Integrated information theory (IIT) is a clearly defined physical model that addresses key aspects of consciousness (Oizumi, Albantakis, & Tononi, Reference Oizumi, Albantakis and Tononi2014; Tononi, Reference Tononi2004). It gives attention to an interdependency of operations and differences in spatiotemporal scales, and illustrates basic functions of integration and differentiation of experience. It is also sufficiently generalised to accept the possibility for conscious processes in non-traditional systems, allowing for consideration of underpinnings that are panpsychological (Basile, Reference Basile, Basile, Kiverstein and Phemister2010; Goff, Reference Goff2019). But Merker, Williford, and Rudrauf do well to point out that IIT suffers errors of logic that render it incoherent as a primary theory of consciousness, and we agree it cannot be used to identify consciousness, by the rules of its theory. Beyond this concern of its logic, IIT suffers another structural shortcoming for a theory of consciousness. It omits the most important psychobiological function of consciousness as generative, an affective animation that guides physical movement for vital purpose (Clark, Reference Clark2019; Reed, Reference Reed1996; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, Hopkins, Geangu and Linkenauger2017a). This fundamental property of consciousness, with its aspects of affective evaluation made with knowledge, is neglected.
In IIT, there is no perspective or purpose of a conscious agent. The “information” it attends to in its measures of coherence are not anchored in the vital necessities of life, the essential evolved function of consciousness to serve the purpose of the organism as an agent with choice, aware of options for action (or inaction), and able to consolidate information for vital gains. This is the psychobiological essence of consciousness, which IIT has missed. Without adaptation of purpose to serve and protect the vitality of the organism, what is the point of consciousness? We perceive IIT as disembodied, abstract, and lacking the affective vital meaning of feelings, a cornerstone of all living consciousness (Langer, Reference Langer1967; Panksepp & Biven, Reference Panksepp and Biven2012; Solms, Reference Solms2021; Vandekerckhove & Panksepp, Reference Vandekerckhove and Panksepp2011).
We can learn from detailed attention to the beginning of conscious human life in body movement. Infants reach to engage the future with innate and learned knowledge of its consequences – their neuro-motor systems are structured with an inherent prospective awareness, an intrinsic knowledge of self-generated futures with their pleasurable benefits and fearful dangers, which are experienced and remembered (Delafield-Butt et al., Reference Delafield-Butt, Freer, Perkins, Skulina, Schögler and Lee2018; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, Hopkins, Geangu and Linkenauger2017a, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, White and Dalli2017b). This is the essence of the primitive brainstem-mediated consciousness, evident in the intentional movements of the human foetus from the second trimester onwards (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, Reference Delafield-Butt and Gangopadhyay2013), an active and sensible agency that shapes experience in the development of a human consciousness (Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, Hopkins, Geangu and Linkenauger2017a). It does not require cortical processing.
But the experiments to validate Tononi's IIT focus on interpretations of activity recorded in the neocortex – an area of the brain not required for basic human consciousness (Damasio, Reference Damasio2010; Merker, Reference Merker2007). The theory lacks reference to psychobiological foundations in lived, embodied, affective experience of agile agency in the material world, perceptual evidence of which structures, informs, and unifies conscious experience in “The Self As Agent” (Macmurray, Reference Macmurray1959). We are surprised Merker has not recovered his own empirical and theoretical ideas into the debate. All biological evidence suggests consciousness must be purposive, needing evaluation of choices as affordances for future action. These are the embodied, ecological ingredients of the experience of life that make sense of conscious awareness and subjective feelings (Langer, Reference Langer1967). Merker set these out clearly in his case for the “liability of mobility” in the evolution of consciousness (Merker, Reference Merker2005). In all vertebrates, the primary integrator of exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive information is in the brainstem, where affective evaluation, learning, and memory motivate choice in the conscious agent for selection in volitional body movement (Merker, Reference Merker2007).
Grossberg (Reference Grossberg2021) is right when he says, “we consciously see in order to be able to reach.” Sight is imaginative, about what to do, where, and how. But IIT adapts a linear causality, a “cause-effect” logic in its account of how information and its effects at different locations in the brain are integrated and evaluated. Consciousness affords a further logic, an “action-effect” causality of experienced self-generated agent action, animated with feeling and vital purpose. All conscious agents create their own causal flow, and this structures how their sensory information across all modalities becomes structured. We view Merker et al.'s (2021) recalling of the perspective view of consciousness as an attempt to re-embody the concept of consciousness, to put the conscious agent back into the picture as a causal structure. This is a needed step.
