Carlo Rovelli on the Religious Critics of Science

The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes: “The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. [] There is always someone with his own real Truth.”

This essay is about those critics of science who yearn for (to quote Rovelli again) “some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words, ‘Follow me, I am the true way’”.

(i) Introduction

(ii) David Berlinski’s Criticisms of Contemporary Science

(iii) Henri Poincaré on the Critics of Science

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In the book What Is Religion? (published in 1902), the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrote the following words:

“What we call science today is merely a haphazard collection of disconnected scraps of knowledge, most of them useless, and many of which, instead of giving absolute truth provide the most bizarre delusions, presented as truth one day and refuted the next.”

Here we have Tolstoy openly yearning for what he called “absolute truth”. He strongly believed that science didn’t offer people absolute truth. However, religion did.

To move on to 2016.

The Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli picked out those contemporary critics of science who’ve taken a very similar position to that of Tolstoy.

In his book Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli writes:

“The answers given by science are reliable because they are the best available today.”

So science does offer us answers. However, it doesn’t offer us absolute answers. In other words, scientific answers are never “considered [] to be definitive”. Or, in Tolstoy’s own terms, they’re never absolute…

And a good thing too!

If scientific theories were deemed to be absolutely true, and if all its answers were definitive, then scientists wouldn’t “see them as open to improvement”…

And, again, that would be disastrous for science (or for scientific advance).

Rovelli goes into more detail on all this when he states the following:

“As every researcher working in every laboratory throughout the world knows, doing science means coming up hard against the limits of your ignorance on a daily basis — the innumerable things which you don’t know, and can’t do.”

Rovelli then provides his readers with a longish list of some of the present-day limits of science:

“We don’t know which particles we might see next year at CERN, or what our next telescopes will reveal, or which equations truly describe the world; we don’t know how to solve the equations we have, and sometimes we don’t understand what they signify; we don’t know if the beautiful theory on which we are working is right. We don’t know what there is beyond the Big Bang; we don’t know how a storm works, or a bacterium, or an eye — or the cells in our own bodies, or our thought processes.”

Tolstoy himself would have been shocked by these confessions — especially since they come from a well-known and respected scientist!

On the other hand, there’s still a degree of hyperbole in Rovelli’s own words. That’s said because we do, in fact, know a lot about our thought processes, the cells in our own bodies. We also know a lot about the Big Bang, about storms, bacteria, etc…

Sure!

It’s still the case that scientists as a whole don’t have the final word on any of these things.

Yet Tolstoy — for one — yearned for that final word… on everything. Hence he came down on the side of religion in his very own religion-vs-science war.

Tolstoy’s positions on science are relevant in other respects too.

For a start, it’s odd that scientists get it on the chin for believing that “they can explain everything”, as well as for not actually being able to do so.

Of course, there may be no actual contradiction here. It depends.

Some critics of science don’t like the belief (or idea) that science can — in principle — explain everything. Other critics (like Tolstoy himself) believe that science should explain everything. Thus, they become emotionally unhappy when it doesn’t do so.

Just to be clear.

There are two types of critic hinted at here:

(1) Those critics who find it audacious to even claim that science can “explain everything”. 
(2) Those critics who actually want science to explain everything. However, they become deeply unhappy when they discover that it can’t.

It can be seen that these two types of critics can sometimes crossover.

If we return to Tolstoy’s words again.

David Berlinski’s Criticisms of Contemporary Science

In the passage above we had Tolstoy openly yearning for what he called “absolute truth”. He strongly believed that science didn’t offer people absolute truth: religion did.

However, let’s now quickly move from Tolstoy in 1902 to tackle the up-to-date example of the American writer and polemicist David Berlinski.

Berlinski has his very own Tolstoyan criticisms of contemporary science.

A good place to start is with Berlinski’s article ‘Was There a Big Bang?’. More particularly, take this literary passage (which can be found at the end of his article):

“Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Big Bang cosmology has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory is promoted to a secular myth. [] Myths are quite typically false, and science is concerned with truth. Human beings, it would seem, may make scientific theories or they may make myths, but with respect to the same aspects of experience, they cannot quite do both.”

