Jeremiah Hendren
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Sleep and Consciousness
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Jeremiah Hendren works within Giulio Tononi’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness group on the structural side of Integrated Information Theory, the effort to describe not only whether a system is conscious but what the specific quality of its experience is and how that quality is composed from more basic phenomenal distinctions.
With Matteo Grasso and Tononi, Hendren co-authored the August 2026 preprint “Consciousness as Intrinsic Structure: Towards a Chemistry of Experience,” which proposes treating phenomenal experience the way chemistry treats matter, as combinations of a limited set of basic elements governed by systematic compositional rules, rather than as an unstructured collection of sensory atoms. The analogy is meant to make the internal structure IIT assigns to an experience empirically tractable in the same way a molecular formula is, specific, falsifiable, and comparable across systems.
Known for. Structural modeling of phenomenal experience within Integrated Information Theory
Coverage on this site
- Tononi, Grasso, and Hendren on QStr, a New Method for Measuring Intrinsic Structure in Any Substrate August 2026
- Matteo Grasso and Consciousness as Intrinsic Structure August 2026
Related researchers
- Giulio TononiUniversity of Wisconsin-MadisonIntegrated information theory and the quantity phi
- Matteo GrassoUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Sleep and ConsciousnessIntegrated Information Theory 4.0 and the structural description of the quality of experience
- Hedayat AbedijooACE Conscious Studio / IndependentACE.await (2026), the ACE decision framework (Agency, Connection, Exchange)
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Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
- Igor AleksanderImperial College LondonAxiomatic Consciousness Theory, neural state machines, The World in My Mind, pioneering neural network engineering
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Joscha BachCalifornia Institute for Machine ConsciousnessThe machine consciousness hypothesis, cyber animism, and MicroPsi
Jeremiah Hendren is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. 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.