We also draw caution to their conflation of panpsychism and IIT. Panpsychism is not IIT, but IIT has come to adopt elements of the metaphysic into its system, ad hoc. In our view, this is not a justified integration of this complex metaphysics into a technical theory, but “cherry-picks” a crude idea of “mind everywhere” or accepts an equation of “physicalism as panpsychism” (Strawson, Reference Strawson and Freeman2006) without taking due care to understand the depths and structure of the philosophy assumed. Panpsychism and IIT require distinction.
The metaphysical frameworks of the two major panpsychist theorists, Leibniz (Reference Leibniz1716) and Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1929), present a highly structured account of mind as coincident with occasions, or events. These, like Merker's original view of the “liabilities of mobility” (Merker, Reference Merker2005), require an integration of experience and felt evaluation of affordances for choice of action – enabling volition and the intentional action of a conscious agent (Delafield-Butt, Reference Delafield-Butt and Koutroufinis2014). These complex metaphysical frameworks require not the empty, abstract, disembodied consciousness of IIT, but stand in agreement with more established notions of an ecological psychology of agents nested in environmental affordances (Reed, Reference Reed1996). The benefit and reach of panpsychism means that conscious agency is not restricted to the level of whole organisms, be they humans, cats, mice, or worms, but to their organic subsystems, too. And also to simpler component organisms such as cells and organelles. Generalised principles of IIT that extend beyond the animal kingdom are potentially important, but as described they remain devoid of purpose, which leaves them unfaithful to panpsychism, and phenomenology as well. That IIT invites scientific discourse on this topic is welcome, but the outcome is somewhat incoherent, and incomplete.
Finally, we remind our readers that all transcendent ideas which have led to wiser knowledge and purposiveness of life on earth led by human technology and reason have been dependent on sensitive attention to and measurement of the qualities, forms, and expressions of nature. This has been made clear by the works of Darwin (Reference Darwin1872) and the contemporary science of cycles of prosperity and extinction in life on earth surveyed by Attenborough (Reference Attenborough2020). The latter, especially, teaches our collective human understanding about risks of over-extending our inventive technical industry, in all our communities and nations, and in our science.
Integrated information theory (IIT) is a clearly defined physical model that addresses key aspects of consciousness (Oizumi, Albantakis, & Tononi, Reference Oizumi, Albantakis and Tononi2014; Tononi, Reference Tononi2004). It gives attention to an interdependency of operations and differences in spatiotemporal scales, and illustrates basic functions of integration and differentiation of experience. It is also sufficiently generalised to accept the possibility for conscious processes in non-traditional systems, allowing for consideration of underpinnings that are panpsychological (Basile, Reference Basile, Basile, Kiverstein and Phemister2010; Goff, Reference Goff2019). But Merker, Williford, and Rudrauf do well to point out that IIT suffers errors of logic that render it incoherent as a primary theory of consciousness, and we agree it cannot be used to identify consciousness, by the rules of its theory. Beyond this concern of its logic, IIT suffers another structural shortcoming for a theory of consciousness. It omits the most important psychobiological function of consciousness as generative, an affective animation that guides physical movement for vital purpose (Clark, Reference Clark2019; Reed, Reference Reed1996; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, Hopkins, Geangu and Linkenauger2017a). This fundamental property of consciousness, with its aspects of affective evaluation made with knowledge, is neglected.
In IIT, there is no perspective or purpose of a conscious agent. The “information” it attends to in its measures of coherence are not anchored in the vital necessities of life, the essential evolved function of consciousness to serve the purpose of the organism as an agent with choice, aware of options for action (or inaction), and able to consolidate information for vital gains. This is the psychobiological essence of consciousness, which IIT has missed. Without adaptation of purpose to serve and protect the vitality of the organism, what is the point of consciousness? We perceive IIT as disembodied, abstract, and lacking the affective vital meaning of feelings, a cornerstone of all living consciousness (Langer, Reference Langer1967; Panksepp & Biven, Reference Panksepp and Biven2012; Solms, Reference Solms2021; Vandekerckhove & Panksepp, Reference Vandekerckhove and Panksepp2011).
