Integrated Information Theory: Methodology, Foundations, Explanations

Integrated Information Theory: Methodology, Foundations, Explanations

With Matteo Grasso

Sunday February 25, 2024
9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT  |  6:00pm CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for consciousness in physical terms by identifying the essential properties of experience (axioms), and inferring the necessary and sufficient properties that its physical substrate must satisfy (postulates). In this talk I will present an outline of IIT 4.0’s account of some qualitative contents of experience. First, I will introduce IIT’s methodology to study consciousness scientifically, highlighting its differences with respect to other approaches in philosophy and consciousness science. Then, I will provide an overview of the core concepts of the theory, with particular focus on the role of phenomenology, on the view of experience as a phenomenal structure, and on their implications for the understanding of consciousness in physical terms. Lastly, I will present IIT’s account of some key qualitative contents of experience (such as the extendedness of visual space and the flow of time).

Matteo Grasso works as a Scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After completing a PhD in philosophy, he joined the Tononi lab to contribute to the development of Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Currently, his research is focused on applying IIT’s formalism to account for phenomenal time and conceptual invariance.