[See my ‘A Case Against Contemporary Theoretical Physics and Cosmology’.]

So, just like Tolstoy before him, does Berlinski yearn for absolute truth? And, in so doing, does he get science (at least as it was expressed by Rovelli earlier) drastically wrong? (Perhaps, instead, Berlinski is simply a contrarian and showman.)

To repeat:

(1) Is it that science is merely offering us (to use Tolstoy’s words again) “a haphazard collection of disconnected scraps of knowledge” under the disguise of truth? 
(2) Alternatively, is (absolute) truth not even aimed at by scientists in the first place?

It seems that, in this case at least, science can’t win.

By many scientists’ own admissions, science never even attempts to offer us absolute truth. Indeed, according to some philosophically-inclined scientists, science doesn’t even offer us truth. (This is a tricky position that not many scientists themselves would accept.)

In tune with Rovelli, take the philosopher of science and Catholic priest Ernan McMullin (who died in 2011). He didn’t believe that the “acceptance of a scientific theory [also] involves the belief that it is true”. Moreover,

“to suppose that a theory is literally true would imply that no further anomaly could arise”.

And surely such a belief in literal truth (or in absolute truth) is counterproductive in science. [See my ‘Scientific Theories Don’t Need To Be True’.]

Yet, as Rovelli puts it, science is also attacked for “pretending to explain everything”, and also “for thinking it has an answer to every question”.

So did Tolstoy himself really want science to explain everything, and to answer all questions? What’s more, when he saw that science failed in these regards, did that prompt him to embrace religion instead?

Alternatively, was Tolstoy already committed to the absolute truths of religion long before he made his rhetorical criticisms of science?

In any case, let’s now take the example of the French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré, who was certainly well aware of Tolstoy’s views on science. [See here.]

Henri Poincaré on the Critics of Science

Henri Poincaré (roughly a contemporary of Tolstoy) can be seen to have been responding to positions such as Tolstoy’s when he wrote the following often-quoted words:

“The laity are struck to see how ephemeral scientific theories are. After some years of prosperity, they see them successively abandoned; they see ruins accumulate upon ruins; they foresee that the theories fashionable today will shortly succumb in their turn and hence they conclude that these are absolutely idle. This is what they call the *bankruptcy of science*.”

However, Poincaré then concluded by saying that this “scepticism is superficial”.

Why superficial?

Poincaré continued:

“The [laity] give[s] no account to themselves of the aim and the role of scientific theories; otherwise they would comprehend that the ruins may still be good for something.”

Just as I brought Tolstoy up to date by discussing Rovelli’s position on the contemporary critics of science, so lets now bring Henri Poincaré up to date by quoting the American biologist Jerry Coyne and his own response to Berlinski:

“[According to David Berlinski] [s]cience has no answers to ‘The Big Questions’ like ‘why is there something instead of nothing?’ (the answer that ‘it was an accident’ is fobbed off by Berlinski as ‘failing to meet people’s intellectual needs’, which of course is not an answer but a statement about confirmation bias); ‘where did the Universe come from?’; ‘how did life originate?’; ‘what are we doing here?’, ‘what is our purpose?’, and so on. Apparently Berlinski [like Leo Tolstoy] doesn’t like ‘we don’t know’ as an answer, but as a nonbeliever I’d like to know his answer! He has none; all he does is carp about science’s ignorance.”

It’s useful to bring in the American science writer Kitty Ferguson here.

Ferguson is very sympathetic to religion. At the very same time, she also seems to have understood science far better than either Tolstoy or Berlinski when she wrote the following words:

“[S]cience doesn’t make any claim to have discovered the ultimate truth about anything. [Scientists] don’t speak of ‘the verdict of science’, but of ‘the standard model’. [] They speak of ‘approximate theories’. [] They speak of ‘effective theories’, which means that something we can work with for the present while knowing it isn’t absolutely and unequivocally correct.”

