Special Section: Questioning New Materialisms

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276418802890

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Between Eliminative
and Vital Materialism
with Integrated
Information Theory
Alexander Wilson
Aarhus University

Abstract
Though most neomaterialists share a commitment to the Copernican decentring of
humans from the world stage, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an
endeavour. The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the
return to materiality entails: is matter the principle of the non-thinking as such, or
is it always already imbued with some sort of subjectivity? Is the new materialism’s
goal to come to terms with the non-living origin of life? Or is it rather to recognize
that seemingly dead materials are always in some sense incipiently alive? For con-
venience, we can think of two neomaterialist perspectives: the rationalist or elim-
inative neomaterialism, and the vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialism. I explore
some of the conceptual problems faced by both camps and, drawing from the
recently developed theory of consciousness as integrated information (Tononi), as
well as its quantum physical construal by Max Tegmark, I suggest some provisional
ways to address those issues.

Keywords
agency, body-mind dualism, consciousness, enlightenment, materialism, reason,
vitalism

In this article, I expose several conceptual hurdles faced by the new

materialisms, and show how the quantum physical construal of the inte-
grated information theory of consciousness may help to solve them.
The split in the neomaterialist movement concerns how each theory

Corresponding author: Alexander Wilson. Email: contact@alexanderwilson.net

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

deals with questions of subjectivity, sentience, consciousness, or agency,

and how it relates these concepts to matter. In short, several theorists
have argued for rethinking of matter in terms of various forms of vital-
ism, panexperientialism, panpsychism, and other forms of distributed
sentience or agency, while others, following the eliminative trend,
argue that materialism ultimately serves to discredit theories of con-
sciousness, experience, and agency. Such a characterization of the spec-
trum of contemporary thought on materialism productively exposes the
insufficiently addressed theoretical problems these theories face. The pre-
sent article submits the recently developed theory of consciousness as
integrated information (Tononi, 2008) and aims to contribute tools
adapted from the theory as a means of working beyond the apparent
neomaterialist impasse. The integrated information theory of conscious-
ness – which has already been found useful in the fields of theoretical
psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, as well as research
into the neural correlates of consciousness – offers a way of rethinking
the relation between matter, information and mind, which is still largely
overlooked by the new materialisms. I argue that the theory has potential
to help neomaterialist theories beyond the conceptual roadblocks I will
outline below. The purpose of this article is therefore to introduce inte-
grated information theory into the conceptual toolbox of the new materi-
alisms. Following a thorough characterization of the movements in terms
of the neomaterialist divide, I demonstrate how both perspectives lead to
untenable theoretical alternatives, and how these problems may be alle-
viated or solved by critically rehabilitating the ideas of integrated infor-
mation theory, particularly in its quantum mechanical variant.

The Neomaterialist Divide

Philippe Descola ponders a split in the human sciences, between the
Spinozist alternatives of nature naturing and nature natured, that is,
between an emphasis on the deterministic and materialist basis of culture,
versus the cultural constructivist reduction:

Many geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers

have strived to find a dialectical move that would allow them to
sidestep the confrontation between these two dogmatisms. [. . .] But
such efforts of mediation can only be in vain since they ultimately
amount to stitching very coarsely the two sections of the world that
our dualist cosmology had separated, the ostensible scar left by the
suture emphasizing the dissociation rather than dissolving it.
(Descola, 2012: 29)
Wilson 3

In Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the human’s capacity for action

depended on closing this very gap:

This separation is only a means, not an end. [. . .] Between [man]

and the world, therefore, no rift must be established; contact
and reciprocal action must be possible between the two.
(Schelling, 1988: 10)

