We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness
          research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (although not all) respects

Desmond, Hugh

Huneman, Philippe

We propose that measures of information integration can be more

straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of

consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness

research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many

(though not all) respects

PhilSci Archive

The Integrated Information Theory of Agency  Hugh Desmond1,2 Philippe Huneman1   1 Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne – CNRS. 2 Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp    Published in Brain and Behavioral Sciences doi:10.1017/S0140525X21002004, e0    Abstract We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (though not all) respects.     Once consciousness is analysed as “efficient network activity”, it is manifested across a broad range of systems, and its meaningfulness as a concept becomes diluted. That is, as Merker et al. successfully show, a fundamental challenge for the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness (Tononi 2008; Tononi et al. 2016).  As a way forward, we propose that measures of information integration can more straightforwardly be interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. Because agency can be defined in terms of behavioural patterns, it avoids the problems arising from quantifying “first-person perspective” properties by means of “third-person perspective” measures. As the conceptual dual of consciousness, agency may, thus, deserve a more prominent place in consciousness research.   Agency and Integration. Agency is increasingly of interest to biologists, as many developmental patterns and behaviors (including those of plants) are characterized in agential terms. It is part of a trend to assign a greater theoretical role to organisms as such in our understanding of evolution: organisms do not simply passively undergo  evolutionary processes but actively shape their selective environment (Laland, Matthews, and Feldman 2016) and respond in a goal-directed manner to opportunities or “affordances” in their environment (Walsh 2015). At a very general level, “agency” refers to how organisms exhibit goal-directed behaviours in response to environmental change. Talking about goals in this way activates old worries about teleology and anthropomorphism (i.e., agency as human-like intentionality). However, in practice, the pay-off for explaining behaviors as goal-directed lies in accounting for patterns of behavioral robustness: an organism’s “goal” is simply what it attempts to achieve through various means, even when it is perturbed or challenged by an environmental change. In other words, agency refers to how a (1) small number of goals can account for patterns of connectivity between (2) a large number of possible environmental states, and (3) a large number of possible behaviors.  This explanatory structure describes a bow-tie architecture (see Figure 1) where environmental states and behaviors are integrated in virtue of the “goals” present. Note that the figure does not illustrate any fine-grained connections between environmental states and behaviors. What it does illustrate is the general explanatory structure of agency, where the “goals” are used to explain how environmental states and behaviors are informationally integrated (for an information-theoretic treatment of scientific explanation: see e.g. Desmond 2019).      Figure 1: The bow-tie architecture of agency.  When the issue is put in this way, suggestive parallels with theories of consciousness emerge. The IIT posits consciousness as the integration of various experiential properties (Tononi 2008), but also global workspace theory (Dehaene and goals possible behaviorspossible environmental statesChangeux 2011, 11) posits a similar structure, where consciousness is a global broadcast mechanism, integrating input and output systems. However, unlike theories of consciousness, an integrated information theory of agency would not need further justification of why such bow-tie architectures should be identified with agency. Goal-directedness is a third-person concept and in this way it can be unproblematically fleshed out in terms of input-output patterns. Agency as a concept just is a type pattern of connectivity between environmental states and behaviors. There is no need to posit a counterpart to “qualia” or some ineffable subjective quality.  The underlying reason for this is that agency is an explanatory concept rather than one that refers to an empirical state-of-affairs. Informally, agency could be said to be more like “Newton’s law of inertia” rather than to “white snow”. If one is habituated to thinking of agency in terms of intentionality (or the presence of some form of mentality), this view of agency may require a gestalt-switch. The concept of agency imposes a structure on observed behavior, and if the observed behavioral patterns do not exhibit this general structure, there is simply no need to describe them as “agential” (see discussion in Desmond and Huneman 2020).    