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Radical Theories of Consciousness

The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness

Hedda Hassel Mørch asks: what is IIT all about?

Consciousness is something with which we’re all intimately familiar. It’s the thing that goes away every night in deep sleep, and comes back when we wake up every morning, or whenever we start dreaming. It encompasses all our subjective feelings and experiences, ranging from the simple redness of red, to the complex depth of an emotion, to the ephemeral quality of thought. It’s the one thing that is directly and immediately known to us, and it mediates our knowledge of the external world. This is how consciousness is defined by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, the originator of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, or IIT for short.

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