[These words can be found in Ferguson’s book The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion and the Search For God.]

Finally, we can see that not only does Rovelli (in a manner of speaking) play down science, he’s also well aware of what at least some of its critics really want. In conclusion, he writes:

“There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got in from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from god; they have found it in the depths of themselves. There is always someone who has the presumption to be the depository of Truth, neglecting to notice that the world is full of *other* depositories of Truth, each one with his own real Truth, different from that of the others. There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words, ‘Follow me, I am the true way.’”

So did Leo Tolstoy and David Berlinski yearn for someone “dressed in white” who would offer them absolute truth? And do many of the other critics of science (i.e., whom Rovelli refers to in his book) also yearn for “real Truth”?

Anil Seth: Intelligence ≠ Consciousness ≠ Intelligence

The critics of both panpsychism and integrated information theory (IIT) rely on an implicit— although sometimes explicit — strong connection which they make between intelligence and consciousness. In basic terms, then, they believe that because very basic entities can’t be deemed to be intelligent, then they can’t be deemed to instantiate consciousness either.

(i) Introduction
(ii) Thermostats, Computers and Animals
(iii) According to Seth, Chalmers and Penrose, Functionalism Fails
(iv) John Searle on Biological Brains

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Without actually mentioning panpsychism and integrated information theory (IIT), the British neuroscientist Anil Seth states the following:

“This is the assumption that consciousness and intelligence are intimately, even constitutively, linked: that consciousness will just come along for the ride.”

Now let’s take an extreme version of this position.

If intelligence and consciousness (with a stress on the former) are necessarily linked, then (depending on how “intelligence” is actually defined in the first place) thermostats can’t be conscious. And neither can ants, mice and even human babies.

Seth draws his own conclusions from this when he continues with these words:

“[T]he tendency to conflate consciousness with intelligence traces to a pernicious anthropocentrism by which we over-interpret the world through the distorting lenses of our own values and experiences. *We* are conscious, *we* are intelligent, and *we* are so species-proud of our self-declared intelligence that we assume that intelligence is inextricably linked with our conscious status and vice versa.”

Seth seems to pick up on a Cartesian strand here when he adds the following warning:

“If we persist in assuming that consciousness is intrinsically tied to intelligence, we may be too eager to attribute consciousness to artificial systems that appear to be intelligent, and too quick to deny it to other systems — such as other animals — that fail to match up to our questionable standards of cognitive competence”

It’s not entirely clear that any collective “we” has ever “conflate[d] consciousness with intelligence”. Perhaps only a single philosophical tradition — i.e., Cartesianism — did so. However, it’s still of up for debate how much of an influence that tradition had outside of philosophy and science.

In addition, not all other cultures and traditions — i.e., outside the West — have had benevolent and sympathetic attitudes to all animals. Added to that is the fact that individuals or collectives can be cruel to animals, deny them dignity and worth, etc. and still believe that they are indeed conscious, and, to a degree, even intelligent.

So there’s a danger of conflating Descartes’ own technical and somewhat philosophically-arcane position on animals, with what Western “folk” believed. [See Note 1.]

To sum up. It’s hard to believe that there are any strict Cartesians nowadays. Thus, anthropocentrism itself may not be as big a problem as Seth believes.

It depends…

It depends on the philosophical ism being discussed, and also on what particular philosophers and scientists have to say on the matters in hand.

All that said, and as ever, much of this depends on what’s meant by the words “consciousness” and “intelligence” in the first place!

Thus, if the word “intelligence” is taken (as Seth puts it) “anthropocentrically”, then we’re driven to a Cartesian position which denies most (even all?) animals consciousness. From a different direction, we’re also driven to a position which laughs at panpsychists for supposedly believing that stones or atoms “think”. [See my ‘Sabine Hossenfelder Doesn’t Think… About Panpsychism’.]

