CONCEPT
The Architecture of Experience
The set of structural requirements — dense reentrant connectivity, irreducibility, intrinsic information, multi-timescale integration — that a physical system must satisfy to instantiate consciousness, distinguishing brains from machines not by capability but by form.
IIT specifies five structural requirements for a physical system to be conscious: intrinsic existence (causal power directed at itself), composition (hierarchical structure of elements and connections), information (large repertoire of specific states), integration (irreducibility across all partitions), and exclusion (definite grain). These requirements constitute something like an engineering specification for artificial consciousness — and they describe a system radically unlike any AI currently built. The cerebral cortex satisfies them through dense reentrant connectivity, multi-timescale dynamics, and architectural balance between specialization and integration. Transformer architectures satisfy them poorly or not at all.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The architectural requirements are derived from IIT's five axioms and translate phenomenological properties of experience into physical properties of cause-effect structure. Intrinsic existence requires that a system make a difference to itself — its elements must constrain each other's past and future states. Composition requires hierarchical structure capable of supporting the combinatorial richness of phenomenal distinctions. Information requires that