Quantifying Spacetime Integration across a Partition with Synergy

Abstract

In service to the mathematical underpinnings of the Information Integration Theory of Consciousness (IIT), we introduce four principled measures of integration based on the partial information decomposition framework. We compare our measures to current IIT practice in simple deterministic networks. Our measures are the first IIT-related state-dependent integration measures to naturally obey standard info-theoretic lower and upper bounds. Matching IIT4, the four measures are non-Shannon, but outside IIT they work just as well as standard Shannon-based measures of irreducibility in discrete dynamical systems.