Carlotta Langer
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden; Center for Systems Biology Dresden
Integrated information Consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information
Carlotta Langer works at the point where Integrated Information Theory stops being a description of axioms and starts being a number you can compute. Her earlier papers with Nihat Ay, “Complexity as causal information integration” (2020) and “How morphological computation shapes integrated information in embodied agents” (2021), built the specific measure of integrated information her later work depends on, one grounded in the KL-divergence between a system’s full causal structure and a version of it with the parts cut apart. That measure, not IIT 3.0 or 4.0’s own calculations, is what she and her coauthors could actually run on hundreds of simulated agents without the computation becoming intractable.
Her 2026 paper with Jesse van Oostrum and Nihat Ay, “Integrated Information in the Active Inference Framework,” trains agents to navigate a simple environment using active inference, then checks whether the free energy those agents minimize is related to how much information their internal states integrate. The PhD work behind this line of research was completed at the Institute for Data Science Foundations at Hamburg University of Technology, under Ay, before she moved to the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.
Langer’s contribution is a methodological one as much as a theoretical one. Comparing integrated information theory to a rival framework requires a version of IIT’s central quantity that is cheap enough to compute on hundreds of agents across thousands of training steps, and building that version, without simply declaring the expensive one close enough, is the harder half of the argument.
Known for. Measures of integrated information for embodied and active inference agents
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Jesse van OostrumHamburg University of TechnologyMathematical formalization of active inference in discrete time
- Nihat AyHamburg University of Technology; external professor, Santa Fe Institute; honorary professor, Leipzig UniversityInformation geometry and information-theoretic measures of complexity and causal integration
- Karl FristonUniversity College London. Chief Scientist, VERSES AIThe free energy principle and active inference
- Larissa AlbantakisUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Sleep and ConsciousnessIntegrated Information Theory 4.0 and dissociating intelligence from consciousness in artificial systems
- Costas AnastassiouAllen InstituteEphaptic coupling of cortical neurons, endogenous electric fields as causal participants in neural activity, extracellular field biophysics
- Anton ArkhipovAllen Institute for Brain ScienceLarge-scale neural simulation, biophysically detailed cortical models, AIBRAIN program, State of Brain Emulation Report 2025
Carlotta Langer is listed with the other integrated information theorists, who hold that consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.