Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2-2023
Abstract
Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its parts) happens under no or all conditions. In this paper, we provide a self-contained introduction to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. We show that IIT specifies a non-trivial restriction on composition: composition happens when integrated information is maximized. We compare the IIT restriction to existing proposals and argue that the IIT restriction has significant advantages, especially in response to the problems of vagueness and counterexamples. An appendix provides an introduction to calculating parts and wholes with a simple system.
Recommended Citation
Kelvin J McQueen , Naotsugu Tsuchiya, When do parts form wholes? Integrated information as the restriction on mereological composition, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2023, Issue 1, 2023, niad013, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niad013
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
This article was originally published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, volume 2023, issue 1, in 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niad013