I think a lot of Camp #2 people would agree with you that IIT doesn’t make meaningful progress on the hard problem. As far as I remember, it doesn’t even really try to; it just states that consciousness is the same thing as integrated information and then argues why this is plausible based on intuition/simplicity/how it applies to the brain and so on.
I think IIT “is Camp #2 stuff” in the sense that being in Camp #2 is necessary to appreciate IIT—it’s definitely not sufficient. But it does seem necessary because, for Camp #1, the entire approach of trying to find a precise formula for “amount of consciousness” is just fundamentally doomed, especially since the math doesn’t require any capacity for reporting on your conscious states, or really any of the functional capabilities of human consciousness. In fact, Scott Aaronson claims (haven’t read the construction myself) here that
the system that simply applies the matrix W to an input vector x—has an enormous amount of integrated information Φ
So yeah, Camp #2 is necessary but not sufficient. I had a line in an older version of this post where I suggested that the Camp #2 memeplex is so large that, even if you’re firmly in Camp #2, you’ll probably find some things in there that are just as absurd to you as the Camp #1 axiom.
(Some years ago I tried to search for “qualia” in IIT texts, and I think I got literally zero results; I was super disappointed to discover that indeed “it doesn’t even really try to make meaningful progress on the hard problem”.
I think a lot of Camp #2 people would agree with you that IIT doesn’t make meaningful progress on the hard problem. As far as I remember, it doesn’t even really try to; it just states that consciousness is the same thing as integrated information and then argues why this is plausible based on intuition/simplicity/how it applies to the brain and so on.
I think IIT “is Camp #2 stuff” in the sense that being in Camp #2 is necessary to appreciate IIT—it’s definitely not sufficient. But it does seem necessary because, for Camp #1, the entire approach of trying to find a precise formula for “amount of consciousness” is just fundamentally doomed, especially since the math doesn’t require any capacity for reporting on your conscious states, or really any of the functional capabilities of human consciousness. In fact, Scott Aaronson claims (haven’t read the construction myself) here that
So yeah, Camp #2 is necessary but not sufficient. I had a line in an older version of this post where I suggested that the Camp #2 memeplex is so large that, even if you’re firmly in Camp #2, you’ll probably find some things in there that are just as absurd to you as the Camp #1 axiom.
Yes, I agree with all this.
(Some years ago I tried to search for “qualia” in IIT texts, and I think I got literally zero results; I was super disappointed to discover that indeed “it doesn’t even really try to make meaningful progress on the hard problem”.
I was particularly disappointed because it came from Christof Koch, and their “40hz paper” from 1990 has been a revelation and a remarkable conceptual breakthrough Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness”, so I had all those hopes and expectations for IIT because it was from Koch :-) :-( )