What is it like to be a culture?
I read your quite fantastic article in MIT press reader and thought it a wonderfully accessible explanation of a quite elegant theory in its predictions and applications [and not a little frightening given recent events].
While I would love to have the capacity, both in data and mathematical ability to work through some proofs rather than posing this question I am only a poet. And the question is…
I have delighted in the ideas of panpsychism and popular translations of the insights of Plank. Positing “experience” if not “consciousness” at atomic level opens up a whole new vista. If within the vast spaces (relatively) that separate the constituent elements of atoms the tiny changes of charge can be “experienced” the range of our empathic investigations is more daunting even than that outlined by Nagel (long a supporter of the concept of DNA rights, perhaps atomic rights and sensitivity to their experience could be new grounds for Nuclear non-proliferation).
As I understand it, IIT would rule out intrinsic understanding of these experiences due to differences of spatio-temporal grain. That the “whole” experienced at one scale cannot be understood at another.
This is where the question arises. The question with regard to aggregates, collectives of wholes, or more plainly the question of whether communities, organisations or societies can “experience”. One might ask if the atom denies the emergence of the molecule or the neuron denies the possibility of the brain. One of the implications would appear to be, that they do.
If I understand corerctly, this arises because the collection of neurons has a greater phiMax, or has a larger integrated information maximum that its constituents. The neuron cannot posit the experience of the brain because it is unable to integrate the information available to the brain’s interacting sub-units.
It would seem to follow from this that the individual would have no capacity to know what it is like to exist in the information space aggregated by a mass, or the phiMax of a collective (I may have misunderstood phiMax and can’t do the maths).
The fist question is essentially physical substrate. Just as the physical substrate of a brain can be reduced to neurons that share information the physical substrate of a collective can be reduced to individuals who share information. The “whole” that emerges has casual power, at least in the extrinsic sense.
In plain language, it would seem possible for organisations to have a greater phiMax than the individuals within it. The collective behaviour of a large corporation e.g. Kraft or Unilever is guided by an integrated information space beyond the capacity of any of its subunit “wholes” to grasp at one time. The phiMax of MIT itself must be quite considerable, and the way it integrates that information have causal effect that changes the system, the lectures, etc..from year to year. In an organisation necessarily partitioned, yet integrative, such as the NSA, the phiMax must be in almost every case greater than that available to most of its constituent parts.
It would appear that these wholes may be partitioned, as described by phiMin, in a way that changes the experience of the whole or indeed nullifies the whole. A simple example would be a vertically integrated company that disposes of the base layer of its production process, thus intrinsically changing the behaviour and motivations of the company. Or indeed MIT without its administrative staff reduced only to academics. The partition and loss of mechanisms would destroy the experience of the whole and the character of the system.
But these would seem peripheral questions against the issue of intrinsic causal power.
It is not clear to me that information integrated within an organisation, its production processes and policies, its business purpose, does not have casual power separate from its elements. No one in Shell would pump Oil if Shell was not an Oil company. While the elements (individuals) can change that information (the specified practices) it is not clear that this is non-comparable to neuronal changes aggregating to changed concepts in the brain.
A more powerful example is culture. Culture as the integrated information of a society (cf. culture as a means of adaptation to local environment) is independent of any of its individual “wholes”. The “whole” of a society’s culture is a maximally integrated information space larger than that possessed by any of its elements. Of course, culture is caused by individuals but “the culture industry” it is not reducible to individuals, exists independent of those individuals and the “whole” that emerges from their actions is of entirely different character than the product of the individuals.
If you were to “partition” culture, remove paintings, speech, a genre of music, the “whole” would not be the same and have lower maximally integrated information. So even if the connections within a culture do not sum to the level of consciousness, it would seem to constitute an integrated information system with intrinsic casual power and thus IIT would seem to suggest that a culture can have an “experience”. Looking at the historical record and with a bit of anthropology, this would seem to be an entirely sensible statement (e.g. the holocaust, Hadrian, Cinema)
The idea of culture having independent “intent” might be intuitively more accessible to America’s citizens of colour. Dare I go further to say that the legacy of opposition to Communism and collectivism causes US culture to integrate information with the intent of making it harder for its elements to think about populations.
What it is like to be a cult? We, at our spatio-temporal grain would have no way of knowing what the intrinsic experience of this whole would be, but presumably, if we view ourselves not as simply wholes but substrates for another layer of emergence, this would be testable with IIT.
There are a rich set of other questions, such as what partitioned sets integrated could produce. Each being less than the phiMax of its system but the aggregate creating a greater phiMax than the majority partition. The question of whether SAGE (the nuclear warning system) has experiences?
Perhaps most perplexing is why if you were to run a brain simulation in software it would not have an experience? But I imagine I need maths to understand that.
Thank you very much for your most perspicacious explanation of this illuminating theory.
I enclose a poem written some time ago
Yours sincerely
Sven Desai
Sonnet for Berners-Lee’s Monster
“What is it like to be a bat?”
Nagel
A wobble of flesh wakens and reacts
Tap, tap
Plastic catalyst pressed calls on
Signals from silicon-carbon synapse
Electric charge along copper axon.
Glass dendrite lights, digital bytes echo.
Another road, connection reinforced
Traversed between terminals of macro
Neurons, silicon enriched wobbling flesh.
Fan cooled hippocampus in Finnish wharehouse
Orbito-celebrito lobes cross-linked
With Twitter-form Gyrus and various
Specialist regions on sex, cats. In sync.
It is anyone’s guess
If it’s conscious.
Anyone’s guess
What its consciousness is.
Cf. also
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_Information_Theory*
svendesai 