CONCEPT
The Five Axioms of Consciousness
The phenomenological foundation of IIT — five properties (existence, composition, information, integration, exclusion) that any conscious experience must possess, derivable from introspection alone and serving as the starting point from which the theory's physical postulates are derived.
IIT's five axioms specify the properties that any conscious experience must have, derivable from introspection and undeniable to any reflective observer. Existence: experience exists (the Cartesian bedrock). Composition: experience is structured with multiple phenomenal distinctions within a single field. Information: each experience is specific, differentiated from the vast space of possibilities. Integration: experience is unified, not decomposable into independent parts. Exclusion: experience is definite, with specific borders and specific contents. From these axioms, IIT derives five corresponding postulates about the causal structure of any physical system identical to consciousness.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The axiomatic approach distinguishes IIT from virtually every other theory of consciousness. Most theories begin with mechanism (the brain, computation, information processing) and try to derive or explain experience. IIT begins with experience itself — the phenomenology — and works backward to the physical structure that must support it. The axioms are not hypotheses