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Synergistic signatures of consciousness across brains and machines
Abstract: Integrated information theory (IIT) is a candidate theory of consciousness that posits a tight relationship between consciousness and patterns of information sharing across neurons or brain regions. In this talk, I will describe Weak IIT, an empirically focused approach to IIT, and argue that central IIT metrics can be quantified effectively from data using the information-theoretic concept of synergy: the extent to which neural dynamics irreducibly depend on multiple parts of the system. After describing the main mathematical elements, we will go through key results showing that synergy plays an important role in human cognition and consciousness. Next, we will strengthen the link between synergy and consciousness through a cross-species analysis and a computational whole-brain model. Finally, to causally probe the relevance of synergy for intelligence, we will cover recent results investigating synergy in large language models (LLMs), revealing intriguing similarities between minds and machines.
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