Christof Koch: Consciousness Is Everywhere: "No matter what the NCC will prove to be, a skeptic can always ask why does this particular NCC give rise to a conscious experience but not another one? The cause and effect between neuronal activity in the brain and conscious thought can seem as magical as rubbing a brass lamp and having a genie emerge. It is here that the ideas of Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, prove crucial. He advocates for a sophisticated theory that links information to consciousness. His integrated information theory introduces a precise measure capturing the extent of consciousness called Φ (phi). Expressed in bits, phi quantifies the extent to which any system of interacting parts is both differentiated and integrated when that system enters a particular state. Any one conscious experience is both highly differentiated from any other one but also unitary, holistic. The larger the phi, the richer the conscious experience of that system. Furthermore, the theory assigns any state of any network of causally interacting parts (these neurons are firing, those are quiet) to a shape in a high-dimensional space."
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