The consciousness-first commitment of integrated information theory

Abstract

Integrated information theory (IIT) accounts for consciousness through its explanatory identity: an experience (the explanandum) is identical to a causal structure (or Φ-structure, the explanans). In other identities in science (e.g. ‘water is H2O’), the power of the explanans (H2O) comes from the presumption that it somehow exists more fundamentally. Yet when our explanandum is experience itself, as in IIT, we must recalibrate the norms of explanation to the fact that experience exists immediately and irrefutably, while whatever we may posit about the world beyond experience is always an inference within experience.