We can learn from detailed attention to the beginning of conscious human life in body movement. Infants reach to engage the future with innate and learned knowledge of its consequences – their neuro-motor systems are structured with an inherent prospective awareness, an intrinsic knowledge of self-generated futures with their pleasurable benefits and fearful dangers, which are experienced and remembered (Delafield-Butt et al., Reference Delafield-Butt, Freer, Perkins, Skulina, Schögler and Lee2018; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, Hopkins, Geangu and Linkenauger2017a, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, White and Dalli2017b). This is the essence of the primitive brainstem-mediated consciousness, evident in the intentional movements of the human foetus from the second trimester onwards (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, Reference Delafield-Butt and Gangopadhyay2013), an active and sensible agency that shapes experience in the development of a human consciousness (Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, Reference Trevarthen, Delafield-Butt, Hopkins, Geangu and Linkenauger2017a). It does not require cortical processing.
But the experiments to validate Tononi's IIT focus on interpretations of activity recorded in the neocortex – an area of the brain not required for basic human consciousness (Damasio, Reference Damasio2010; Merker, Reference Merker2007). The theory lacks reference to psychobiological foundations in lived, embodied, affective experience of agile agency in the material world, perceptual evidence of which structures, informs, and unifies conscious experience in “The Self As Agent” (Macmurray, Reference Macmurray1959). We are surprised Merker has not recovered his own empirical and theoretical ideas into the debate. All biological evidence suggests consciousness must be purposive, needing evaluation of choices as affordances for future action. These are the embodied, ecological ingredients of the experience of life that make sense of conscious awareness and subjective feelings (Langer, Reference Langer1967). Merker set these out clearly in his case for the “liability of mobility” in the evolution of consciousness (Merker, Reference Merker2005). In all vertebrates, the primary integrator of exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive information is in the brainstem, where affective evaluation, learning, and memory motivate choice in the conscious agent for selection in volitional body movement (Merker, Reference Merker2007).
Grossberg (Reference Grossberg2021) is right when he says, “we consciously see in order to be able to reach.” Sight is imaginative, about what to do, where, and how. But IIT adapts a linear causality, a “cause-effect” logic in its account of how information and its effects at different locations in the brain are integrated and evaluated. Consciousness affords a further logic, an “action-effect” causality of experienced self-generated agent action, animated with feeling and vital purpose. All conscious agents create their own causal flow, and this structures how their sensory information across all modalities becomes structured. We view Merker et al.'s (2021) recalling of the perspective view of consciousness as an attempt to re-embody the concept of consciousness, to put the conscious agent back into the picture as a causal structure. This is a needed step.
We also draw caution to their conflation of panpsychism and IIT. Panpsychism is not IIT, but IIT has come to adopt elements of the metaphysic into its system, ad hoc. In our view, this is not a justified integration of this complex metaphysics into a technical theory, but “cherry-picks” a crude idea of “mind everywhere” or accepts an equation of “physicalism as panpsychism” (Strawson, Reference Strawson and Freeman2006) without taking due care to understand the depths and structure of the philosophy assumed. Panpsychism and IIT require distinction.
The metaphysical frameworks of the two major panpsychist theorists, Leibniz (Reference Leibniz1716) and Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1929), present a highly structured account of mind as coincident with occasions, or events. These, like Merker's original view of the “liabilities of mobility” (Merker, Reference Merker2005), require an integration of experience and felt evaluation of affordances for choice of action – enabling volition and the intentional action of a conscious agent (Delafield-Butt, Reference Delafield-Butt and Koutroufinis2014). These complex metaphysical frameworks require not the empty, abstract, disembodied consciousness of IIT, but stand in agreement with more established notions of an ecological psychology of agents nested in environmental affordances (Reed, Reference Reed1996). The benefit and reach of panpsychism means that conscious agency is not restricted to the level of whole organisms, be they humans, cats, mice, or worms, but to their organic subsystems, too. And also to simpler component organisms such as cells and organelles. Generalised principles of IIT that extend beyond the animal kingdom are potentially important, but as described they remain devoid of purpose, which leaves them unfaithful to panpsychism, and phenomenology as well. That IIT invites scientific discourse on this topic is welcome, but the outcome is somewhat incoherent, and incomplete.
Finally, we remind our readers that all transcendent ideas which have led to wiser knowledge and purposiveness of life on earth led by human technology and reason have been dependent on sensitive attention to and measurement of the qualities, forms, and expressions of nature. This has been made clear by the works of Darwin (Reference Darwin1872) and the contemporary science of cycles of prosperity and extinction in life on earth surveyed by Attenborough (Reference Attenborough2020). The latter, especially, teaches our collective human understanding about risks of over-extending our inventive technical industry, in all our communities and nations, and in our science.
Conflict of interest
There are no conflicting interests.