Schelling was thus reframing the Socratic doctrine of anamnesis in

terms of a natural rift in matter itself, and positing philosophy as a
means to bridge the gap. It is this rift we now see reflected in the neo-
materialist divide.
On the face of it, every neomaterialist’s return to matter is motivated
by a similar general set of problems and concerns. The zeitgeist of the
Anthropocene has compelled critical thought to respond to a climate
in crisis, and a complex, polluted environment suffering from its techno-
logical appropriation by humans. There is widespread sentiment that
humans have for too long ignored the materiality of their own condi-
tions, having been led astray by the intertias of evolutionary dynamics
and the lure of techno-genetic promise. The new materialisms emerge in
the wake of – and as a supplement to – poststructuralist thought, which
increasingly seems to have run out of steam, exhausted its historical
relevance and its capacity to respond to the concerns of the age.
Contemporary theorists are urgently sifting through the last 60 years
of theory and philosophy, selecting what few insights to salvage from a
tradition that, we now understand, has perhaps overemphasized a con-
structivistic conception of science to the benefit of various instrumenta-
lizations of knowledge and ideology, and which, as Coole and Frost
(2010: 6) rightly note, has shown itself to be ‘inadequate for thinking
about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the
contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy’.
The new materialism’s commitment to various Copernican decentrings
of humans from the world stage is endemic of an age ridding thought of
every last hint of anthropocentrism. However, as other commentators
have noticed, there is in these contemporary movements an important
divergence. Though all agree on the need to do away with anthropocen-
trism, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an endeavour.
The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the
return to materiality implies: should matter be upheld as the principle
of the non-living as such, or should it be considered as always already
imbued with some sort of vitality or subjectivity? For convenience, we
can think of the new materialism as being divided between these two
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

shares, respectively: the rationalist or eliminative neomaterialism, and the

vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialism.1
On the rationalist side of the split, the return to matter is often taken
to participate in a ‘kicking-away’ of the mythological scaffoldings of
human reason, the last remnants of our common-sense or ‘folk’ notions
about the world, in a triumphant discarding of our animal background.
Thus the rationalist neomaterialism entertains a close tie to the modern
project of enlightenment. Here materialism is seen as a first step in rein-
stating a distinction between cogito and world. Upholding the primacy of
matter is thought to go hand-in-hand with the subject-independence of the
real, on which the recent speculative realist turn hinged. On this side of
the spectrum, therefore, materialism is about endorsing the ontological
primacy of a reality prior to observation, consciousness, sentience or
agency. As Meillassoux puts it, ‘matter is a primordial ontological
order: it is the fact that there must be something and not nothing’
(Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012: 81). For him, matter ‘designates con-
tingent non-living and non-thinking beings. In our world, life and
thought are constituted on a background of inorganic matter to which
they return’. Indeed, it is possible to read Meillassoux’s argument for the
importance of escaping what he calls ‘correlationism’ (Meillassoux,
2006), and his appeal to an ‘absolute’ real, outside of thought, as being
reflected in his understanding of matter as an ontological mechanism that
imposes constraints on reality, and that is both temporally and logically
prior to life.
But from the other side of the divide, that is, from the point of view of
the materialists, realists, and object-oriented theorists on the vitalist
or panpsychist side, the critique of anthropocentrism via matter has
very different aspirations. Here the point is not to secure the reality of
the dead, inert, non-subjective, non-thinking matter of the ‘ancestral’
realm, but rather to defend the reality of the non-human capacities,
agencies, and subjectivities of the material (and immaterial) world.
This materialism is indebted to Bruno Latour’s ‘principle of irreducibility’
(Latour, 1993: 158), and more generally his case for viewing categories,
hierarchies, orderings and equivalences as constructed through the
trials of various non-human actants. The actor-network theory
he helped develop is sometimes considered a material semiotics: a dense
and inclusive network of relations and interactions where any node,
living or non-living, can become an actant under the appropriate
enabling conditions. Each node is thus a hybrid between subjective and
objective characteristics. Likewise, the new materialism on this side of the
divide is concerned, not with reinstating a firm distinction between
thought and thing, mind and matter, but rather with trying to avoid
dismissing the capacities, agencies and subjective dimensions of seem-
ingly dead materials. As an extended refutation of human exceptional-
ism, it is a return to various flavours of animism, vitalism, panpsychism
Wilson 5

