Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

what distinguishes the variety of information processing that results in conscious awareness? This is a question guiding psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, joined in the pursuit by neuroscientist Christof Koch. It has led to an approach called integrated information theory.27 To get a sense of the theory, imagine I present you with a brand-new red Ferrari. Regardless of whether you are a fan of high-end sports cars, the encounter stimulates your brain with a wealth of sensory data. Information expressing the car’s visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities, as well as more abstract connotations from the car’s power on the road to associations of luxury and wealth, immediately become entwined in a unified cognitive experience. It is an experience whose information content Tononi would characterize as highly integrated. Even focusing more narrowly on the car’s color, note that your experience is decidedly not one of a colorless Ferrari that your mind subsequently paints red. Nor is it of an abstract red environment that your mind subsequently shapes into a Ferrari. Although shape information and color information activate different parts of the visual cortex, your conscious experience of the Ferrari’s shape and color are inseparable. You experience them as one. This, according to Tononi, is an intrinsic quality of consciousness: the information threading through conscious experience is tightly stitched together.