Recently, it has been claimed that Integrated Information Theory and other theories of its type cannot explain consciousness (“unfolding argument”). We unravel this argument mathematically and prove that the premises of the argument imply a much stronger result according to which the observed problem holds for almost all theories of consciousness. We find, however, that one of the premises is unwarranted and show that if this premise is dropped, the argument ceases to work. Thus our results show that the claim of the unfolding argument cannot be considered valid. The premise in question is that measures of brain activity cannot be used in an empirical test of theories of consciousness.

最近，有人声称综合信息理论和其他同类理论无法解释意识（“展开论证”）。我们从数学上解开这个论点，并证明这个论点的前提暗示了一个更强的结果，根据这个结果，观察到的问题几乎适用于所有意识理论。然而，我们发现其中一个前提是没有根据的，并表明如果放弃这个前提，论证就停止工作。因此，我们的结果表明，展开论证的主张不能被认为是有效的。有问题的前提是大脑活动的测量不能用于意识理论的经验测试。