The examples though _do_ have physical manifestations - everything that exists in the universe has a physical manifestation (by tautology). How is a feed forward circuit carrying information (to be integated) not a physical realization? It's not clear why neurons carrying potentials and mixing them count but not an FPGA (no longer an ALU simulation) doing cryptographic operations for a bitcoin mining rig. Furthermore as an FPGA more directly implements the information integration system than an ALU fetch-execute cycle, is it 'more conscious'? For me that sounds absurd.

Presume the Game of Life _did_ have a direct physical implementation, let's say neurons fire according to GOL rules. Would you then be forced to call it conscious or not? Wouldn't it depend on the cell configuration? An all blank cell configuration certainly isn't conscious but the system would have the same low IIT score as a manifestation running some UTM-equivalent setup.

Finally, what about physical systems that do highly integrate information? N-body problems exhibit highly integrated behavior manifest in the so-called butterfly effect. Why do the air molecules in a balloon not count as conscious? This physical example escapes the "America" criticism - every molecule applies a force on every other and due to n-body mechanics the system is highly integrated.

My worry, which I think is mostly corroborated, is that the definite clarity of the IIT definition will serve to obscure the fact that underlying definition has no real definite clarity or derivation.

Ultimately the IIT formula was imagined to capture some heuristic notions - but it was not derived. For this reason, added to those above, I am very skeptical.

Or maybe it's my CS background that makes me biased toward thinking that _how_ information is integrated matters purely more than some measure of how much mixing there is (e.g. by one of many versions [5 now?] of the IIT formula).