This article series has been highly readable -- and useful research. My novel series touches upon a lot of the metaphysical/philosophical matters being discussed, and both Nietzsche's writings and modern science (in broad terms if not specifics) were very influential on the setting's metaphysics, so you can imagine that I was delighted to find your work here.
Interesting post, Brett. You wrote: "According to IIT, all integrated ‘wholes’ are conscious to one degree or another. A spoon, table, rock, or planet is not a whole in this way and therefore none of these objects are conscious according to IIT. A single atom, however, is a whole and would therefore have some modicum of consciousness." Can you elaborate on why an atom is considered a whole under this theory while a spoon, table, rock or planet is not?
Thanks. It's kind of like the difference between a herd of buffalo and a buffalo. The herd is an identifiable 'thing' but really it is an aggregate, a loose collection that is not internally integrated. A spoon is like a herd of atoms/molecules. The atom is internally integrated, as is the buffalo. The spoon/herd is not. There is no information being integrated by the spoon or the herd. There is a little information being integrated by an atom, and a lot by a buffalo. That's probably not a great answer but it's the best I've got for the moment.
The IIT guys haven't said too much about it except this from Koch's book:
"Let us travel down further in scale, transitioning from biology to the simpler worlds of chemistry and physics, and compute the intrinsic causal power of a protein molecule, an atomic nucleus or even a single proton. Per the standard model of physics, protons and neutrons are made out of three quarks with fractional electrical charge. Quarks are never observed by themselves. It is therefore possible that atoms constitute an irreducible Whole, a modicum of “enminded” matter. How does it feel to be a single atom compared to the roughly 1026 atoms making up a human brain? Given that its integrated information is presumably barely above zero, just a minute bagatelle, a this-rather-than-not-this?"
Koch, Christof. The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed (p. 159). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
I am fascinated, again (but this time I also just had to become a paid subscriber!), and really looking forward to future instalments. I've read about IIT separately as well, and I do have suspicions or reservations about whether that will last (as a consciousness-related explanatory field) - without my being able to intelligently articulate or justify any specific objections; it's more of an instinct. Talking of which, this question of whether there is "experience" of any kind in creatures simple enough to have no nervous systems also intrigues me; if a cell in a dish moves voluntarily towards light or food, or away from a toxic substance, I find it difficult to understand how there could not be some level of "experience", even of a kind alien to us. And the idea that sex evolved first - hundreds of millions of years before nervous systems - and that "non-experiencing" organisms were able to successfully mate with the opposite sex, is surely a suggestion of a substantial mystery! (I don't have any problem regarding say birds or fish as having consciousness, even if it's at a level insufficiently sophisticated to override the evolutionary programming of instincts. Perhaps it's all to do with how those with objections would define things like "experience" or "instinct". It seems covered by Nietzsche as a manifestation of a will to power, though, whatever the relationship between will to power and consciousness!) I'm also intrigued by the idea of the thought experiment in which we could replace an organic neuron with an artificial one - being virtually unnoticeable to the conscious recipient - and then, one at a time, keep replacing them until they are all artificial. Would consciousness continue throughout, or "switch off" at some unknown threshold, while the person would be able to continue functioning "normally", like an AI-powered humanoid robot, pretending he/she is conscious, and perhaps even not being "aware" that they are not? I'd be fascinated by your observations, if any, in due course - I appreciate it's unanswerable and hardly a currently feasible experiment, even if you could get it through an ethics committee! No, I'm not volunteering my brain for this!)
Thanks for the support, Graham! To answer the question at the bottom, I think we are lightyears away from having the technology to do something like that. If we did, I think the person would continue being conscious as long as the flow of information remained the same. Not that I'm sure about that.
A missing piece in discussions about consciousness is the concept of an API into spacetime—a framework for interfacing with the underlying informational substrate of reality. This term wasn’t available before digital systems provided a working analogy for how information can be structured, accessed, and transformed across different layers of experience. Even now, many people struggle with this concept either because they lack the technical awareness to engage with it meaningfully or because they are trapped in an ideological commitment to reductive physicalism, which dismisses consciousness as an emergent, passive byproduct of matter rather than an active, structured flow of information.
Panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory both suggest degrees of experience permeating all material structures, but without a robust conceptual model for how systems interface with this distributed consciousness, the discussion remains vague. An API into spacetime implies that consciousness isn’t just in matter but is accessing something deeper—engaging with a flow of structured information beyond brute physical causality. The failure to incorporate this into mainstream discourse is partly linguistic (we haven’t had the words) and partly ideological (materialism has dominated intellectual culture).
The real challenge is helping people see consciousness as a system that interacts across scales, rather than something that merely “emerges” from matter at a certain level of complexity. A shift in language is necessary for this, but so is a shift in mental models. AI research, particularly in transformer architectures and reinforcement learning, provides the closest working analogy: a system doesn’t just generate outputs from inputs—it calls functions, accesses information, and routes signals in structured ways.
If we apply this same thinking to consciousness, we are left with a radical but compelling idea: individual awareness is an interface layer, not a property of brain tissue alone. It’s a node in an ongoing interaction between the structured informational substrate of reality and the material conditions that allow it to be expressed. Recognizing this isn’t just a philosophical exercise—it’s an essential shift in how we engage with intelligence, identity, and the nature of reality itself.
