Consciousness: here, there and everywhere?
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences May 19, 2015 G. Tononi, C. Koch
Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness can be understood by starting from the essential properties of experience itself, such as its intrinsic existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. From these axioms, the theory derives physical requirements for a system to be conscious. IIT offers a principled account of both the quantity and quality of experience, and provides a calculus to determine whether a physical system is conscious. It explains clinical and laboratory findings, makes testable predictions, and suggests that consciousness is graded and common among biological organisms, including some simple systems. In contrast, it predicts that feed-forward networks and digital computers, even those simulating the human brain, would experience little to nothing.