Agency and Consciousness as Duals. Whether or not the apparent isomorphism between theories of consciousness and the structure of agency is more than skin-deep is not a question we systematically address here.  Instead, we offer a general rationale why the appearance of such isomorphisms should not be surprising. If agency refers to the “activity” of the organism in relation to the environment, consciousness in its broadest sense denotes the “passivity” of the organism. A synonym for consciousness – sentience – makes this passivity clearer: the capacity of “feeling” refers to how an organism “undergoes” its environment (or think of “e-motion”: being moved). Agency and consciousness are different sides of the same fundamental coin of organism-environment relationality. One cannot have activity without passivity, and vice versa. In mathematics, dual concepts are used to integrate two different ways of looking at a same object (Atiyah 2007). Similarly, agency and consciousness can, at a fundamental level, be viewed as “duals.” And just as invoking the dual operator in mathematics may help solve otherwise intractable problems, perhaps some of the challenges facing our understanding of consciousness can be addressed by invoking agency. For instance, it is likely that the evolution of consciousness can only be understood by simultaneously understanding how agency evolved. This is reflected in how greater sensorimotor control has evolved in tandem with various proxies of consciousness such as cognitive systems (van Duijn, Keijzer, and Franken 2006; Godfrey-Smith 2020). Could an IIT of agency avoid the equivalent of panpsychism, which seems unavoidable once consciousness is naturalized an/or de-anthropomorphized?  Panpsychism’s dual is “panagentialism”. In other contexts, this has been called hyper-agency detection: seeing agency everywhere (cf. Atran 2002). We believe  panagentialism can be more easily defused, because of a subtle asymmetry between agency and consciousness (at least as the latter is typically understood). Attributing agency is an explanatory strategy to make sense of behavioral complexity – not a statement about the ontological makeup of the world. Panagentialism is thus simply a (poor) explanatory practise. Note that there may also be “no facts of the matter” regarding consciousness (Carruthers 2020). In that case, panpsychism would also be a poor explanatory practise, and agency and consciousness would be true duals.   REFERENCES Atiyah, Michael. 2007. “Duality in Mathematics and Physics.” Transcription of a talk delivered at the Institut de Matemàtica de la Universitat de Barcelona. https://fme.upc.edu/ca/arxius/butlleti-digital/riemann/071218_conferencia_atiyah-d_article.pdf. Atran, Scott. 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Carruthers, Peter. 2020. “Stop Caring about Consciousness.” Philosophical Topics 48 (1): 1–20. Dehaene, Stanislas, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2011. “Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing.” Neuron 70 (2): 200–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.018. Desmond, Hugh. 2019. “Shades of Grey: Granularity, Pragmatics, and Non-Causal Explanation.” Perspectives on Science 27 (1): 68–87. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00300. Desmond, Hugh, and Philippe Huneman. 2020. “The Ontology of Organismic Agency: A Kantian Approach.” In Natural Born Monads: On the Metaphysics of Organisms and Human Individuals., edited by Andrea Altobrando and Pierfrancesco Biasetti, 33–64. Berlin: De Gruyter. Duijn, Marc van, Fred Keijzer, and Daan Franken. 2006. “Principles of Minimal Cognition: Casting Cognition as Sensorimotor Coordination.” Adaptive Behavior 14 (2): 157–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/105971230601400207. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2020. “Varieties of Subjectivity.” Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 1150–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/710541. Laland, Kevin, Blake Matthews, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2016. “An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory.” Evolutionary Ecology 30: 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-016-9821-z. Tononi, Giulio. 2008. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.” The Biological Bulletin 215 (3): 216–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/25470707. Tononi, Giulio, Melanie Boly, Marcello Massimini, and Christof Koch. 2016. “Integrated Information Theory: From Consciousness to Its Physical Substrate.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17 (7): 450–61. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.44. Walsh, Denis. 2015. Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719.       