Thermostats, Computers and Animals

Against both anthropomorphism and Cartesianism, there’s a passage from Anil Seth (which doesn’t express his own position) which actually widens the domain of consciousness, rather than narrows it. However, even though it widens it to all animals, it doesn’t also do so to computers, robots, thermostats, etc. Seth writes:

“For some people — including some AI researchers — anything that responds to stimulation, that learns something, or that behaves so as to maximise a reward or achieve a goal is conscious.”

Thus, according to this account, thermostats may not be deemed to be conscious because they don’t — again, depending on definitions — learn anything, and they don’t do anything to maximise a reward or achieve a goal…

However, thermostats do respond to stimulation.

In any case, Seth’s account of consciousness above can be applied to literally all animals.

So is this an account which leaves out intelligence?

Or is responding to stimulation, learning something, and behaving so as to maximise a reward or achieve a goal not only constitutive of being conscious, but also of being intelligent?

Indeed, does it matter?

Which sets of data and arguments could possibly help us decide which is the best term (i.e., “intelligent” or “conscious”) to use here?

Still, Seth warns us that consciousness and intelligence are often juxtaposed. Yet they’re sometimes being juxtaposed in such a way (i.e., in the passage above) so as to work against anthropocentrism, and toward a widening of the domains of both intelligence and consciousness.

According to Seth, Chalmers and Penrose, Functionalism Fails

Anil Seth argues that functionalism is at the heart of both AI theory generally, as well as being at the heart of the belief that intelligence (or at least “intelligent behaviour”) and consciousness are intrinsically connected.

So first things first.

According to Seth’s account of functionalism,

“what matters for consciousness is what a system *does*”.

What does the relevant system do?

In this case, it “transforms inputs into outputs”. And if it does that “in the right way”, then, according to some functionalists, then “there will be consciousness”.

Thus, on this definition, a thermostat must be conscious — at least to some degree…

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers seems to agree.

In his ‘What is it like to be a thermostat?’, Chalmers writes:

“[Thermostats] take an input, perform a quick and easy nonlinear transformation on it, and produce an output.”

What Chalmers adds to this story, however, is the important notion and reality of information. [See here.] However, let’s just say here that ants and viruses take inputs too, and they perform quick and easy nonlinear transformations on such inputs, to produce outputs. (It can be doubted that a thermostat’s transformations are, in fact, nonlinear.)

So what about a paramecium and its own inputs and outputs?

The mathematical physicist Roger Penrose writes:

“For she [a paramecium] swims about her pod with her numerous tiny hairlike legs — the cilia — darting in the direction of bacterial food which she senses using a variety of mechanisms, or retreating at the prospect of danger, ready to swim off in another direction. She can also negotiate obstructions by swimming around them. Moreover, she can apparently even learn from her past experiences [].”

Chalmers has referred to proto-experiences when discussing a thermostat (although not actually quoted doing above), and here we have Penrose using the unadulterated word “experiences” in reference to a paramecium.

As already stated, functionalists stress… well, functions. In other words, they stress what systems do. Thus, functionalists also stress substrate-independence. Yet, as just mentioned, Penrose is actually stressing biology itself.

In more detail.

Penrose believes that ants are one step ahead of computers and other artificial entities when he claims that the

“actual capabilities of an ant seem to outstrip by far, anything that has been achieved by the standard procedures of AI”.

The molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist Francis Crick also argued that the study of consciousness must be a biological pursuit.

According to Crick, psychologists (as well as philosophers) have

“treated the brain as a black box, which can be understood in terms merely of inputs and outputs rather than of internal mechanisms”.

The biologist, neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman (1929- 2014) is also said to have held the position that the mind

“can only be understood from a biological standpoint, not through physics or computer science or other approaches that ignore the structure of the brain”.

All this brings us to the more (philosophically) detailed account of these issues as offered to us by the American philosopher John Searle.

