There’s the obvious one implied by the name, that states of consciousness will be associated with high degrees of integrated information.
This can be used to predict who will recover from a coma:
Moreover, IIT leads to experimental predictions, for instance that the loss and recovery of consciousness should be associated with the breakdown and recovery of information integration.
ITT predicts that directed grids should be found especially in brain
areas devoted to the perception of stimulus sequences, most likely
in auditory areas dealing with sounds, speech, and music, but also
in areas dealing with visual or body motion. This prediction could
be tested through methods well suited to examining anatomical
and functional connectivity at the level of individual neurons or
minicolumns
According to IIT, the seat of consciousness is instead likely to be in the sensory representation in the back of the brain, where the neural wiring seems to have the right character.
. . .
The test subjects would be presented with a series of varied images, such as faces, clocks and letters of the alphabet in different fonts. They would see each image for 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. At the beginning of each series, two specific images would be defined as targets (say, the face of a woman and a vintage clock), and participants were given the reporting task of pressing a button if they saw either of them. Other faces and objects in the images would therefore be task-relevant (because they fell into the same categories as the targets), but no report was required. Other types of images in the series, such as alphabet letters and meaningless symbols, would be task-irrelevant. The test was run repeatedly with different targets in the series so that each set of stimuli could be tested as both task-relevant and task-irrelevant. State-of-the-art brain signal decoders would correlate neural firing patterns with what the subjects were seeing. . . . IT, on the other hand, predicted that the brain patterns of consciousness would vary with the tasks, because carrying out a task would involve the prefrontal cortex and perception stripped of a task would not. This “pure” form of consciousness would only require the sensory hot zone at the back of the brain. The connectivity and duration of the signals for consciousness of an image would match the duration of the visual stimulus.
The first prediction is that a subject’s conscious experience at a time can be affected by the disabling of neurons that were already inactive at that time. The second is that even if a subject’s entire brain is “silent,” meaning that all of its neurons are inactive (but not disabled), the subject can still have a conscious experience.
Evidence for IIT, which we don’t have, does not prove idealism and the person you are defending is arguing for idealism.
The things you posit are falsifiable, the claims they have been putting forward are not. Hence my initial questions surrounding panpsychism to them before they started trying to use logical fallacies against a mainstream scientific position.
Right, I agree with you (my only quibble is that we do technically have evidence for IIT; it just isn’t definitive).
I misunderstood the guy in my first comment. At this point I know he isn’t defending IIT. All I’m saying is that IIT has legitimized a theory that once seemed crazy (panpsychism). It’s conceivable to me that something similar could happen with idealism, because not a single scientist or academic philosopher alive has any idea whats going on with consciousness. And when we dismiss ideas like idealism, we are implicitly assuming that we have some grasp of what’s going on, but we don’t.
Edit: just to clarify, in this particular comment chain I am defending IIT in particular
Yeah, honestly this might be a fatal issue. I know proponents of IIT say they have an explanation for this to do with causal powers of information or whatever, but I’m not sure if I’m convinced of IIT for other reasons.
There is a really interesting thesis that was written on the combination problem in relation to split-brain experiments. I’m still not sure if I’m totally convinced but it’s definitely an interesting read if you’re into this stuff!
This is false, it makes a number of concrete predictions and the theory is mathematically precise.
Really? Name one for me.
There’s the obvious one implied by the name, that states of consciousness will be associated with high degrees of integrated information.
This can be used to predict who will recover from a coma:
Source
Then there’s other stuff.
Source
Source
Source
Want me to keep going or is that enough?
Evidence for IIT, which we don’t have, does not prove idealism and the person you are defending is arguing for idealism.
The things you posit are falsifiable, the claims they have been putting forward are not. Hence my initial questions surrounding panpsychism to them before they started trying to use logical fallacies against a mainstream scientific position.
Right, I agree with you (my only quibble is that we do technically have evidence for IIT; it just isn’t definitive).
I misunderstood the guy in my first comment. At this point I know he isn’t defending IIT. All I’m saying is that IIT has legitimized a theory that once seemed crazy (panpsychism). It’s conceivable to me that something similar could happen with idealism, because not a single scientist or academic philosopher alive has any idea whats going on with consciousness. And when we dismiss ideas like idealism, we are implicitly assuming that we have some grasp of what’s going on, but we don’t.
Edit: just to clarify, in this particular comment chain I am defending IIT in particular
Agreed, we can’t even rigorously define consciousness, so to claim it’s the only thing that exists is a stretch too far for me.
Panpsychism is interesting but gonna need a lot more evidence including an explanation of the Combination Problem before I’m convinced.
Yeah, honestly this might be a fatal issue. I know proponents of IIT say they have an explanation for this to do with causal powers of information or whatever, but I’m not sure if I’m convinced of IIT for other reasons.
There is a really interesting thesis that was written on the combination problem in relation to split-brain experiments. I’m still not sure if I’m totally convinced but it’s definitely an interesting read if you’re into this stuff!