Max Tegmark
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Integrated information Consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information
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Position on AI consciousness
Tegmark treats consciousness as an emergent property defined by measurable structural facts rather than by what a system is made of, set by five conditions: information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility. He treats the quantities as uncomputable for real systems and the question as open.
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
Related researchers
- 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
- Bernard J. BaarsThe Neurosciences InstituteGlobal Workspace Theory (GWT), cognitive architecture of conscious access, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988), In the Theater of Consciousness (1997)
- Adam B. BarrettSussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of SussexContinuous field formulations of Integrated Information Theory, Measure-theoretic Phi, practical complexity measures, Granger causality
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Yoshua BengioMila, Université de MontréalThe Consciousness Prior, deep learning foundations, Turing Award, global workspace-inspired representation learning
Max Tegmark 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.