The psychedelic state in light of integrated information theory

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

35 pointsmh-cx3 comments

For anyone interested in Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Scholarpedia's current summary is much, much better thank Wikipedia's.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_t...

IIT is one of the most horribly abused and misunderstood theories out there, right alongside poor old Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I'd be wary of anything that you read about IIT and what it implies, unless that information is coming directly from the theory's creators.

It's also worth reading Scott Aaronson's (fairly meaty, it seems to me) objection to IIT:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

Aaronson's criticism boils down to:

"I understand the math and what it predicts doesn't match my uneducated, intuitive idea of what should and shouldn't be conscious. also ur dumb haha[0]."

A bad case of the Dunning Kruger effect, quite surprising for someone who deals regularly with the totally unintuitive aspects of quantum physics.

[0] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823, where he drops his troll mask.

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