Complex Adaptive Systems

A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a concept from complexity science for a class of entities. CAS are dynamic, self-organizing networks of interactions between diverse agents (for instance, species in an ecosystem, traders in a market, or neurons in the brain). Since CAS have highly integrated causal structures (nonlinear feedback, adaptation, and interdependence), they generate Φ.

But since IIT starts by assuming both human consciousness and exclusion, it rules out nesting—conscious entities having parts that are themselves conscious—from the start. In IIT's current framework, minds cannot have conscious parts, and CAS with lower Φ than its parts cannot possess phenomenal consciousness. The problem for IIT's exclusion axiom and other similar anti-nesting principles is that it seems ad-hoc, with critics arguing its strongest justifications is an intuitive repulsion to nesting. In addition to the ad-hoc charge, I argue we should reject IIT's exclusion because it is even more theoretically problematic than nesting is unintuitive.