Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul

by Giulio Tononi

Perhaps there was a special part of the brain, an inner sanctum where consciousness’s conception was celebrated. Perhaps there was a pivot point where transubstantiation could transpire, not from bread to body, but from brain to soul.

“Quite right,” said Frick, stepping forward, “though it does other refined things. It keeps track of our movements much faster then we can, and it corrects and stabilizes them.

Frick went on: “You have just seen your lady in a remote corner of the hospital, inside a room you never saw before. The hippocampus will weave a knot between that room and her lovely face and keep it tightly in store. So if one day you see that room again, the room will pull its strand in the hippocampus; that single strand, woven together with that of her fair image, will pull her up as well. Then through an inverted set of funneled strands, fanning out to reach the full width of the brain, the nodes in the hippocampus will call back their sources in the cortex and recall what was going on when that memory was formed. But now the thread of all the past is lost to her.”

To me the name of wife was nothing: it’s sweeter to be a mistress—love and be loved—so that our faith and love must be professed anew and with fresh will every single day, not forced on two tired prisoners by the chains of marriage.

At any rate, the choice of Spinoza may explain why, despite its ponderous, self-important style, the chapter fails to convey a straightforward message that everybody can understand: each experience is a shape made of irreducible concepts, which are probability distributions of past and future states of the complex, specified over the space of qualia by the causal mechanisms that make up the complex in its present state.

but in the thinking burden of our responsibility. Dear doctor, the mother of my children never was my wife, and prudence might have counseled that our fruits be snipped in their unknowing buds. But that was a less important choice than this: whether, having decreed their birth, we would commit to make those lives as full as fate allowed; that once committed, we would accept them for better or for worse, as we once did for each other. It is because we are human who understand, pass judgment, and decide, that we owe respect, and owe it to all that reason might find worthy.

I will tell you what I think I have learned, said Galileo. I have learned that information only exists if there is a difference that makes a difference. For how would anything exist, if nothing can make a difference to it? How could it exist, if it has no choice—an element with only one possible state? I have learned that information and causation are one and the same thing, and that is all there is: what exists must be a difference that makes a difference, a choice that’s causal.

Galileo went on: I have also learned that information only exists if it is integrated—that only consciousness, integrated information—is really real, the only thing that exists in and of itself, and does not need another being to be. But simple aggregates do not exist in and of themselves—if you probe them, they dissolve into much lesser beings, a dust of dust. For you can group disparate objects in a thought, make something one that one is not—a heap of sand, a galaxy, or a crowd—but those exist as one just from the outside, from the perspective of a conscious being. “Yes,” said Alturi, “just like you exist and I exist, but not the two of us—tertium no datur.”

I learned that the geometry of the space of qualia contains all phenomena of the world, said Galileo, defining what blue is and what red is, what color and what form, what sight and sound, what image and what thought. I learned we only know the world as constructed by our brain, in its own image and likeness. That all is in the brain, not just color and taste, but also space and time, mass, number, and extension. That all is paradox: the brain, a small knot in the fabric of the world, is the sole source of the world itself. But then the world is the sole source of our brain. I learned we are the thing itself: at times sound and at times tragic, interminable or cruelly short, the only thing we experience from within.