Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is intrinsic causal power, not computation. Causal power is not something intangible, ethereal, but something physical—the extent to which the system's recent past specifies its present state (cause power) and the extent to which this current state specifies its immediate future (effect pow

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The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the consciou... See more

Over the past several years, Roger Penrose, a noted physicist and philosopher, has suggested that fine structures in the neurons called tubules perform an exotic form of computation called “quantum computing.” Quantum computing is computing using what are called “qu bits” which take on all possible combinations of solutions simultaneously. Just bec... See more