Abstract from Haun, A., & Tononi, G. (2019). Why does space feel the way it does? Towards a principled account of spatial experience. Entropy, 21(12), 1160:

"There must be a reason why an experience feels the way it does. A good place to begin addressing this question is spatial experience, because it may be more penetrable by introspection than other qualities of consciousness such as color or pain. Moreover, much of experience is spatial, from that of our body to the visual world, which appears as if painted on an extended canvas in front of our eyes. Because it is ‘right there’, we usually take space for granted and overlook its qualitative properties. However, we should realize that a great number of phenomenal distinctions and relations are required for the canvas of space to feel ‘extended’. Here we argue that, to be experienced as extended, the canvas of space must be composed of countless spots, here and there, small and large, and these spots must be related to each other in a characteristic manner through connection, fusion, and inclusion. Other aspects of the structure of spatial experience follow from extendedness: every spot can be experienced as enclosing a particular region, with its particular location, size, boundary, and distance from other spots. We then propose an account of the phenomenal properties of spatial experiences based on integrated information theory (IIT). The theory provides a principled approach for characterizing both the quantity and quality of experience by unfolding the cause–effect structure of a physical substrate. Specifically, we show that a simple simulated substrate of units connected in a grid-like manner yields a cause–effect structure whose properties can account for the main properties of spatial experience. These results uphold the hypothesis that our experience of space is supported by brain areas whose units are linked by a grid-like connectivity. They also predict that changes in connectivity, even in the absence of changes in activity, should lead to a warping of experienced space. To the extent that this approach provides an initial account of phenomenal space, it may also serve as a starting point for investigating other aspects of the quality of experience and their physical correspondents."

To reference the content of these slides, please cite Haun, A., & Tononi, G. (2019). Why does space feel the way it does? Towards a principled account of spatial experience. Entropy, 21(12), 1160.

Preview of abstract from Comolatti, Grasso & Tononi. (Forthcoming). Why does time feel the way it does?

Why does time feel flowing? Why does every moment feel directed, flowing away from us toward the past? Why do we have an experience of the present as a moment, and why does it feel composed of various smaller moments within it? In this paper, we use the formalism of IIT to account for why time feels flowing.

First, we characterize the phenomenology of time, defining the explanandum we aim to account for: a phenomenal structure of distinctions and relations between them that we call phenomenal flow. Then, we propose an account of phenomenal flow in physical terms in a way that is principled and testable, linking time phenomenology to a particular physical substrate (directed 1D grids) and to plausible circuits in the brain. IIT establishes an explanatory identity between the properties of experience and the properties of the cause–effect structure specified by its substrate. Applied to the experience of time, we show how the properties of phenomenal flow—moments, the way they feel directed, the way they relate with each other, the way they compose the present, among others—can be accounted for in physical terms by the cause–effect structure specified by directed grids: by the causal distinctions that compose the cause–effect structure and the specific ways they relate to compose a flow.

Preview of abstract from Grasso & Tononi. (Forthcoming). Why do objects feel the way they do?

When we look at the world, we don’t only perceive specs of color, we see objects we have names for: we see three segments and recognize a letter “A”; we see two dots and a curved line and recognize a smiley face. Visual experience is typically characterized by sets of low-level features that are bound together to form objects we recognize—anything from geometric shapes to natural forms, animal shapes, letters, numbers, faces, tools, and so on. Previous work has applied the formalism of IIT to account for the extendedness of visual space (Haun & Tononi 2019) and the feeling of the flow of time (Comolatti, Grasso & Tononi Forthcoming). Here we develop an initial explanation of why objects feel the way they do: how phenomenal objects bind general concepts with particular features (conceptual invariance). 

First we characterize the phenomenology of objects, in which a particular configuration of low-level features (e.g., colors and edges) is experienced as an instance of a general concept (e.g., “face”), which is invariant for many possible configurations. We then apply the formalism of IIT to analyze a plausible neural substrate for conceptual invariance: pyramids of grids, similar to the ones found across levels of the visual cortex. We show how the binding of particular configurations to general concepts can be accounted for in physical terms by the cause–effect structure specified by pyramids of grids: by the causal distinctions (specified by conjunction and disjunction mechanisms) and  relations they form to compose a conceptual hierarchy.

Why aren’t the experiences of space and time considered axioms in IIT?