John Searle on Biological Brains

Searle’s basic position is that if functionalists ignore the physical biology of brains and nervous systems, and, instead, focus exclusively on syntax, computations or functions, then that will lead to a kind of 21st century mind-body dualism. What he means by this is that in much AI theory and functionalism there’s a radical disjunction created between the actual physical reality of the brain and how we explain — or account for — consciousness (as well as for intentionality and the mind generally).

Searle himself wrote the following words:

“I believe we are now at a point where we can address this problem as a biological problem [of consciousness] like any other. For decades research has been impeded by two mistaken views: first, that consciousness is just a special sort of computer program, a special software in the hardware of the brain; and second that consciousness was just a matter of information processing. The right sort of information processing — or on some views any sort of information processing — would be sufficient to guarantee consciousness. [] it is important to remind ourselves how profoundly anti-biological these views are. On these views brains do not really matter. We just happen to be implemented in brains, but any hardware that could carry the program or process the information would do just as well. I believe, on the contrary, that understanding the nature of consciousness crucially requires understanding how brain processes cause and realize consciousness. ”

He continued:

“Perhaps when we understand how brains do that, we can build conscious artifacts using some nonbiological materials that duplicate, and not merely simulate, the causal powers that brains have. But first we need to understand how brains do it.”

To Searle himself, it’s mainly about what he calls “causal powers”.

This refers to the fact (or possibility) that a certain level of complexity is what’s required (as against panpsychism, and perhaps against integrated information theory too) to bring about those causal powers which are necessary for consciousness (as well as for intentionality and mind generally).

Despite that, Searle never argues that biological brains are the only things capable — in principle — of bringing about consciousness and (genuine?) intelligence. (Therefore, in Searle-speak, semantics.) He only argues that biological brains are the only things known to exist which are complex enough to do so. Again, Searle doesn’t believe that only brains can give rise to minds. Searle’s position is that only brains do give rise to minds. In other words, Searle is emphasising an empirical fact. However, he’s not also denying the logical, metaphysical and even natural possibility that other things can bring forth consciousness and intelligence.

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Note:

It can be argued that Descartes’ view on animals filtered down to the folk. On the other hand, it can also be argued that Descartes himself latched onto preexisting (Christian?) views about animals.

It’s also worth noting here that Descartes stressed mind, not consciousness itself.

(*) See my ‘Neuroscientist Anil Seth Links Panpsychism To Integrated Information Theory’ and ‘Anil Seth: Consciousness ≠ Integrated Information’.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth Links Panpsychism To Integrated Information Theory

 

(i) Introduction

(ii) Integrated Information Theory and Panpsychism

(iii) David Chalmers on Conscious Thermostats

(iv) Is Information Fundamental?

Introduction

Firstly, let me quote the British neuroscientist Anil Seth offering his broad view of panpsychism. He writes:

“Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, alongside other fundamental properties such as mass/energy and charge; that is present to some degree everywhere and in everything.”

Seth then immediately tackles the subject of “silly” panpsychism when he continues with the following words:

“People sometimes make fun of panpsychism for claiming things like stones and spoons are conscious in the same sort of way that you and I are, but these are usually deliberate misconstruals designed to make it look silly. There are more sophisticated versions of the idea [].”

More relevantly to this essay, an important way of linking panpsychism to integrated information theory (IIT) can be seen when comparing Seth’s words that

“[p]anpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe”

to his words (written elsewhere) that integrated information theory

“also implies that *information itself* exists — that it has some definite ontological status in our universe — a status like mass/energy and electrical charge”.

Here we have two rival views as to what is fundamental in the universe…

Or are they rivals?

Integrated Information Theory and Panpsychism

Integrated information theorists don’t believe that all (physical) entities (or “systems”) instantiate consciousness. The main reason for this is that not every… thing has the required level of integrated information to be conscious.

In broad and general terms, most integrated information theorists (along with Anil Seth himself) emphasise complexity and integration. Thus, unlike panpsychists, they also focus almost entirely on biological brains.