and panexperientialism, via an insistence on a flat ontology that refuses to

impose a specific hierarchical priority.
This appeal to ‘flat ontology’, a term coined by Roy Bhaskar (2008) in
the 1970s but more recently reinterpreted by Manuel Delanda (2005),
is indeed common to thinkers on this side of the spectrum. It implies
that there is no ontological hierarchy, that there is only one ‘level’ of
primitives, as it were, in the ontological composition. Whether the ontol-
ogy begins with relations as in Latour, objects as in Harman’s (2011)
object-oriented philosophy, material vibrancy or capacity as in the vital
materialisms of Bennett (2010) or Braidotti (2002), or even with continu-
ous meshworks of potentials as in Delanda’s (2000) work, though the
ultimate constituents of reality may have different capacities, an equal
ontological footing for all beings is maintained and defended. It is
assumed that this implies treating each parcel of being equally, that is,
of neither undermining nor ‘overmining’ (to use Graham Harman’s ter-
minology) the stuff of the world by prioritizing any beings over others.
This particular feature of the flat ontology is in fact precisely what a
theory like Delanda’s, which describes the world as a continuous (yet
heterogeneous) field of potentials, has in common with Harman’s, which
advocates an ontology of strictly discrete objects. Do away with this
distinction between continuity and discontinuity, and you end up with
similar accounts of how the stuff of the world, regardless of whether it is
discrete or not, has some sort of living interiority or agency. One appeals
to a virtual depth or preindividual potential in material processes, while
the other attributes a dimension of private withdrawal in all objects; but
both allow for the possibility of at least some form of interiority distrib-
uted throughout being, whatever might be said to populate the real.
The idea that experience is a general property of things and materials
can be traced back to the animistic cosmologies of prehistory (which,
incidentally, still survive to this day). In animism all things are thought to
have a spiritual essence: plants, forests, stones, mountain peaks, bodies of
water and weather patterns are assumed to be ‘selves’, that is, to have a
private dimension of experience, feeling or value. The idea has a long
history in philosophy as well: Thales, Anaximander, Bruno, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Schelling, James, Whitehead, among others, each entertain
some variant of panpsychism (for a thorough survey of this history see
Skrbina, 2007). Though unpopular in the last century, panpsychism is
currently seeing somewhat of a revival, particularly in philosophy of
mind. This side of the neomaterialist divide can be said to follow the
same trend. Under the constraints of the Anthropocene’s posthumanist
and Copernican ethics, it grants at least some minimal experiential
dimension to all parcels of existence and, as an intended consequence,
the agency of humans and social organizations is proportionally dimin-
ished. This is especially true in comparison to the modern conception of
the human’s dominion over nature, and its narrative of unbounded
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

