Giulio Tononi, Melanie Boly

This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT’s “consciousness-first” approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists–experience–and reveals its essential properties–the axioms of phenomenal existence. IIT formulates these properties operationally, yielding the postulates of physical existence. To exist intrinsically or absolutely, an entity must have cause-effect power upon itself, in a specific, unitary, definite and structured manner. IIT’s explanatory identity claims that an entity’s cause-effect structure accounts for all properties of an experience–essential and accidental–with no additional ingredients. These include the feeling of spatial extendedness, temporal flow, of objects binding general concepts with particular configurations of features, and of qualia such as colors and sounds. IIT’s intrinsic ontology has implications for understanding meaning, perception, and free will, for assessing consciousness in patients, infants, other species, and artifacts, and for reassessing our place in nature.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Renli Wu, Christopher Esposito, and James Evans

PNAS 122 (44) e2414893122

China’s emergence as one of the world’s top producers of high-quality science raises critical questions about its trajectory toward achieving scientific leadership. Traditional methods for evaluating the power of national scientific ecosystems, however, often overlook the nuances of a country’s global influence. In this perspective, we introduce a framework that highlights shifting power dynamics in international scientific collaborations, focusing on whether leadership positions in international scientific teams are moving from one country to another. Using rich sociological data from nearly 6 million scientific publications, we document a marked shift in team leadership from Western countries to China. In particular, the share of team leaders involved in U.S-China scientific collaborations that were affiliated with Chinese institutions grew from 30% of the total in 2010 to 45% in 2023. We further explore the implications of China’s rise by forecasting when Chinese scientists are projected to achieve parity in leadership vis-à-vis the United States, including in 11 critical technology areas that are focal points of technological development, and by analyzing how a potential decoupling of U.S.-Chinese science might affect Chinese scientific leadership. We conclude by considering the impacts of China’s growing investments in the training of young scientists in countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative.

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David Dahmen, Axel Hutt, Giacomo Indiveri, Ann Kennedy, Jeremie Lefebvre, Luca Mazzucato, Adilson E. Motter, Rishikesh Narayanan, Melika Payvand , Henrike Planert , Richard Gast

Much effort has been spent clustering neurons into transcriptomic or functional cell types and characterizing the differences between them. Beyond subdividing neurons into categories, we must recognize that no two neurons are identical and that graded physiological or transcriptomic properties exist within cells of a given type. This often overlooked “within-type” heterogeneity is a specific neuronal implementation of what statistical physics refers to as “disorder” and exhibits rich computational properties, the identification of which may shed crucial insights into theories of brain function. In this perspective article, we address this gap by highlighting theoretical frameworks for the study of neural tissue heterogeneity and discussing the benefits and implications of within-type heterogeneity for neural network dynamics, computation, and self-organization.

Read the full article at: inria.hal.science