Seth offers his readers his own technical take on integration, information and complexity when he cites the example of the molecules in a gas. He claims that this

“kind of system has maximum information — maximum randomness — but shows no integration at all, because every element is independent from each other”.

On the other hand, we also have Seth’s other example of a “crystal lattice”. In this case, “all the elements do exactly the same thing”. Thus, here we have

“maximum integration, but almost no information, because there are very few possible states that the system can be in”.

Interestingly enough, the physicist Max Tegmark also mentions gases. And he too uses integrated information theory to distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as gases, liquids and solids. Indeed, he backs up both Anil Seth’s and Giulio Tononi’s position when he tells us that consciousness is dependent upon “information, integration, independence, dynamics, and utility principles”.

Now let’s tackle panpsychism more broadly.

Panpsychism

The problem with arguing that consciousness (or experience) is integrated information, and that information is everywhere, is that even very simple objects (or systems) must instantiate (or contain) a degree of (integrated?) information. Therefore, such basic objects must also have a degree of consciousness. Or, in the language of integrated information theory, all such objects (or systems) must have a “φ value”.

Perhaps, then, we’ve entered the territory of panpsychism here.

Not surprisingly, Giulio Tononi’s position does touch on panpsychism — even if his position isn’t identical to that of panpsychists. That said, he’s written conflicting things about this particular philosophical ism.

For example, Tononi wrote the following words:

“Unlike panpsychism, however, IIT clearly implies that not everything is conscious.”

Despite all that, and to repeat, IIT has it that even basic objects have a nonzero degree of Φ. This would mean that consciousness is almost everywhere — if only to a rudimentary degree (as with the “proto-experience” of panpsychists).

In any case, the argument that IIT is not a kind of panpsychism is at odds with what the philosophers David Chalmers and John Searle believe. They do take IIT to be a form of panpsychism. [See here and here.] What’s more, the German-American neurophysiologist and neuroscientist Christof Koch (Giulio Tononi’s co-worker) has even claimed that IIT is a “scientifically refined version” of panpsychism.

In any case, if we accept a strong — indeed a necessary — link between consciousness and integrated information, then an ant or a virus must have a “non-zero degree of consciousness”…

Indeed, this could be true of a thermostat too!

David Chalmers on Conscious Thermostats

In his ‘What is it like to be a thermostat?’, David Chalmers writes:

“[Thermostats] take an input, perform a quick and easy nonlinear transformation on it, and produce an output.”

What does Chalmers mean by the word ‘information’ when it comes — specifically — to a thermostat?

Basically, heat and cold (i.e., all variations in temperature in a given environment) can be seen as bits of information. However, are heat and cold information for a thermostat? More relevantly, does that even matter in this IIT-panpsychism context?

Or is it the case that the actions (i.e., cases of processing) which are carried out by the thermostat constitute information? Alternatively, perhaps it’s the physical nature of a thermostat (its mechanical and material innards) that constitutes its information.

In terms of the thermostat at least, surely information is information-for-us, not information for the thermostat itself. After all, a thermostat responds to changes in temperature because we’ve designed it to do so…

Nonetheless, whatever a thermostat is doing (even if designed), it’s still doing. That is, the thermostat is acting on changes in temperature. (When it’s hot, it does one thing. And when it’s cold, it does another thing.)

Thus, does a thermostat have (to use John Searle’s term) as-if information? Or does it have real (first-order) information? In other words, does the fact that a thermostat is designed by human beings automatically stop it from having experiences which are themselves determined by its informational innards and/or nature?

To move away from thermostats.

Does the fact that a computer (or robot) is designed by human persons — and created out of synthetic materials — create any necessary or automatic problems for artificial consciousness?

After all, humans are also — in a strong, if metaphorical, sense — designed by their DNA, and we certainly have experiences.

Thermostats are designed by human persons: do the former have experiences too?

David Chalmers also tackled (way back in 1996) the case of the artificial neural network NETtalk, and asked us whether or not it does (or could) instantiate conscious experience. He wrote:

“NETTALK, then, is not an instantiation of conscious experience; it is only a model of it.”

