JimCui

Hello again Professor Tegmark,

I like that you included chapter 8 in your book!

What specific experiment are you currently most excited/interested/optimistic about for making progress on the EHP and/or PHP?

The Pretty Hard (PHP) and Even Harder (EHP) Problems of Consciousness are two terms defined his Prof. Tegmark's new book Life 3.0 (http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/ai.html) in Chapter 8 Consciousness: What's the Problem?

He further subdivides the term Hard Problem of Consciousness coined by Prof. David Chalmers quite some years ago into three subcategories: The Pretty Hard (EHP), Even Harder (EHP), and Really Hard (RHP) Problems. In addition, there is the 'Easy Problems' which isn't directly about consciousness but rather the types of behavioral questions neuroscience and cognitive science have been trying to answer all along. The distinction between the PHP and EHP is that the PHP tries to answer which physical systems are consciousness whereas the PHP goes into more detail and tries to map particular physical states to particular subjective experiences. RHP asks: why does consciousness exist at all? I.e. why couldn't our universe be a consciousnessless world of philosophical zombies?

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a theory of consciousness proposed by Prof. Giulio Tononi. The theory is also mentioned in Prof. Tegmark's new book and the IIT paper can be found here: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588. Essentially, the theory defines a maximally irreducible conceptual structure (MICS) which is argued to represent the subjective experience and an associated quantity called integrated information which measures of how integrated the information being processed by a system is (how indivisible the computation is to its components). Consciousness exists only in states of high integrated information. I don't fully understand what Tononi is trying to say myself so take my explanation of IIT with a grain of salt.

I just looked at the page in your book you were referring to. I'd love to learn more about the technical aspects of this experiment! (i.e. what neuroimaging/measurement devices you are using, and what consciousness theories you plan to test)

I'm gonna go with a wild guess and say you're currently testing some variant/aspect of IIT? Are there any other approaches to operationalizing consciousness other than integrated information that you know of and think may be worthwhile?

I guess this question can be infinitely regressed: Why don't you have my brain and I have yours? Why don't you have my eyes and I have yours?

Why aren't you me and I you?