This town ain’t big enough…

boxers…for two theories?

Ihtio kindly drew my attention to an interesting paper which sets integrated information theory (IIT) against its own preferred set of ideas – semantic pointer competition (SPC). I’m not quite sure where this ‘one on one’ approach to theoretical discussion comes from. Perhaps the authors see IIT as gaining ground to the extent that any other theory must now take it on directly. The effect is rather of a single bout from some giant knock-out tournament of theories of consciousness (I would totally go for that, incidentally; set it up, somebody!).

We sort of know about IIT by now, but what is SPC? The authors of the paper, Paul Thagard and Terrence C Stewart, suggest that:

consciousness is a neural process resulting from three mechanisms: representation by firing patterns in neural populations, binding of representations into more complex representations called semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers to capture the most important aspects of an organism’s current state.

I like the sound of this, and from the start it looks like a contender. My main problem with IIT is that, as was suggested last time, it seems easy enough to imagine that a whole lot of information could be integrated but remain uniluminated by consciousness; it feels as if there needs to be some other functional element; but if we supply that element it looks as if it will end up doing most of the interesting work and relegate the integration process to something secondary or even less important. SPC looks to be foregrounding the kind of process we really need.

The authors provide three basic hypotheses on which SPC rests;

H1. Consciousness is a brain process resulting from neural mechanisms.
H2. The crucial mechanisms for consciousness are: representation by patterns of firing in neural populations, binding of these representations into semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers.
H3. Qualitative experiences result from the competition won by semantic pointers that unpack into neural representations of sensory, motor, emotional, and verbal activity.

The particular mention of the brain in H1 is no accident. The authors stress that they are offering a theory of how brains work. Perhaps one day we’ll find aliens or robots who manage some form of consciousness without needing brains, but for now we’re just doing the stuff we know about. “…a theory of consciousness should not be expected to apply to all possible conscious entities.”

Well, actually, I’d sort of like it to – otherwise it raises questions about whether it really is consciousness itself we’re explaining. The real point here, I think, is meant to be a criticism of IIT, namely that it is so entirely substrate-neutral that it happily assigns consciousness to anything that is sufficiently filled with integrated information. Thagard and Stewart want to distance themselves from that, claiming it as a merit of their theory that it only offers consciousness to brains. I sympathise with that to a degree, but if it were me I’d take a slightly different line, resting on the actual functional features they describe rather than simple braininess. The substrate does have to be capable of doing certain things, but there’s no need to assume that only neurons could conceivably do them.

The idea of binding representations into ‘semantic pointers’ is intriguing and seems like the right kind of way to be going; what bothers me most here is how we get the representations in the first place. Not much attention is given to this in the current paper: Thagard and Stewart say neurons that interact with the world and with each other become “tuned” to regularities in the environment. That’s OK, but not really enough. It can’t be that mere interaction is enough, or everything would be a prolific representation of everything around it; but picking out the right “regularities” is a non-trivial task, arguably the real essence of representation.

Competition is the way particular pointers get selected to enter consciousness, according to H2; I’m not exactly sure how that works and I have doubts about whether open competition will do the job. One remarkable thing about consciousness is its coherence and direction, and unregulated competition seems unlikely to produce that, any more than a crowd of people struggling for access to a microphone would produce a fluent monologue. We can imagine that a requirement for coherence is built in, but the mechanism that judges coherence turns out to be rather important and rather difficult to explain.

So does SPC deliver? H3 claims that it gives rise to qualitative experience: the paper splits the issue into two questions: first, why are there all these different experiences, and second, why is there any experience at all? On the first, the answers are fairly good, but not particularly novel or surprising; a diverse range of sensory inputs and patterns of neural firing naturally give rise to a diversity of experience. On the second question, the real Hard Problem, we don’t really get anywhere; it’s suggested that actual experience is an emergent property of the three processes of consciousness. Maybe it is, but that doesn’t really explain it. I can’t seriously criticise Thagard and Stewart because no-one has really done any better with this; but I don’t see that SPC has a particular edge over IIT in this respect either.

Not that their claim to superiority rests on qualia; in fact they bring a range of arguments to suggest that SPC is better at explaining various normal features of consciousness. These vary in strength, in my opinion. First feature up is  how consciousness starts and stops. SPC has a good account, but I think IIT could do a reasonable job, too. The second feature is how consciousness shifts, and this seems a far stronger case; pointers naturally lend themselves better to thus than the gradual shifts you would at first sight expect from a mass of integrated information. Next we have a claim that SPC is better at explaining the different kinds or grades of consciousness that fifteen organisms presumably have. I suppose the natural assumption, given IIT, would be that you either have enough integration for consciousness or you don’t. Finally, it’s claimed that SPC is the winner when it comes to explaining the curious unity/disunity of consciousness. Clearly SPC has some built-in tools for binding, and the authors suggest that competition provides a natural source of fragmentation. They contrast this with Tononi’s concept of quantity of consciousness, an idea they disparage as meaningless in the face of the mental diversity of the organisms in the world.

As I say, I find some of these points stronger than others, but on the whole I think the broad claim that SPC gives a better picture is well founded. To me it seems the advantages of SPC mainly flow from putting representation and pointers at the centre. The dynamic quality this provides, and the spark of intentionality, make it better equipped to explain mental functions than the more austere apparatus of IIT. To me SPC is like a vehicle that needs overhauling and some additional components (some of those not readily available); it doesn’t run just now but you can sort of see how it would. IIT is more like an elegant sculptural form which doesn’t seem to have a place for the wheels.