(2023-09-17) Hoel Ambitious Theories Of Consciousness Are Notscientific Misinformation

Erik Hoel: Ambitious theories of consciousness are not "scientific misinformation". Yesterday over one hundred scientists, many prominent or even world-famous, debuted a signed letter declaring that one of the most popular scientific theories of consciousness is “pseudoscience.” The letter is directed at Integrated Information Theory (IIT)

Sparked by the recent press around an international “adversarial collaboration” that pitted the predictions of theories of consciousness against one another

names include many well-known researchers in the field

I am not a fan of this letter. Everyone who signed it acted irresponsibly

My greatest fear is that we get another “consciousness winter” wherein just talking about consciousness is considered pseudoscientific bunk

The letter is so bad that I’m forced to reply to it and defend IIT. Which is surprising because I just published an entire book in which several chapters track IIT’s failures and limits.

So I’m going to go through the letter in its entirety and refute every point, demonstrating why this never should have been written.

There are a few other “leading” theories as well, like Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) or perhaps Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory. In other words, we simply don’t know how consciousness works, and there is a set of competing scientific ideas, and some are very popular.

Just like the other theories, IIT has sparked a lot of empirical work, like on predicting which patients will recover from a coma. Does this extensive literature count as “empirically tested?” Well, depends on what you mean.

the five sources cited by the letter, The New York Times, also described the results as “mixed.”

Zero of them say, or imply, anything else. The entire motivation of the letter is just flat-out wrong.

And it’s worth pausing at this. “Scientific misinformation” has become a loaded word.

Using the politically-charged “scientific misinformation” term to describe the reasonable articles that the letter cites is—and I’m not going to mince words here—Machiavellian. Unless merely saying anything about IIT should be forbidden, which is what the claim of the letter appears to be.

The idea that somehow the predictions associated with GNWT were direct tests of the theory, and meanwhile the predictions associated with IIT were “not logically related to the core ideas,” is simply not true.

A true criticism is that the predictions are underdetermined by the theories, in that they could be taken as supporting evidence for any number of alternative theories. But that has nothing to do with IIT. The real issue is the paucity of neuroimaging.

none of the cited news articles used the term “well-established” or “dominant,” to describe IIT, and all of them were nuanced.

IIT is not really “panpsychist” in the classic sense, which John Searle described as when consciousness is “spread like jam” over the universe. Most things are not conscious in the theory, just sets of interactive mechanisms (like neurons) with the greatest degree of integrated information (like brains). Consciousness, according to IIT, might be more wide-spread than we think, but it is neither universal nor arbitrary.

The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,”

The second citation given is called “the unfolding argument.”

the paper itself was a bit confused in how it was presented. Johannes Kleiner and I quickly did a follow-up that abstracted and generalized the issue into what we called the broader “substitution argument,” identifying the real problem: that the inferences about consciousness an experimenter makes that are based on behavior (like someone’s report about consciousness) can be varied independently from a theory’s predictions about consciousness (like those based on neuroimaging).

What I’d stress to its critics is that IIT’s problems are your problems. That is, most problems supposedly unique to IIT are not, it’s just that IIT is more ambitious and well-formalized, so it actually tackles head-on the difficulties of a theory of consciousness, and you notice the problems and blame IIT in particular.

Now, does being well-formalized mean it’s correct? No. It just means IIT always gives you an answer.
No other theory of consciousness can do that. This is why IIT is a good model theory.

If any of the other theories were to ever be as well-formalized as IIT, then they would inherit many of its problems—which is precisely what Kleiner and I showed

The short letter—and I’ve addressed every word so far—culminates in this politically-charged paragraph:

• If IIT is either proven or perceived by the public as such, it will not only have a direct impact on clinical practice concerning coma patients, but also a wide array of ethical issues ranging from current debates on AI sentience and its regulation, to stem cell research, animal and organoid testing, and abortion. Our consensus is not that IIT and its variants decidedly lack intellectual merit. But with so much at stake, it is essential to provide a fair and truthful perspective on the status of the theory. As researchers, we have a duty to protect the public from scientific misinformation.

Ultimately, throwing the word “pseudoscience” around at the only popular theory of consciousness ambitious enough to allow for real criticism of its details advocates for only one result: to bury scientific theories of consciousness for another hundred years. This letter is a historical step backwards, striking directly at the new and hard-won legitimacy that allows consciousness to be tackled with ambitious theories, even if most of those attempts will admittedly fail. That sort of destructive legacy is not worth wanting, and I don’t think this letter in its current form—which is right now just a pre-print—is worth pursuing through to publication for the majority of the signees.