Larissa Albantakis
Larissa Albantakis is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness and a co-author of Integrated Information Theory 4.0, the formal statement of IIT built from axioms about the essential properties of experience. Her research applies IIT’s mathematics to concrete computational systems, using deliberately simple models to make the theory’s abstract claims testable rather than purely philosophical.
With Graham Findlay, William Marshall, Isaac David, William Mayner, Christof Koch, and Giulio Tononi, Albantakis argued that an artificial system can be functionally indistinguishable from a human, producing the same outputs for the same inputs, while having a radically different degree of integrated information, including close to zero. Her 2026 book chapter, “On the utility of toy models for theories of consciousness,” extends this project methodologically, showing how highly simplified systems can be used to test and compare the assumptions behind Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory directly, sharpening the distinction between functional and structural theories and probing features of experience such as spatial extendedness and temporal flow.
Albantakis’s consistent position is that intelligence and consciousness are separate axes that current AI evaluation methods routinely conflate. A toy model that behaves intelligently within a narrow task can be built with a causal structure carrying almost no integrated information, which under IIT means the model has almost no experience regardless of its competence.
No freely licensed photograph of Larissa Albantakis is available on Wikimedia Commons; no Wikipedia article exists for her as of this writing. Checked 2026-08-20.
Known for. Integrated Information Theory 4.0 and dissociating intelligence from consciousness in artificial systems
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.