The Integrated Information Theory of Agency

The Integrated Information Theory of Agency Hugh Desmond1,2Philippe Huneman11 Institute of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne – CNRS. 2 Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp Abstract We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (though not all) respects. Once consciousness is analysed as efficient network activity, it is manifested across a broad range of systems, and its meaningfulness as a concept becomes diluted. That is, as Merker et al. successfully show, a fundamental challenge for the integrated information theory of consciousness (Tononi 2008; Tononi et al. 2016). In this commentary we propose that measures of information integration can most directly be interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. As we will argue, since agency can be defined in terms of behavioural patterns, it avoids the problems arising from quantifying “first-person perspective” properties by means of “third-person perspective” measures. As the conceptual dual of consciousness, agency may deserve a more prominent place in consciousness research. Agency and Integration. Agency is increasingly of interest to biologists, as many developmental patterns and behaviors (including those of plants) are characterized in agential terms. It is part of a trend to assign a greater theoretical role to organisms as such in our understanding of evolution: organisms not as passive targets of evolutionary processes as actively shaping their selective environment (Laland, Matthews, and Feldman 2016) and respond in a goal-directed manner to opportunities or “affordances” in their environment (Walsh 2015). At a very general level, “agency” refers to how organisms exhibit goal-directed behaviours in response to environmental change. Talking about goals in this way activates old worries about teleology and anthropomorphism (i.e., agency as human-like intentionality). However, in practise, the pay-off involved in explaining behaviors as goal-directed is that this helps account for patterns of behavioral robustness: an organism’s “goal” is what it attempts to achieve through various means, even when it is perturbed or challenged by an environmental change. In other words, agency refers to how a (1) small number of goals can account for patterns of connectivity between (2) a large number of possible environmental states, and (3) a large number of possible behaviors.  This explanatory structure describes a bow-tie architecture (see figure). environmental states and behaviors are integrated in virtue of the presence of “goals”. Agency can be manifested in different ways, and the figure does not illustrate any fine-grained connections between environmental states and behaviors. What it does illustrate is the explanatory general structure, where the “goals” are used to explain how environmental states and behaviors are informationally integrated (for an information-theoretic treatment of scientific explanation: see e.g. Desmond 2019).      When the issue is put in this way, suggestive parallels with theories of consciousness emerge. Not just the IIT posits consciousness as the integration of various experiential properties (Tononi 2008), but also global workspace theory (Dehaene and Changeux 2011, 11) posits a similar structure, where consciousness is a global broadcast mechanism, integrating input and output systems. Unlike theories of consciousness, a theory of agency does not need further justification of why such bow-tie architectures should be identified with agency. Goal-directedness is a third-person concept and in this way it can be unproblematically goals possible behaviorspossible environmental statesfleshed out in terms of input-output patterns. Agency as a concept just is a type pattern of connectivity between environmental states and behaviors. There is no need to posit a counterpart to “qualia” or some ineffable subjective quality.  The underlying reason for this is that agency is an explanatory concept rather than one with a reference to an empirical state-of-affairs. Informally, agency could be said to be more like “Newton’s law of inertia” rather than to “white snow”. If one is habituated to thinking of agency in terms of intentionality (or the presence of some form of mentality), this view of agency may require a gestalt-switch. The concept of agency imposes a structure on observed behavior, and if the observed behavioral patterns do not exhibit this general structure, there is simply no need to describe them as “agential” (see discussion in Desmond and Huneman 2020).    Agency and Consciousness as Duals. Whether or not the apparent isomorphism between theories of consciousness and the structure of agency is more than skin-deep is not something we can analyse in detail here. Instead, we offer a general rationale why the apparent isomorphism might be genuine: agency and consciousness can, at a fundamental level, be viewed as “duals”. In mathematics, dual concepts are used to integrate two different ways of looking at a same object (cf. e.g. Atiyah 2007). Similarly, if agency refers to the activity of the organism in relation to the environment, consciousness in its broadest sense denotes the “passivity” of the organism. A synonym for consciousness – sentience – makes this passivity clearer: the capacity of “feeling” refers to how an organism “undergoes” its environment (or think of “e-motion”: being moved). The duality follows from the fact that one cannot have activity without passivity, and vice versa: both are dimensions of an underlying organism-environment relationality.  Given this duality, it is not surprising that greater motor sensori-motor control has evolved in tandem with various proxies of consciousness such as cognitive systems (van Duijn, Keijzer, and Franken 2006; Godfrey-Smith 2020). Just as invoking the dual operator in mathematics may help solve otherwise intractable problems, understanding the evolution of agency may help understanding the evolution of consciousness. Another major worry for consciousness research is the spectre of panpsychism – seemingly the unavoidable cost of naturalising and/or de-anthropomorphizing consciousness. In context of agency, the dual spectre would be that of “panagentialism”. In other contexts, this has been called hyper-agency detection: seeing agency everywhere (cf. (Atran 2002). However, panagentialism can be more easily defused, because of an asymmetry between agency and consciousness (at least as the latter is typically understood). Attributing agency is an explanatory strategy to make sense of behavioral complexity. Hence, explaining all behaviors as agential is not a statement about reality (as panpsychism is typically interpreted to be), but simply as a (poor) explanatory practise. In other words, it reflects methodological issues rather than facts of the matter. However, perhaps there are indeed “no facts of the matter” regarding consciousness (Carruthers 2020). In that case, agency and consciousness may be true duals.   REFERENCES Atiyah, Michael. 2007. “Duality in Mathematics and Physics.” Transcription of a talk delivered at the Institut de Matemàtica de la Universitat de Barcelona. https://fme.upc.edu/ca/arxius/butlleti-digital/riemann/071218_conferencia_atiyah-d_article.pdf. Atran, Scott. 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Carruthers, Peter. 2020. “Stop Caring about Consciousness.” Philosophical Topics. Dehaene, Stanislas, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2011. “Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing.” Neuron 70 (2): 200–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.018. Desmond, Hugh. 2019. “Shades of Grey: Granularity, Pragmatics, and Non-Causal Explanation.” Perspectives on Science 27 (1): 68–87. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00300. Desmond, Hugh, and Philippe Huneman. 2020. “The Ontology of Organismic Agency: A Kantian Approach.” In Natural Born Monads: On the Metaphysics of Organisms and Human Individuals., edited by Andrea Altobrando and Pierfrancesco Biasetti. Berlin: De Gruyter. Duijn, Marc van, Fred Keijzer, and Daan Franken. 2006. “Principles of Minimal Cognition: Casting Cognition as Sensorimotor Coordination.” Adaptive Behavior 14 (2): 157–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/105971230601400207. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2020. “Varieties of Subjectivity.” Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 1150–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/710541. Laland, Kevin, Blake Matthews, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2016. “An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory.” Evolutionary Ecology 30: 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-016-9821-z. Rickles, Dean. 2017. “Dual Theories: ‘Same but Different’ or ‘Different but Same’?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 59 (August): 62–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2015.09.005. Tononi, Giulio. 2008. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.” The Biological Bulletin 215 (3): 216–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/25470707. Tononi, Giulio, Melanie Boly, Marcello Massimini, and Christof Koch. 2016. “Integrated Information Theory: From Consciousness to Its Physical Substrate.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17 (7): 450–61. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.44. Walsh, Denis. 2015. Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719.       

Abstract: We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are \u201cduals\u201d in many (although not all) respects

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The integrated information theory of agency

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The integrated information theory of agency

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