13 theories

Information: theories of consciousness

Information is a real, basic ingredient of the world, often more fundamental than matter, and consciousness arises from, or simply is, certain structures of information.

Open Information on the mapAll theories A–Z

Theories in this group treat information as something real in its own right. Computational theories under Materialism also talk about information, but there it only describes what physical systems do. Here it carries the weight. In many of these theories information is more basic than matter, energy or spacetime, and consciousness is what certain informational structures are, or what they produce.

The flagship is Integrated Information Theory, developed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and later championed by Christof Koch. It starts from features of experience, such as being unified and specific, and asks what kind of physical system could have them. Its answer is a quantity, phi, that measures how much information a system’s whole carries over and above its parts. On this view consciousness is integrated information, and any system with enough of it, biological or not, has experience.

Other entries take different routes. David Chalmers’s double-aspect theory proposes that information has a physical side and an experiential side. Erik Hoel’s causal emergence argues that larger scales of a system can carry more causal information than its microscopic parts. Adam Safron’s Integrated World Modeling Theory combines integrated information with global workspace and predictive ideas, while Michael Levin and Paul Davies look to patterns of information that may lie beyond the physical altogether.

IIT draws enough criticism to have its own entry on the chart. Phi is practically impossible to compute for a real brain, and Scott Aaronson showed that the theory rates some simple, orderly networks as more conscious than people. Koch has also compared the theory with panpsychism, since it grants a little experience to a great many systems.