The one aspect of reality that I have close acquaintance with—in fact, to adopt the languages of philosophers—the only aspect of the world that I have direct acquaintance with is my own consciousness. I know nothing about the world. The only thing I really know about the world, the only thing I have direct knowledge of, is my sensations.
The only way I know about me, about the world, about you guys, about science, is because I have a movie in my head. And so, if science is ultimately to try to explain everything including dark matter and dark energy, and viruses, and neurons, surely it has to explain the phenomenon that’s at the center of each one of our existences, namely: consciousness.
What are the minimal neuronal mechanisms that are necessary for any one conscious percept?
You have this unique anatomical structure in the brain and you ask: what is its function? It seems to integrate all information from the different cortical regions. So we thought at the time it was associated with consciousness. It binds all the information from the different sensory, non-sensory, motor, planning areas together into one coherent percept. A little bit like the conductor of the cerebral symphony.
Experience is generated by any mechanism that has a cause-effect repertoire in a particular state.
You only exist if you’re irreducible. If you’re reducible to a simpler system, then you don’t exist—only the simpler system exists.
Consciousness is graded. It’s not an all-or-none thing.
Consciousness is a property intrinsic to organized matter. It’s a property like charge and spin. We find ourselves in a universe that has space and time, and mass and energy, but we also find ourselves in a universe where organized systems that have [a value of] phi different from zero have experiences. It’s just the way it is.
We find ourselves in a universe where we have highly conscious creatures. So the question is: how were we selected for? And the answer is: integrated information is evolutionarily advantageous since, obviously, it’s much better—rather than having separate streams of information; let’s say auditory, and visual, and memory—it’s obviously much better if you can integrate that information, because then you’re much more easily able to find coincidences and make an informed judgment on the whole.
You could do interesting thought experiments that may be possible in the future. You can, for example, connect my brain and Tommy’s brain with some sort of direct brain-to-brain transfer where it enhances the bandwidth between our brains. At some point, the theory says our brains would become so interconnected that the phi of us two as a whole is going to exceed the phi of each one of us. At that point, abruptly, my consciousness and his consciousness will disappear and there will be this new Übermind. But it requires a causal mechanism.