progress. Today’s post-humanism seems to asks: Who do we humans

think we are, denying the private experience of a rock, of a chair, or of
a cloud?
In addition to this ethical concern, it is important to note that the
vitalist materialism is in a certain way more attuned to the contemporary
scientific conception of matter than its counterpart. Whereas in classical
physics matter tended to be understood as passive in relation to the
concepts of motion, force, and energy, in post-classical physics ‘matter
has become considerably more elusive (one might even say immaterial)’,
as Coole and Frost (2010: 5) note. According to current physics, matter is
composed of quantum entities that, on their own, are not localized in
space-time but probabilistically smeared-out across dimensions (this will
be central to the quantum construal of integrated information theory,
developed below), fluctuating in and out of existence in the depths of the
quantum foam, momentarily escaping into parallel universes. This is
vibrant matter indeed. Hence, comparatively, the rationalistic neomateri-
alism’s return to a conception of ‘dead’ matter might seem old fashioned;
indeed, it does entertain affinities with historical materialism in its return
to a dualism between two ontologically distinct aspects, one thinking and
one non-thinking, reminiscent of Descartes’ two substances.
Nevertheless, the contemporary rationalist materialist is certainly not
appealing to some ‘spooky’ Cartesian realm of the mind in relation to the
inert, dead matter on which he wants to insist. On the contrary, there is a
tendency on this side to entertain various flavours of eliminativism: if
mind, thought, and life are derivatives of matter, and if experience is
grounded in non-experience, it is thought that perhaps qualia themselves
are illusions, that they can be neatly folded into non-experience and
eliminated as superfluous. On this end of the spectrum we at times find
names like Ray Brassier (2010) and Reza Negarestani (2014). Here is a
kind of instrumentalized nihilism and eliminativism that is promoted as a
crucial step on the path toward enlightenment. It is a call to face the brut
facts of human subjectivity’s displacement from the centre stage, by
reversing what Meillassoux (2006) calls Kant’s ‘ptolemaic counter-revo-
lution’. But as Steven Shaviro (2014: 74) points out, ‘[u]ndoing the
Kantian nexus of thought and being leads us, in this case, to the conclu-
sion that thought is epiphenomenal, illusory, and entirely without effi-
cacy’. Proponents of this project will thus fall in line with philosophies
critical of the ‘folk’ or common sense conceptions of subjectivity or
phenomenality: for example Wilfrid Sellars’ (1997) critique of the
‘myth of the given’, Robert Brandom’s (1998) exceptionalist account of
the ‘inferential articulation’ of human normativity, as well as
Churchland’s (1988), Dennett’s (1991) and Metzinger’s (2003) various
eliminative materialist arguments against holistic consciousness or self.
It is argued that consciousness, as integrated, holistic and irreducible, is
an illusion, a magic trick the specific functions of cognition perform on
Wilson 7

the more general ones. Curiously, the rationalist neomaterialist neverthe-

less finds in this normative illusion the means to salvage from Kant the
idea of an irreducible difference between sensing and knowing, or sen-
tience and sapience, as well as a relation of priority between the two. The
necessity of mind, life, consciousness and holistic subjective experience is
radically put into question, and it is in this, specifically, that he differs
from the old-fashioned modern materialist who took human conscious-
ness for granted. By being read backwards, the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo
sum’ now takes on new meaning: ‘I am, therefore I think’, and therefore
if thinking is but a functional instantiation of material processes,
then perhaps the givenness of phenomenality – the ‘I am’ – is a superficial
and unessential aspect of the equation, an inconsequential effect, a sec-
ondary quality. In this light the concept of experience begins to be
seen as a dangerous and persistent obstacle to human enlightenment, a
threat to our promethean, or accelerationist, escape from our folk past. It
is assumed that the pervasive cliché that ‘we all intuitively know what
consciousness is like’, is holding us back from our full potential for pro-
gress as sapient beings, the last frontier of our break from the mere
sentience of the animal world, which, they will maintain, only feels but
doesn’t think.

The Impasse
It will now be helpful to formulate this more schematically. We have on
one side a materialism that insists on the existence of dead, non-thinking,
unconscious matter, that this matter has both logical and historical pri-
ority over subjectivity, and furthermore, that this priority of matter over
subjectivity puts into question the very idea of subjectivity as such, with
its private dimension of mental interiority, values, and qualia. On the
other side, we have an opposing materialism that insists that all matter is
imbued with some kind of agential, subjective or withdrawn interiority.
Thus two different takes on the purview of materialism: one says that
aesthesia is nowhere; the other says that aesthesia is everywhere.
For the rationalist neomaterialist project to work, there is a sense in
which it needs to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to ‘step out’ of
subjectivity’s enclosure to touch the objective real, while also staying
behind to be cognitively affected by this real, that is, to make ground
on its enlightenment project of ridding the world of folk concepts. This
is a sound intent, but it leads to the awkward claim that in order to
elevate thought we must do away with the idea of a subjective venue
for thought. The rationalist neomaterialism is Copernican in the sense
that it wants to do away with common-sense conceptions of the human’s
relation to the real, while also anti-Copernican in that, convinced as it is
by the distinction between sentience and sapience, its eliminative stance
is doubled by a strict exceptionalism about the normative foundation of
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

