Integrated Information Theory - If correct could humans create artificial consciousness?
IIT implies that just about everything is 'conscious' (to a degree) in that you can measure its integrated information to say how conscious it is, while accepting that what we as humans typically describe as 'consciousness' is a very high value of this measure. That's sort of the whole point of the theory: having a definition of consciousness that starts from a more basic principle ('integrated information') rather than starting at "humans are conscious" without defining what it really means to be conscious.

High levels of integrated information are not easy to achieve with typical computers we use today, but nothing about the theory says it cannot be done. If you have a sufficient level of integrated information, we can call that consciousness based on IIT.

IIT does not say anything about implementation of such a system, even though your question implies that it does (you could view this as either a weakness or a strength depending on your perspective); there are certainly ways to connect artificial systems dynamically without them needing to be neurons. It is true, however, that an individual neuron is far more complex than typical artificial instantiations of neurons, like the nodes of an artificial neural network.

As far as your paragraph beginning "IIT seems to imply that conscious experience lies in certain configurations of the electron field" I don't know what this means or where your got it; IIT doesn't say anything like this. IIT says that consciousness is what you get when you connect information to other information; for example, placing information you are measuring from the world right now in the context of your life's experience involves integrating information from your sensory systems with your memories. Computers can already achieve this to some degree, the part about human consciousness that is remarkable is just how deeply and rapidly (and automatically) these comparisons occur in parallel.



Koch, C., &amp; Tononi, G. (2008). Can machines be conscious?. Ieee Spectrum, 45(6).