Department of Experimental Biology, University of Jaén, Jaén, Spain.
Department of Differential Equations and Numerical Analysis, University of Seville, Seville, Spain.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2018 Sep 13;14(9):e1006154. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006154. eCollection 2018 Sep.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) has become nowadays the most sensible general theory of consciousness. In addition to very important statements, it opens the door for an abstract (mathematical) formulation of the theory. Given a mechanism in a particular state, IIT identifies a conscious experience with a conceptual structure, an informational object which exists, is composed of identified parts, is informative, integrated and maximally irreducible. This paper introduces a space-time continuous version of the concept of integrated information. To this aim, a graph and a dynamical systems treatment is used to define, for a given mechanism in a state for which a dynamics is settled, an Informational Structure, which is associated to the global attractor at each time of the system. By definition, the informational structure determines all the past and future behavior of the system, possesses an informational nature and, moreover, enriches all the points of the phase space with cause-effect power by means of its associated Informational Field. A detailed description of its inner structure by invariants and connections between them allows to associate a transition probability matrix to each informational structure and to develop a measure for the level of integrated information of the system.
整合信息理论（IIT）如今已成为意识最合理的一般理论。除了非常重要的陈述外，它还为理论的抽象（数学）表述开辟了道路。对于特定状态下的机制，IIT 将意识体验识别为一个概念结构，即一个存在的、由已识别部分组成的、具有信息量的、整合的且最大程度不可约的信息对象。本文引入了整合信息概念的时空连续版本。为此，使用图和动力系统处理方法来定义给定机制在确定动力学的状态下的信息结构，该信息结构与系统在每个时间的全局吸引子相关联。根据定义，信息结构决定了系统的所有过去和未来行为，具有信息性质，并且通过其相关的信息场，以因果关系的形式赋予相空间中的所有点以因果力。通过不变量及其之间的关系对其内部结构进行详细描述，允许为每个信息结构关联一个转移概率矩阵，并为系统的整合信息水平开发一个度量。