John Searle had something to say on thermostats too:

“I say about my thermostat that it perceives changes in the temperature [].”

This means that this is Searle’s way (as with Daniel Dennett) of taking an intentional stance towards thermostats. That is, we can treat them — or take them — as being intentional objects. We can also take them as as-if intentional objects.

On Searle’s view, then, the as-if-intentional nature of thermostats is derived from the fact that these inanimate objects have been designed to (as it were) perceive, know and act. However, this is only as-if perception, as-if knowledge and as-if action. (All this involves as-if information too.) Thus, such things are dependent on human perception and human knowledge. Yet such as-if perception, as-if-knowledge and as-if-action require real — or “intrinsic” — intentionality.

This must mean that Chalmers’ thermostat has a degree of as-if intentionality too, which is derived from (our) intrinsic intentionality.

Now let’s jump from conscious thermostats to conscious nations.

The following passage is Anil Seth’s reference to the China brain thought experiment:

“The China brain thought experiment considers what would happen if each member of the Chinese nation were asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Would this arrangement have a mind or consciousness in the same way that brains do?”

So, according to Seth, at the other end of the scale it’s also the case that “an entire country [could] be conscious”. What’s more, if that were the case, then we’d also need to decide if “one country [could] be more conscious than another”.

Let’s now move on from integrated information, and simply tackle information itself.

Is Information Fundamental?

Anil Seth discusses the idea that integrated information theorists see information as being fundamental. He writes:

“[A]nother weirdness of IIT is that by making the strong claim that PHI *is* consciousness, IIT also implies that *information itself* exists — that it has some definite ontological status in our universe — a status like mass/energy and electrical charge.”

There are problems with this position.

The science writer Philip Ball quotes the words of the physicist Christopher Fuchs to express some of these problems. Firstly, Ball writes:

“Christopher Fuchs sees these insights as a necessary corrective to the way quantum information theory has tended to propagate the notion that information is something objective and real — which is to say, ontic."

Ball then quotes Fuchs directly:

“‘It is amazing how many people talk about information as if it is simply some new kind of objective quantity in physics, like energy, but measured in bits instead of ergs. You’ll often hear information spoken of as if it’s a new fluid that physics has only recently taken note of.’"

Finally, Ball sums up this issue with the following words:

“In contrast, [Fuchs] argues, what else can information possibly be except an expression of what we think we know?”

That passage can be read as arguing that stuff gives off information, rather than stuff actually being information in and of itself.

Yet this position conflicts with what some philosophers and physicists believe. That is, such people believe that information is in no way mind-dependent. Indeed, they believe that information is information regardless of minds, persons, observers, experiments, tests, etc.

So Fuchs is (at least partly) at one with the philosopher John Searle in rejecting this hypostatisation of information.

That said, information may well become (what Searle calls) information-for-us for such information-based physicists. Yet it’s still regarded as information even before it becomes information-for-us.

There is a midway position here, as expressed by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.

Rovelli writes very loosely about information here:

“[T]he white ball ball in my hand is black. We’re dealing with physical facts, not mental notions. A ball has information, in this sense, even if the ball does not have mental states, just as a USB storage device contains information [].”

More directly on the theme of observers or scientists:

“But the effective way of continuing to exist in a changing environment is to manage correlations with the external world better, that is to say, information; to collect, store, transmit and elaborate information.”

Thus, information can be seen as being fundamental, and it can be tied to minds or observers too.

What’s more, some readers might have spotted that these passages from Rovelli tie in with Philip Ball’s earlier fundamental question:

“[W]hat else can information possibly be except an expression of what we think we know?”

In other words, these commentators certainly don’t believe that information is (to use the words of Christopher Fuchs again)

“simply some new kind of objective quantity in physics, like energy”.

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(*) See my ‘Anil Seth: Consciousness ≠ Integrated Information’.]