| What is consciousness?It's a fundamental problem in the studies of cognitive science,which human have been exploring for thousands of years.We had found some philosophical thoughts in most of the early philosophy from different civilizations.Early philosophical exploration of consciousness was mostly rooted on direct experience and philosophical speculations.With the emergence and development of modern science,especially with the establishment of experimental psychology in the 19th century,people began to put consciousness into scientific experiments.The progress of contemporary consciousness science indicated that the exploration of consciousness has been entered into a new stage,which is based on modern science and technology.Facing with extremely complicated phenomenon of consciousness,the contemporary consciousness theory not only needs to pay attention to research on comprehensive integration of biological brain,but also focusses on the quantitative study of properties related to consciousness.Among the study of the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness,Giulio Tononi puts forward an information integration theory(IIT),which has certain unique features during much contemporary theory.IIT gripped the scholars soon after it started,cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers have discussed widely on this theory,while the domestic scholars pay less attention on it.This thesis put the IIT into a context of contemporary consciousness science,and I will focus on the main content,different scholars' views and the metaphysical connotation of IIT,after that I will share some ideas and appraisal on IIT.This thesis divides into five chapters.The first chapter mainly discusses the background and major theoretical origin of IIT.In the latest stage of consciousness science,an important research direction is starting from the study of local neural correlates of consciousness to the integrate study of the system,and then reveals the mechanism of consciousness.Besides,IIT has extended Gerald M.Edelman's integrated view and Ernst Mach's quantitative thoughts,it adheres to a kind of holism and complex system theory position on consciousness problem.The second chapter primarily discusses the main points of IIT.Taking consciousness experience as primary,IIT first identifies axioms of experience,then derives a set of corresponding postulates about its physical substrate.IIT build a set of geometry axiomatic system of phenomenology to explain consciousness.It believes that the emergence of consciousness depends on the complex in a physical system,which could integrate a lot of information in a very short period of time.In addition,IIT tries to give some explanation prediction and inference on the current controversial issues in consciousness,for example,whether the brain or the cerebellum will give rise to consciousness,philosophical zombie problems,etc.The third chapter focuses on diverse scholars views of IIT.It can be roughly distinguished as four different types.The fourth chapter through combing the relationship between IIT and panpsychism to discuss a number of metaphysical implication in IIT.At the same time,I also raised the correlation between IIT and artificial intelligent.The fifth chapter,which will echo the quantization and integration issues again,and shares some opinions from me.IIT is built on the empirical and to start from the perspective of phenomenology.IIT provides a good framework for us to understand consciousness,and open up a new way to the scientific research of consciousness.IIT is a developing theory,the conclusion of IIT still remains to be verified.So we should be dialectically to treat IIT in the future.It is no doubt that information integration theory is a significant progress in philosophy and science. |
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