human intelligence. Though sentience is common in the animal kingdom,

it maintains, animals only seem to ‘have’ sensations; really, their behav-
iour is reducible to purely causal sensory-motor functions, and there is
no moment of ‘having’ this process ‘from the inside’, as it were. The
eliminative materialist will ultimately deny that there is such a thing as
what-it-is-like to be, or to have, an experience. Sapience, for its part, also
has no need for a withdrawn dimension of private experience. Robert
Brandom maintains that what differentiates sapience from sentience is
that it is normatively constrained by a network of reciprocal commit-
ments, whereas sentience isn’t. With sapience, as with sentience, there is
no need for integrated, holistic experience or consciousness. Having done
away with thought’s conditionality on experience, the question of non-
human thought now becomes the question of artificial general intelligence,
a pure, post-human rationality that has discarded the last remnants
of the folk illusion of consciousness. This seems to throw the baby out
with the bathwater: though the rationalist neomaterialism can now
step out of subjectivity to touch the real, it can no longer ‘have’ an
experience of the real, making its leap out of correlationist thought
seem rather pointless. The situation here is much like that of being
offered immortality on the condition of being afflicted by an eternal
coma: what is the benefit of accessing the ‘great outdoors’, if one is no
longer ‘there’ to cognize it?
On the panexperientialist side of the divide, a complementary set of
problems appear. Since this persuasion of materialism entertains the idea
that matter is imbued with some kind of subjectivity or agency, it inev-
itably encounters what is called the ‘combination problem’ in philosophy
of mind. For any panpsychist framework, this is the problem of how the
subjectivities and phenomenal quiddities composing the experience of,
say, a subatomic particle, combine with others to produce larger aggre-
gates of subjective experience, in the molecule, the chemical compound,
the living cell, the multicellular life-form, and so on up the hierarchy of
complex living beings. This problem was discussed by William James in
his oft-cited critique of the ‘mind-dust’ theory:

Take a hundred [elemental feelings], shuffle them and pack them as

close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each
remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, win-
dowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There
would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series
of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group
as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new
fact; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a
signal for its creation, when they came together; but they would
have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one
Wilson 9

could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible
sense) say that they evolved it.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to
each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a
bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will;
nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
(James, 1890: 160)

James’s critique of panpsychism was articulated on a problematization of

the objective reality of the aggregate. A bunch of things does not magic-
ally amount to more than their sum, he maintains; it might look like a
new thing from the point of view of the external observer, but the
parts making up the aggregate are still individual things. He was thus
questioning the possibility of strong emergence, where actual observer-
independent behaviours and capacities, irreducible to the substrate,
emerge from the interaction of many small parts. His argument sup-
ported what science now calls supervenience, which stipulates that once
the microscopic components are in their places, so are the phenomena of
the macro level, and consequently that nothing new really emerges at
larger scales. If all matter is sentient, if all things, regardless of their
material instantiations and functional relationships, have their own
what-it’s-likeness, then how do the experiences of small things combine
to produce the experiences of larger things? Are our human experiences
reducible to the experiences of the tissue structures and chemical com-
pounds composing our bodies? If experience is everywhere, then every
slice of material reality, as well as every combination of discrete things,
will have its own private dimension of mentation. In other words, if this
desk in front of me has a vital interior dimension, then the same must go
for only the right half of the desk, and a quarter, and an eighth, and
so on, ad infinitum. Are we to believe that each region of materiality, no
matter how you cut it up, has an internal phenomenal experience of the
world? Or that the sum of any number of objects in the universe, chosen
at random, always already has a mental life of its own? It becomes dif-
ficult to see how such a theory can work. How is information about the
world gathered by these inanimate, un-integrated material structures?
How is this piece of plastic’s experience different from this stone’s?
Indeed any response to these questions will appeal to guesswork, or
worse, to a mystic realm of immateriality, as long as we lack a functional
extrinsic account of how this interior space of mentation emerges in its
material substrate. Furthermore, by discarding all epistemic priority
between individual cases, it is doubtful such theories can gain any pur-
chase over the real, or address problems of any pragmatic nature. Peter
Wolfendale’s (2014: 135) critique of Graham Harman’s ‘metaphysics of
haecceity’ could equally apply to any such panexperientialism: ‘it leaves
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

