A Scientific Feud Breaks Out Into the Open
For years now, Hakwan Lau has suffered from an inner torment. Lau is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of awareness that all of us experience during our every waking moment. How this awareness arises from ordinary matter is an ancient mystery. Several scientific theories purport to explain it, and Lau feels that one of them, called integrated information theory (IIT), has received a disproportionate amount of media attention. He’s annoyed that its proponents tout it as the dominant theory in the press. He’s disturbed by their apparent affinity with New Age figures, such as Deepak Chopra. Worst of all, he complains, the theory doesn’t even rise to the level of “science.”
IIT was first formulated by Giulio Tononi in 2004. It’s meant to quantify the consciousness that exists in any system, based on the total information that is brought together by its constituent parts. Other theories of consciousness tell more of a general story about how the brain generates consciousness; IIT gives it a
