2021 Annual Meeting

I will offer a broad-brush account of what explains the emergence of agents from a physics perspective, what sorts of conditions have to be in place for them to arise, and the essential features of agents when they are viewed through the lenses of physics. One implication will be a tight link to informational asymmetries associated with the thermodynamic gradient. Another will be a reversal of the direction of explanation from the one that is usually assumed in physical discussions. In in an evolved system, while it is true in some sense that the macroscopic behavior is the way it is because of the low-level dynamics, there is another sense in which the low-level dynamics is the way that it is because of the high-level behavior it supports. (More precisely and accurately, the constraints on the configuration of its components that define system as the kind of system it is are the way they are to exploit the low-level dynamics to produce the emergent behavior.) Another will be some insight into what might make human agency special.
Integrated information theory (IIT) takes as its starting point phenomenology, rather than behavioral, functional, or neural correlates of consciousness. The theory characterizes the essential properties of phenomenal existence—which is immediate and indubitable. These are translated into physical properties, expressed operationally as cause-effect power, which must be satisfied by the neural substrate of consciousness. On this basis, the theory can account for clinical and experimental data about the presence and absence of consciousness. Current work aims at accounting for specific qualities of different experiences, such as spatial extendedness and the flow of time. Several implications of IIT have ethical relevance. One is that functional equivalence does not imply phenomenal equivalence—computers may one day be able to do everything we do, but they will not experience anything. Another is that we do have free will in the fundamental, metaphysical sense—we have true alternatives and we, not our neurons, are the true cause of our willed actions.
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