us amidst a swarming mass of thises that appear thusly, with nothing to

tell between them but more thisness’. The problem here stems entirely
from panpsychism’s incapacity to discern between some region of the
world that merely has capacities and behaviours, and some region of
the world that has capacities and behaviours plus a private dimension
of aesthesia.

Integrated Information Theory: A Possible Middle Way

In a sense this impasse is a symptom of the age, which has led us to a
crossroads where each has to choose to go right or left, toward elimina-
tive materialism or toward panpsychism, toward an outright denial of the
existence of integrated experience or toward a blind attribution of men-
tation to all matter. I believe there is no way around this impasse via the
poles of the neomaterialist divide. We need a theory that discovers a way
through the impasse, as it were: a middle way.
Such a theory would 1) uphold the Copernican principle of displacing
humans from the centre stage and thereby avoid the potential hubris of
exceptionalism, while also 2) avoiding the equally dangerous indiscrim-
inate attribution of sentience to all things. Simultaneously, it would 3)
adequately respond to the challenge of addressing the subject-
independence of the real, the ‘ancestral’, or the reality of a ‘dead’
matter that exists regardless of our thinking it. But though we need to
abide by a strict physicalism, we must 4) avoid falling into an eliminati-
vist stance with regard to integrated experience. In other words, we need
to avoid reserving experience, aesthesia, or conscious interiority for
humans while not lazily blanketing all of reality with a vague ‘maybe it
is conscious’. Specifically, we need a theory that allows us to track, within
the public space of science, the existence of a private space that is not
shared by others.
I would like to suggest that Giulio Tononi’s integrated information
theory offers conceptual tools for negotiating between eliminative materi-
alism and panpsychism. It is a theory that posits that consciousness is
simply integrated information, and that defends a resolutely physicalist
account of something very close to panpsychism (Tononi, 2008).
However, it does not imply, like the panpsychisms and vitalisms
defended by Galen Strawson, Thomas Nagel, and in some sense
Graham Harman and Jane Bennett, that some mind-like interiority or
life-like tendency is found necessarily everywhere, nor that all things or
all materials have a sentient aspect. Rather, it offers a method of extrin-
sically accounting for intrinsic consciousness and for discriminating
between a thing that has experience and a thing that doesn’t. Though
it is sometimes referred to as a panpsychism, in the context at hand it is
more fruitfully referred to as ‘panpsychism -1’, as it allows for matters
and things which have no phenomenal experience (hence the ‘minus 1’),
Wilson 11

