Max Tegmark
.jpg){kind=link}
Max Tegmark is a physicist who approaches consciousness the way a physicist approaches any emergent property. Superconductivity is not a property of any individual particle. It appears when matter is organised in a particular way, and it is defined by measurable structural facts rather than by what the material is made of. His proposal is that consciousness belongs in that category, and that the hypothetical substance satisfying its conditions can be named and characterised.
The five principles he proposes, information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility, generalise Tononi’s integrated information framework beyond neural networks to arbitrary quantum systems. Independence is his own addition and the most useful one, since a subsystem whose states are entirely determined by its environment has no states of its own for anything to be true of.
The framework inherits IIT’s central difficulty. The quantities cannot be computed for real systems, and the quantum generalisation adds the factorisation problem, since physics supplies no preferred way to divide a system into subsystems and every quantity depends on that choice. Tegmark treats it as open rather than solved.
Known for. Perceptronium, and consciousness as a state of matter
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.