This article series has been highly readable -- and useful research. My novel series touches upon a lot of the metaphysical/philosophical matters being discussed, and both Nietzsche's writings and modern science (in broad terms if not specifics) were very influential on the setting's metaphysics, so you can imagine that I was delighted to find your work here.
Interesting post, Brett. You wrote: "According to IIT, all integrated ‘wholes’ are conscious to one degree or another. A spoon, table, rock, or planet is not a whole in this way and therefore none of these objects are conscious according to IIT. A single atom, however, is a whole and would therefore have some modicum of consciousness." Can you elaborate on why an atom is considered a whole under this theory while a spoon, table, rock or planet is not?
Thanks. It's kind of like the difference between a herd of buffalo and a buffalo. The herd is an identifiable 'thing' but really it is an aggregate, a loose collection that is not internally integrated. A spoon is like a herd of atoms/molecules. The atom is internally integrated, as is the buffalo. The spoon/herd is not. There is no information being integrated by the spoon or the herd. There is a little information being integrated by an atom, and a lot by a buffalo. That's probably not a great answer but it's the best I've got for the moment.
The IIT guys haven't said too much about it except this from Koch's book:
"Let us travel down further in scale, transitioning from biology to the simpler worlds of chemistry and physics, and compute the intrinsic causal power of a protein molecule, an atomic nucleus or even a single proton. Per the standard model of physics, protons and neutrons are made out of three quarks with fractional electrical charge. Quarks are never observed by themselves. It is therefore possible that atoms constitute an irreducible Whole, a modicum of “enminded” matter. How does it feel to be a single atom compared to the roughly 1026 atoms making up a human brain? Given that its integrated information is presumably barely above zero, just a minute bagatelle, a this-rather-than-not-this?"
Koch, Christof. The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed (p. 159). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
I am fascinated, again (but this time I also just had to become a paid subscriber!), and really looking forward to future instalments. I've read about IIT separately as well, and I do have suspicions or reservations about whether that will last (as a consciousness-related explanatory field) - without my being able to intelligently articulate or justify any specific objections; it's more of an instinct. Talking of which, this question of whether there is "experience" of any kind in creatures simple enough to have no nervous systems also intrigues me; if a cell in a dish moves voluntarily towards light or food, or away from a toxic substance, I find it difficult to understand how there could not be some level of "experience", even of a kind alien to us. And the idea that sex evolved first - hundreds of millions of years before nervous systems - and that "non-experiencing" organisms were able to successfully mate with the opposite sex, is surely a suggestion of a substantial mystery! (I don't have any problem regarding say birds or fish as having consciousness, even if it's at a level insufficiently sophisticated to override the evolutionary programming of instincts. Perhaps it's all to do with how those with objections would define things like "experience" or "instinct". It seems covered by Nietzsche as a manifestation of a will to power, though, whatever the relationship between will to power and consciousness!) I'm also intrigued by the idea of the thought experiment in which we could replace an organic neuron with an artificial one - being virtually unnoticeable to the conscious recipient - and then, one at a time, keep replacing them until they are all artificial. Would consciousness continue throughout, or "switch off" at some unknown threshold, while the person would be able to continue functioning "normally", like an AI-powered humanoid robot, pretending he/she is conscious, and perhaps even not being "aware" that they are not? I'd be fascinated by your observations, if any, in due course - I appreciate it's unanswerable and hardly a currently feasible experiment, even if you could get it through an ethics committee! No, I'm not volunteering my brain for this!)
Thanks for the support, Graham! To answer the question at the bottom, I think we are lightyears away from having the technology to do something like that. If we did, I think the person would continue being conscious as long as the flow of information remained the same. Not that I'm sure about that.
A missing piece in discussions about consciousness is the concept of an API into spacetime—a framework for interfacing with the underlying informational substrate of reality. This term wasn’t available before digital systems provided a working analogy for how information can be structured, accessed, and transformed across different layers of experience. Even now, many people struggle with this concept either because they lack the technical awareness to engage with it meaningfully or because they are trapped in an ideological commitment to reductive physicalism, which dismisses consciousness as an emergent, passive byproduct of matter rather than an active, structured flow of information.
Panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory both suggest degrees of experience permeating all material structures, but without a robust conceptual model for how systems interface with this distributed consciousness, the discussion remains vague. An API into spacetime implies that consciousness isn’t just in matter but is accessing something deeper—engaging with a flow of structured information beyond brute physical causality. The failure to incorporate this into mainstream discourse is partly linguistic (we haven’t had the words) and partly ideological (materialism has dominated intellectual culture).
The real challenge is helping people see consciousness as a system that interacts across scales, rather than something that merely “emerges” from matter at a certain level of complexity. A shift in language is necessary for this, but so is a shift in mental models. AI research, particularly in transformer architectures and reinforcement learning, provides the closest working analogy: a system doesn’t just generate outputs from inputs—it calls functions, accesses information, and routes signals in structured ways.
If we apply this same thinking to consciousness, we are left with a radical but compelling idea: individual awareness is an interface layer, not a property of brain tissue alone. It’s a node in an ongoing interaction between the structured informational substrate of reality and the material conditions that allow it to be expressed. Recognizing this isn’t just a philosophical exercise—it’s an essential shift in how we engage with intelligence, identity, and the nature of reality itself.