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Home / Matteo Grasso

Matteo Grasso

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Sleep and Consciousness · Information

Matteo Grasso is a researcher in Giulio Tononi’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness group and a co-author of Integrated Information Theory 4.0, the current formal statement of IIT that derives the theory’s postulates from axioms about the essential properties of experience. Where earlier IIT work focused on quantifying how much a system integrates information, Grasso’s research has increasingly focused on the quality side of the theory, what a given cause-effect structure implies about the specific character of an experience rather than only its presence and degree.

His August 2026 paper with Jeremiah Hendren and Tononi, “Consciousness as Intrinsic Structure: Towards a Chemistry of Experience,” pushes this further by treating phenomenal distinctions and their relationships as a structured whole with its own compositional rules, analogous to how chemistry describes matter as combinations of a limited set of elements following systematic laws. He is also a co-author, with Kallum Robinson, Tononi, and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, of a 2026 paper using category theory to formalize how much any structural theory can prove about another system’s experience.

No freely licensed photograph of Matteo Grasso is available on Wikimedia Commons; no Wikipedia article exists for him as of this writing. Checked 2026-08-20.

Known for. Integrated Information Theory 4.0 and the structural description of the quality of experience

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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.