Zenith Grant Awardee
H. K. Andersen
Simon Fraser University
Project Title
Temporal Structure in the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
Project Summary
Our consciousness is always moving through time. We cannot stop a moment, or change its direction, even though we can walk through space faster or slower. Whatever we are conscious of, we are conscious of it now. When we pay close attention, it seems like the present moment encompasses some short but noticeable length of time. A knock on a door lingers for a moment after it has stopped, hanging there in a just-passed way that is different than remembering it. What makes time so different from space, and so basic to conscious experience? Does consciousness have to have these features? Could there be a consciousness that encompassed a vaster range of time as ‘now’? Could we change the bounds of the present moment to be longer or shorter? There are powerful new tools for representing these questions in mathematically precise ways. This provides new traction to answering them in more detail than philosophers or scientists have been able to thus far. And it opens the possibility of finding ‘time signatures’ of consciousness, flags for which we could search to recognize possible conscious systems that may look very different than a human brain.
Technical Abstract
Consciousness is fundamentally located in time. What are the specifically temporal features of consciousness, and are they contingent or necessary? A recent account of consciousness offers a mathematical framework for understanding consciousness as integrated information. This theory promises the intriguing prospect of quantifying experience in various ways. But how does it quantify or measure various temporal features of experience? My work brings together the integrated information theory of consciousness (IITC) with various distinctively temporal structures or elements in consciousness. Features of temporal structures in experience, from the psychology and phenomenology of time consciousness, can be modeled in the mathematical framework of information theory to address these questions. It looks likely that the IITC can provide a mathematical explanation, rather than a merely mechanistic one, for at least some temporal elements of consciousness. The final goal is to derive a set of identifiable and mathematically formulated time signatures that are indicative of consciousness, which could potentially be used to identify new instances of consciousness. This allows us to use information theory to situate consciousness in the physical world, by deriving the temporal asymmetries of consciousness from time reversible equations in physics.
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Shining a light on the roots of plant “intelligence”
All living organisms emit a low level of light radiation, but the origin and function of these ‘biophotons’ are not yet fully understood. An international team of physicists, funded by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, has proposed a new approach for investigating this phenomenon based on statistical analyses of this emission. Their aim is to test whether biophotons can play a role in the transport of information within and between living organisms, and whether monitoring biophotons could contribute to the development of medical techniques for the early diagnosis of various diseases. Their analyses of the measurements of the faint glow emitted by lentil seeds support models for the emergence of a kind of plant ‘intelligence,’ in which the biophotonic emission carries information and may thus be used by plants as a means to communicate. The team reported this and reviewed the history of biophotons in an article in the journal Applied Sciences in June 2024.