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melchebo | 9 years ago

Seemingly the only relevant reply in this comment section. That said, the article is kind of vague and has a few big misunderstandings unrelated to Tononi's Phi and Information Integration Theory.

Phi is basically a complexity metric that tries to put a number on the effect of memory in a system. I'm unsure wether this has any relation to 'consciousness', but it's at least interesting to measure effects of having a low or high Phi.

For example functional programming languages favor a low Phi. Everything is defined by the input, memoization is possible (sort of what you call 'mocks' in other programming languages). There are no side-effects (memory of past events elsewhere), or at least they have to be invoked explicitly as 'unsafe' operations.

Also, code that calculates Phi: https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples...

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