ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
Information Closure Theory of Consciousness.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Community First Theory: How Collective Organization Generates Individual Diversity.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The causal efficacy of consciousness: a neuroscientific analysis and explanation.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Intrinsic units: identifying a system's causal grain.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- A neuroscientific hypothesis on the physical nature of consciousness.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Naturalizing perceptual experience: the explanatory power of probabilistic computation and the holographic solution.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Consilience in Causation: Causal Emergence Is Found Across Measures of Causation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Emergence from general anaesthesia: stochastic or deterministic?British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
- Capturing the emergent dynamical structure in biophysical neural models.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Irruption and Absorption: A 'Black-Box' Framework for How Mind and Matter Make a Difference to Each Other.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Emergence and Causality in Complex Systems: A Survey of Causal Emergence and Related Quantitative Studies.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Toward a universal theory of consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Brain-consistent architecture for imagination.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2024Article
- A systematic approach to brain dynamics: cognitive evolution theory of consciousness.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2023Article
- Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Flickering Emergences: The Question of Locality in Information-Theoretic Approaches to Emergence.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Non-Separability of Physical Systems as a Foundation of Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Theories of consciousness.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2022Review
- Integrated world modeling theory expanded: Implications for the future of consciousness.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Article
- From the origins to the stream of consciousness and its neural correlates.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Article
- Quantifying the Autonomy of Structurally Diverse Automata: A Comparison of Candidate Measures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Information processing in neural systems can be described and analyzed at multiple spatiotemporal scales. Generally, information at lower levels is more fine-grained but can be coarse-grained at higher levels. However, only information processed at specific scales of coarse-graining appears to be available for conscious awareness. We do not have direct experience of information available at the scale of individual neurons, which is noisy and highly stochastic. Neither do we have experience of more macro-scale interactions, such as interpersonal communications. Neurophysiological evidence suggests that conscious experiences co-vary with information encoded in coarse-grained neural states such as the firing pattern of a population of neurons. In this article, we introduce a new informational theory of consciousness: Information Closure Theory of Consciousness (ICT). We hypothesize that conscious processes are processes which form non-trivial informational closure (NTIC) with respect to the environment at certain coarse-grained scales. This hypothesis implies that conscious experience is confined due to informational closure from conscious processing to other coarse-grained scales. Information Closure Theory of Consciousness (ICT) proposes new quantitative definitions of both conscious content and conscious level. With the parsimonious definitions and a hypothesize, ICT provides explanations and predictions of various phenomena associated with consciousness. The implications of ICT naturally reconcile issues in many existing theories of consciousness and provides explanations for many of our intuitions about consciousness. Most importantly, ICT demonstrates that information can be the common language between consciousness and physical reality.
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