Intrinsic Meaning, Perception, and Matching

Article:
Mayner, W. G., Juel, B. E., & Tononi, G. (2024). Intrinsic meaning, perception, and matching. arXiv preprint: 2412.21111.

Abstact:
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a complex of units that is maximally irreducible. The complex's subsets specify a cause--effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations, which accounts in full for the quality of experience. The feeling of a specific experience is also its meaning, which is thus defined intrinsically, regardless of whether the experience occurs in a dream or is triggered by processes in the environment. Here we extend IIT's framework to characterize the relationship between intrinsic meaning, extrinsic stimuli, and causal processes in the environment, illustrated using a simple model of a sensory hierarchy. We show that perception should be considered as a structured interpretation, where a stimulus from the environment acts merely as a trigger and the structure is provided by the system’s intrinsic connectivity.  We also show how perceptual differentiation---the diversity of structures triggered by typical sequences of stimuli---quantifies the meaningfulness of different environments to the system. In adaptive systems, this reflects the “matching” between intrinsic meanings and causal features of an environment.