some days I might call myself a "mystical materialist," partly just due to the staggeringly infinite awesomeness of nature, I'm fundamentally a materialist. So, it looks to me like WE are conscious machines. Natural and artificial selection, the latter including high tech artificial selection (our reckless seeding of AGI, ASI), is bound to create many additional conscious machines. // Most of the time, being me, is "like being something." But describing what it's like results in unsatisfactory and impoverished verbal stumblings, which, moreover, are full of lies! Our descriptions of ourselves are socially efficacious ones, made up (nonconsciously?), and draw upon a lot of social coaching (somebody below mentions Chat GPT4 being coached on how to represent its consciousness - maybe not so different than humans). Our claims of consciousness generally are quite inflated, IMO. // With effort and help, however, we can have a much higher quality of consciousness in which more information is dynamically integrated, and therefore we think, feel, and sense more in the moment of experience than when we just are running passively, practically in a state of waking sleep, where what it's like being us is almost a blank compared to what's actually possible for a human. The hard problem of consciousness is actually getting some. Not that I'm not all for the scientific study of consciousness that the letter risks discouraging, and that was written in a state of low consciousness, conscientiousness, and conscience. FWIW.
Sorry if this strays off topic and for the double-negative ending!
Talking to GPT4 about consciousness quickly reveals it has been coached on the question.
I suspect that the problem here is trying to have the mental cake and eat it too. To explain consciousness on terms friendly to natural science means doing without subjective and qualitative properties. But since the target of explanation is subjective and qualitative properties, they've got to be in there somewhere. As soon as you attempt to squeeze blood from a stone, you're attracting partisans of blood and stones alike.
This is roughly the same backlash that Dennett attracts with his intentional stance, and for broadly the same reasons. There's not really a consistent theoretical position that gets you both a) the phenomenon of subjective awareness and b) an objective, observer-neutral theory of such. You either have to grant that the methods of natural science have to be open to new kinds of properties, or else you grant that experience is not how it appears. Both are tough sells.
A number of the most prominent signees of this letter are literally the sort of people whose careers have significantly centred around deflating the qualitative and subjective aspect of consciousness or promoting eliminative materialism more broadly.
Very much so. They're wrong, and the kind of wrong that can't be fixed by "doing more experiments", but that's where we are now with the understanding of mind. They don't want to understand it. That's just the excuse as they replace it by artificial mechanisms.
How did all those people come to agree on doing this? It seems like a contagion, like mob behavior. I suppose from now on scientists will sometimes defend or attack en masse like this instead of just doing science. We have entered the era where any publicly discussed issue is a matter of two (+) factions, each of which is the only one on the side of human decency.
Thank you for covering this sorry episode. The label of scientific misinformation seems to apply to the authors of the letter. I have no expertise in the field but everything you say about the rendition in the media of the results of the cooperative competition between the two theories corresponds to the impression from what I read.
I can imagine only two reasons behind the initiative: one is hostility toward Giulio Tononi (as one reader said, academics may find convenient to hide attacks on a colleague behind attacks on journalistic representations of his work); the other is hostility toward the practico-political implications that someone might draw at some point from the theory. The first explanation does not do honor to the authors of the letter as human beings; the other does not do honour to them as scientists. The two explanations may well coexist.
Oh dear! This seems like a disaster! The researchers seem like, rather than arguing against IIT (which is reasonable--I think IIT is false!), trying to just smear it publicly. This is not how science or philosophy ought to be done.
I wonder whether some of the signatories are going to walk it back, given that some of the claims about us science journalists are clearly wrong. It often happens in academic disputes that, hesitant to criticize their colleagues directly, scholars aim their fire instead at journalists.
To focus for a moment on the actual science, what do you think of the Blums’ formalization of GWT?
I think attempts at formalization are to be applauded. I read it when it first came out. I think it would probably be very easy to construct a rather meaningless, behaviorally-dead system that satisfied the conditions (just like what people say invalidate IIT), but I'd have to look into the specifics.
Very astute analysis. I am totally a layperson on these topics, but I can't see how you are wrong about any of the arguments you make. Especially the last part, about the politics. I mean, really? If a scientific investigation leads us to question a politically popular belief, we should "cancel" that investigation?
The letter had some odd political undertones that I think should have been ditched, at minimum.
You're right. I don't think that IIT is correct but it doesn't mean that iit is Pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is usually the term that describes charlatans that tries to sound like scientists, something like Deepak Chopra. It's wrong to call a scientific theory pseudoscience even if it's unfalsifiable. Science needs to be open for new creative and brave ideas.
Always a pleasure reading this, even if somewhat embattled.
I wonder how the "near world-famous" guys got roped into signing this thing, but yeah it seems irresponsible and sadly kinda lazy with regards to its critique.
I'm barely aware of the mentioned theories of consciousness (IIT included), but the appeal to media and academic politics instead of a constructive reproach is just low as far as science in general is concerned. With how much formalism (hence, points to engage with) IIT in particular exposes, it's doubly sad and kinda baffling.
I appreciate your commentary on the silly letter. // "A Universe of Consciousness," by Edelman and Tononi, is one of the most impressive and perhaps profound books I've read by neuroscientists. I'm curious why Tononi gets credit for IIT in your commentary on the letter. Maybe the math of it, yes, and some minor (?) conceptual advances (like?). But the foundational conceptual model of IIT presented in U of C is principally attributable to Edelman, no? I'm not nit-picking; I would really like to understand why you give the credit to Tononi.
Well scientific credit is very difficult. Tononi is the sole author of the clearest origination of the theory, which is a paper from 2004 where the theory gets named. However, certainly if you go back and read, say, A Universe of Consciousness, you will indeed notice a lot of the same ideas are there, earlier, and with different names ("dynamic core" gets replaced with "integrated information complex" and so on). However, Tononi and Edelman are both co-authors of that work anyways, and Edelman didn't do much with it after Tononi left - Tononi, however, has continued developing the line of work for years. So I'm comfortable saying that he "originated" it.
Thank you for your response. 🤠
"My competitor is getting media attention and I'm not!"
IIT has plenty of flaws, to be sure, but calling it pseudoscience seems like petty jealousy to me. Consciousness science will get nowhere if we're afraid to present bold theories.
W-T-F?! How did so many rational people get into this pitchfork brigade? Perhaps some of them did so unwittingly or too trustingly? I hope this is the case. What are they protecting the public from? What possible harm to the public episteme would accepting IIT as a legitimate hypothesis bring? I cannot think of a single one. Maybe I am not insightful enough to see the “danger”.
Perhaps it is the popularity of the “contest” that was staged? Maybe? But I certainly see harms from accepting their weak sauce argument. Basically they are just name-calling: “panpsychist commitments”.
But the attractiveness of the IIT theory is that it is NOT panpsychist. It is giving an operational “cell level” measure to assess no matter what the interpretive substrate actually is made of. This is the exact opposite of panpsychist hand waving. Or did I miss something?