🎉 📜 NEW #PREPRINT !! 📜 🎉 Spearheaded by Adam Barrett we tried to tackle some of the challenges of IIT. We confront aspects worth delving into, with an incredible team of collaborators, inc. Pedro Mediano, @frosas.bsky.social, Daniel Bor, Lionel Barnett, and @anilseth.bsky.social.

Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood

The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is uniquely ambitious in proposing a mathematical formula, derived from apparently fundamental properties of conscious experience, to describe ...

arxiv.org

The next Models of Consciousness Conference will take place in Copenhagen! 

 We are excited to bring #MoC7 to the University of Copenhagen on October 12–16, 2026. Call for Abstracts is now open on our website (link below!)

Ready for the biggest review into Partial Information Decomposition ever? We've gone through the literature and collected every PID measure and property we could find and filled in the gaps! Thanks to Alberto Liardi for his superhuman work here! Check it out below! 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2603.06678

One of the best things about consciousness research is that you are forced to appreciate the value of your own experiences, good and bad Being human enough to regret taking the saltiest pretzel is already a miraculous thing

Just got tearful over a commutative diagram (happy tears, which is somehow worse) Time to go to bed

Nao Tsuchiya: The Qualia Structure Paradigm youtu.be/hxnnU-RmrIo?... via @YouTube This is a talk I gave at the Mathematical Phenomenology: Synergies and Connections Workshop of the Bamberg Mathematical Consciousness Science Initiative (BAMΞ).

Nao Tsuchiya: The Qualia Structure Paradigm

YouTube video by Mathematical Consciousness Science

youtu.be

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...

A behind-the-hood metric of synergistic emergence applied to neurodegeneration. Well done @keenandown.bsky.social and team! A next step would be to apply this to firing rates underlying the fMRI (totally not hinting at a collab) ;-)

Keenan Down@keenandown.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Happy to announce this new preprint! In it, we use info decomp (ΦID) on fMRI in Alzheimer's and MCI to explore how info-dynamic representations change. AD saw big decreases in synergy ('deductive' information) and increases in redundancy. Check it out here: 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

An absolutely precision-oriented read from the wider team of @canalesjohnson.bsky.social and co. on the information processing of prediction errors--an already high feat. They go further, relating it to environmental stimuli across sleep stages.

Delayed, Reduced and Redundant: Information Processing of Prediction Errors during Human Sleep

During sleep, the human brain transitions to a ‘sentinel processing mode’, enabling the continued processing of environmental stimuli despite the absence of consciousness. We employed advanced informa...

jneurosci.org

Next Consciousness Club is this Wednesday 25th Feb at 11am UK time! Anat Arzi @anatarzi.bsky.social will be talking about "The Dynamics of (Un)Consciousness: Insights from Olfaction and Respiration" All welcome, for more info and how to join please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...

Happy to announce this new preprint! In it, we use info decomp (ΦID) on fMRI in Alzheimer's and MCI to explore how info-dynamic representations change. AD saw big decreases in synergy ('deductive' information) and increases in redundancy. Check it out here: 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Didn't post about this at the time, but since we're going back to adult nationals again this year, here are some pictures from the recent Cambridge Classic open! PB for the national series so I'm quite happy 🎉⛸️ Thanks again to coaches James and Hannah!!

Happy to announce that the first major work of my PhD is now available in full in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory! 🎉 We push a set-theoretic version of info theory to new levels, describing 'sets of information' in a bold new way, with surprising insights! ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...

Went down to visit some family in my homeland (east Kent) Feat. the cliffs south of Dover, at Samphire Hoe (the leftover dirt from the channel tunnel) France was super clear on the horizon while I was down over the weekend!

One reason why multivariate information theory is hard: When we find the MI between two variables, we use probs drawn by an implicit third variable (the observation) - at least in the frequentist sense. E.g. we find probabilities for different eye colours by aggregating over *people* 🧍 (1/2)

Tried out the new Rainbow Rocket North yesterday! Awesome having a new climbing gym closer to home!

I think we need some more statistics on which subjects drink the most caffeine archive.thetab.com/us/2017/04/1... I refuse to believe that philosophers drink the most (My bet was bioinformaticians or something of that sort)

Ranked: The majors that drink the most coffee in America

It's not a problem I can quit any time I want

archive.thetab.com

Lucky to have caught this while it’s in London for 3 shows Was super refreshing having such an enthusiastic audience!

Trying some combos! I almost always find myself doing a salchow rather than a flip after an euler Will have to practise it more

I find it genuinely so interesting how nobody really talks about the problem of quantifying shared information I feel like it deserves a video or *something*, but it’s flown so under the radar The maths influencers are letting us down

Just saw a single sunflower in a field of weeds Struck me in a way I wasn’t expecting

The quickest way to make life more interesting is to hunt for unfamiliar qualia - me 15 minutes ago before people started to stare at me on the street

In the space of all phenomenal experiences, are isomorphic experiences the same? Do phenomena live in a skeletal category? Maybe someone with more category theory experience than me could tell me if this is interesting/a thing or not

Mathematics is all about conveying arguments. Because of that, elegant maths relies heavily on narrative structure and exposition. Mathematics is prose first, complexity second. I will defend this until I die

Logarithmic Decomposition is great for understanding distinctions in qualia and their representations! Some colourblind folks can play along! For more information on the method, check out the papers: arxiv.org/abs/2409.03732 www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/27...

Something people don’t realise about figure skating in the UK is how many exams there are Start to finish there are 36 tests/levels to do, most of which need to be done in front of a judge in an exam or passed in competition

Some of our emergence measures might be suffering from being overly dependent on our choice of variables - most notably some PID measures. See my recent poster on the problem which I presented at Embracing Complexity here: 👇 www.ccc-lab.org/uploads/9/8/...

I've been having loads of fun teaching once more at Downing College's (@downingcollege.bsky.social) international summer programme again this year! All students on the programme take an online maths course with yours truly before coming to Cambridge for two weeks! www.dow.cam.ac.uk/internationa...

Is there a natural way to construct a (signed) measure on a simplex? Turns out there is - entropy is a great choice! Check out our preprint on this here 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2409.03732

Trying some new spin positions and failing at axels