> Phenomenal consciousness is crazy. It doesn’t really seem possible in principle for matter to “wake up”.
> In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious. Tononi responded that yup, thermostats are conscious. It probably isn’t a very interesting consciousness. They have no language or metacognition, so they can’t think thoughts like “I am a thermostat”. They just sit there, dimly aware of the temperature. You can’t prove that they don’t.
For whatever reason HN does not like integrated information theory. Neither does Aaronson. His critique is pretty great, but beyond poking holes in IIT, that critique also admits that it's the rare theory that's actually quantified and testable. The holes as such don't show conclusively that the theory is beyond repair. IIT is also a moving target, not something that's frozen since 2004. (For example [1]). Quickly dismissing it without much analysis and then bemoaning the poor state of discussion seems unfortunate!
The answer to the thermostat riddle is basically just "why did you expect a binary value for consciousness and why shouldn't it be a continuum?" Common sense and philosophers will both be sympathetic to the intuition here if you invoke animals instead of thermostats. If you wanted a binary yes/no for whatever reason, just use an arbitrary cut-off I guess, which will lead to various unintuitive conclusions.. but play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
For the other standard objections, like a oldschool library card-catalogue or a hard drive that encodes a contrived Vandermonde matrix being paradoxically more conscious than people, variations on IIT are looking at normalizing phi-values to disentangle matters of redundancy of information "modes". I haven't read the paper behind TFA and definitely don't have in-depth knowledge of Recurrent Processing Theory or Global Workspace Theory at all. But speaking as mere bystander, IIT seems very generic in its reach and economical in assumptions. Even if it's broken in the details, it's hard to imagine that some minor variant on the basic ideas would not be able to express other theories.
Phi ultimately is about applied mereology moving from the world of philosophy towards math and engineering, i.e. "is the whole more than the sum of the parts, if so how much more". That's the closest I've ever heard to anything touching on the hard problem and phenomenology.
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/aip/cha/article/32/1/013115/2835635/Int...