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Home / Giulio Tononi

Giulio Tononi

University of Wisconsin-Madison · Information

Giulio Tononi built the only major theory of consciousness that works backwards. Rather than examining brains and inferring what consciousness is, integrated information theory starts from properties experience is taken to have, that it exists, is structured, specific, unified and definite, and derives what a physical substrate must be like to have them. The quantity phi measures the result, how much a system’s cause and effect structure exceeds the sum of its parts.

The derivation has consequences most people find surprising and Tononi accepts. Feedforward networks have near zero phi however capable they are, so most current AI is ruled out. A simulation of a conscious brain would not be conscious, because the simulation’s causal structure is that of the computer rather than of the thing simulated. And simple systems with the right connectivity can score very high, which Scott Aaronson turned into the sharpest objection the theory has faced.

Tononi’s response to that objection is the most revealing thing about the theory. He did not dispute the mathematics. He accepted that the system in question is conscious and argued that our intuitions about which things have experience are unreliable. That is internally consistent, and it detaches the theory from independent checks, which is why phi remains uncomputable in practice and contested in principle.

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Known for. Integrated information theory and the quantity phi

Coverage on this site

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.