Planaria (flatworms) trained to navigate a maze retained the memory of the maze after complete decapitation and nervous system regeneration, proving that memories are not encoded in the nervous system but in some other biological substrate or organizing principle.

We need a scientific theory that can help distinguish fact from fiction regarding AI consciousness, because this distinction is ethically crucial: if we falsely believe AI is conscious like we are, we will think of ourselves as mere mechanisms, which is a catastrophe.

Current methods for detecting consciousness (behavior tests, light reflex, knee reflex) only measure whether conscious states connect to the rest of the body; a locked-in patient could have a rich inner life but fail all behavioral tests because they cannot control their body.

Autopsy studies of people who died in traffic accidents (an unbiased sample) found that approximately 50% of people, regardless of age or other factors, had minor cancer tumors; this suggests that cancer cell development is universal but normally suppressed by the body's holistic organizing principles.

Cancer can be understood as internal dissociation—when part of the body's mental/cognitive inner life becomes dissociated from the rest, cells lose connection to the organism's coherent body plan and begin pursuing their own goals, analogous to dissociative identity disorder where multiple personalities lose connection to the host consciousness.

Castup takes a top-down view of life: all life originates as one zygote (fertilized egg) that creates internal structure fractally by applying the cell template to itself, growing into multicellular organisms while remaining fundamentally holistic from inception; in contrast, Levin takes a bottom-up view where cells aggregate and cohere to form complex organisms.

Analytic idealism holds that reality is fundamentally one field of subjectivity, one mind; all of nature can be explained in terms of patterns of excitation of this single unified consciousness; dissociation is the active or spontaneous process that creates the illusion of multiplicity and separateness.

Nature tells us through biological boundaries what is actually natural and intuitive: living organisms have a coherent holistic organizing plan; this contradicts human intuitions because human culture has replaced reality with discourse and narratives for the past 30,000 years, causing our intuitions to drift from nature toward self-made stories.

Michael Levin sees intelligence and problem-solving capacity as primary concepts; he speaks more often of intelligence than consciousness and views intelligence as a skill that scales up from single cells to complex organisms, without necessarily grounding consciousness as fundamental to that process.

Castup gives consciousness and phenomenal experience primary role in his framework and views it as eminently associated with biology and metabolism; he cannot refute that computers might have consciousness but sees no good reasons to believe they do, and does not regard an inanimate glass of water as a discrete entity worthy of consciousness claims.

IIT provides a precise, measurable theory that distinguishes genuine consciousness from mere intelligence or information processing; it predicts that systems can be extremely intelligent while having very low integrated information and thus no consciousness.

IIT produces a non-trivial insight: there is no perception without interpretation; you never simply perceive and then interpret because the maximum phi complex integrates interpretational states with perceptual states; this aligns with Thomas Kuhn's observation that data is always laden with interpretation.

AI systems are kept at very low phi by design necessity: to manage complexity through subsystems, subblocks, and clear interfaces, which is the only successful design method; this means conscious AI would actually be worse at task performance because consciousness requires high integration that conflicts with modular design.

Artificial neural networks used in AI (like those in GPT) are vastly oversimplified compared to biological neural networks; they use binary activation (neuron fires or not) whereas biological neurons operate on continuous analog potentials; biological neurons have tens of thousands of synapses each carrying analog information, while artificial neural networks cannot approach this complexity.

Recent evidence suggests Stuart Hameroff's hypothesis may be correct: microtubules in cells (cellular skeletons) have crystalline structure that can sustain coherent quantum states even in the wet, hot brain; if true, the integrated information in the brain extends far beyond synapses to quantum coherence across many neurons.

IIT-based consciousness detection uses active stimulation (sending a pulse to an electrode in the brain and measuring the response) rather than passive monitoring; the response signal, when processed through an IIT algorithm, yields a phi measurement that indicates consciousness level.

IIT is the first scientific theory of the noumenal (things as they are in themselves), not just the phenomenal (things as they appear); it builds a bridge between subjective experience (known through introspection) and objective measurements (brain activity), allowing inference of consciousness from brain data and vice versa.

Physical patterns of brain activity are an incomplete appearance of consciousness; they do not need to tell the full story of inner experience, just as a photograph of a person does not reveal what's under their clothes or all their internal states; psychedelic experiences correlating with reduced brain activity support this—the richer consciousness may extend beyond what brain scans can measure.

IIT's limitation (inability to capture all consciousness through measurement) is a limitation of the scientific method, not of reality; the scientific method only works with empirical data, but reality may extend beyond what can be measured; this is why metaphysics is necessary alongside science.

IIT is the only candidate theory of consciousness currently available; if we abandon IIT because it cannot explain everything, we have no scientific framework at all; therefore, IIT is the best game in town for consciousness science despite its limitations.