Matteo Grasso
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Sleep and Consciousness
Integrated information Consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated 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.
Known for. Integrated Information Theory 4.0 and the structural description of the quality of experience
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
- Jeremiah HendrenUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Sleep and ConsciousnessStructural modeling of phenomenal experience within Integrated Information Theory
- 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
- Nihat AyHamburg University of Technology; external professor, Santa Fe Institute; honorary professor, Leipzig UniversityInformation geometry and information-theoretic measures of complexity and causal integration
Matteo Grasso 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.