On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 05:26:39PM +0200, Günther Greindl wrote:
>
> Have you looked at this?:
>
> The information integration theory of consciousness
> by Giulio Tononi
> in Velmans, M. & Schneider, S. The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness
> Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 287-300
>
> An overview can be found here:
> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6315
>
Interesting reference Günther! Its not overly convincing, however (or
at least the online abstract you point is overly vague on
detailes). It does remind me of Philemotte & Bersini's "intrinsic
emergence" (Bersini's paper in ALife 9 or P & B's paper in ECAL05).
A brief summary of their idea (if I have the gist right) is that
emergence is detected whenever a dramatic reduction of complexity of a
system is produced by adding in a "detector" or "observer" to the
system. This is quantifiable, at least for their CA examples. Tononi's
\Phi seems to be nothing other than this reduction in complexity - so
it would seem to me (off the bat) that he is just measuring emergence (which
in the brain might well be a measure of consciousness, but is dubious
in other systems).
Anyway, all these ideas are very immature, but nevertheless interesting.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpcoder.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Received on Sun Jun 15 2008 - 18:39:39 PDT