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Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)

Anil Seth · 13 Apr 2026 · arxiv.org

3 korrents from this paper

In plain words

Integrated information theory tries to measure consciousness by taking basic features of experience as its starting point and turning them into a number any physical system can be scored on. Much of the criticism aimed at it attacks things it does not actually claim, though it has real problems of its own: the number has never actually been computed for a real system, only stood in for, and it does not yet fit the physics we have. It is a position paper separating the fair objections from the unfair ones, and arguing the theory would need rewriting in terms of continuous fields to sit alongside fundamental physics.

Our summary of the paper, not the authors' words — written to be readable without the field's vocabulary, from the stored copy of the paper and nothing else. Drafted with ppll7, from the stored paper (two model drafts were unreadable) and checked by a person. The authors' own sentences are the quotes below.

Anil Seth did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Second, we describe with nuance the distinct flavour of panpsychism implied by IIT - whereby space (and time) are tiled with substrates of (proto-) consciousness - and find this is not problematic for the theory.
  2. Fourth, so far only proxies for IIT measures have been computed, and not approximations.
  3. Fifth, for IIT to fit with current successful theories in fundamental physics, a reformulation in terms of continuous fields would be needed.