Entropic Brain

[Psybin]

The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs - PubMed

Entropy is a dimensionless quantity that is used for measuring uncertainty about the state of a system but it can also imply physical qualities, where high entropy is synonymous with high disorder. Entropy is applied here in the context of states of consciousness and their associated...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Integrated information theory - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So, what are your all's thoughts on this? The idea occurred to me earlier today, so I looked it up and found the above links.

 

[Creo]

Scott Aaronson's critique of Integrated Information Theory:

Giulio Tononi and Me: A Phi-nal Exchange

You might recall that last week I wrote a post criticizing Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and its apparent implication that a simple Reed-Solomon decoding circuit would, if scaled to a large …

www.scottaaronson.com

At most, I think IIT is a step in the right direction and probably necessary for consciousness (though not sufficient).

Some of the axioms IIT is based on may also be false. In particular, it's not obvious to me that consciousness is (i) integrated and (ii) exclusive. For example, in 'The Society of Mind', Marvin Minsky argues that the brain is made up of a large number of autonomous processes which interact with each other. I would further argue that there is no evidence either of one central process or a singular conscious process [1].

[1] At first, it might be hard to imagine two independent conscious processes in the same brain. But consider the work of Roger Sperry with split brain patients Split-brain - Wikipedia .

 

[Psybin]

I actually agree that there are some possibly faulty assumptions inherent to IIT, but nevertheless, it's fascinating. I'll have to check out 'The Society of Mind' though; I've been intrigued by the idea of consciousness as a distillation or emergent phenomena of overlapping neural "programs", if that makes sense. I've been starting to feel that the entities I meet on DMT are actually different things like personifications of my visual processing "unit" and like wise for other senses and process if that makes any sense.

Also, you should check out Bayesian Interference, which I think might be one possible way conscious is created IMO: Bayesian inference - Wikipedia

 

[Creo]

That's an intriguing idea regarding dmt entities. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turned out to be true.

By the way, 'The Society of Mind' is available online at The Society of Mind Text & Video Archive