and is a kind of pseudo-panexperientialism, or what is sometimes called

panprotopsychism.
Integrated information theory is an extrinsic, information-theoretic
account of experience that has been devised to closely mirror the intrinsic
or phenomenological account. Specifically, it derives what it calls its
‘axioms of consciousness’ from phenomenological observations and
then attempts to reconstruct what these conditions might look like
extrinsically, in a material system that has objectively observable quali-
tative and quantitative features. Hence, though it was developed specif-
ically as a theory of the neural correlates of consciousness, its formulation
is so general that it can be applied to the analysis of any material sub-
strate. Integrated information theory is about understanding how a first-
person perspective, corresponding to the phenomenological axioms we
take to be indubitable truths, can emerge from the structures and rela-
tions inscribed in the stuff of the real world. In other words, it proposes a
way to identify the property of first-person experience from a third-
person perspective.
To home in on the infamous gap between first-person and third-person
accounts of consciousness, Tononi begins by listing the ‘indubitable’
axioms of first-person phenomenological experience, starting with the
Cartesian axiom: consciousness exists. But the comparison with
Descartes ends here: for the goal is to bridge the epistemic gap between
the Cartesian substances of mind and matter, not to insist on their abso-
lute estrangement. This zeroth axiom of the theory establishes that con-
sciousness is not an otherworldly phenomenon, nor is it ‘spooky’,
‘ghosty’, or ‘spirity’. Rather, consciousness exists in the world and is
therefore made of the same stuff as everything else: matter. It affirms
that experience is physically registered in specific material structures
and mechanisms. As such, it opposes any eliminative ‘explaining-away’
of consciousness as an illusion.
The theory goes on to axiomatize several more phenomenological
assertions about consciousness, and then converts these into postulates
that help narrow in on what we might look for as extrinsic characteristics
of conscious matter (see Oizumi et al., 2014):
1. Composition: The postulate of composition implies that, if phenomenal
experience seems always to be composed of various elements, for example
shapes, colours, smells and various other qualia, then the material mechan-
isms and structures that give rise to experience will probably also be composite
in nature.
2. Information: Following Gregory Bateson’s famous adage, the postulate of
informativity implies that ‘a mechanism can contribute to consciousness
only if it specifies ‘‘differences that makes a difference’’ within the system’
(Oizumi et al., 2014). In integrated information theory, this making-of-a-
difference is taken to mean that the information involved must constrain
the causal possibilities of the system, that is, it must limit the possible effects
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

that will arise from possible causes. The system must hence be characterized
by what they call a ‘cause-effect repertoire’, a set of possible system states that
can be achieved given possible input stimuli. The idea is that the more a
system configuration constrains the number of output effects of incoming
causes, the more selective it is and thus the more cause-effect information
it has.
3. Integration: Next, the postulate of integration implies that the mechanism
giving rise to first-person experience must specify a cause-effect repertoire
that is ‘irreducible to independent components’. This is perhaps the crux of
the matter, and indeed this postulate gives its name to the theory, because it is
here that we find its quantitative index of experience, referred to as ‘T’ (Phi),
and which is ‘assessed by partitioning the mechanism and measuring what
difference this makes to its cause-effect repertoire’ (Oizumi et al., 2014: 3).
The phenomenological argument for integration is that experience is always
given holistically, that is, even if it does seem to be composed of various
qualia, the experience is irreducible to either of them. An example Tononi
gives is that the experience of a red square is irreducible to the experience of a
colourless square plus a formless impression of redness; likewise, the experi-
ence of the word ‘sono’ written in the middle of an otherwise blank page, is
irreducible to the word ‘so’ written at the right edge of a half page plus the
experience of the word ‘no’ on the left edge of a half page. One immediately
notices the potential significance of this postulate with regard to the combin-
ation problem, for it is asserting that both first-person and extrinsic accounts
of consciousness should be constrained by the law of irreducibility, despite
being combinatorial in nature.
4. Exclusion: The final postulate, that of exclusion, is similarly valuable with
regard to the combination problem. It implies that in a complex of different
interconnected mechanisms, the only one that will constitute the integrated
experience is the one that has the maximum value of integration or Phi. In a
network of material mechanisms, therefore, the mechanism having a max-
imally irreducible cause-effect repertoire suppresses the cause-effect repertoires
of the other mechanisms in the complex, those that have a lower index of Phi.
Interestingly, Tononi refers to this maximally irreducible cause-effect reper-
toire as a ‘concept’. As we will see, this postulate of exclusion is extremely
helpful in thinking beyond the neomaterialist divide.

Taken together, the postulates reveal a new way of thinking about how
a private realm of interiority might emerge from the essential publicity of
objective reality. The theory can thus be taken to tackle what David
Chalmers (1995) influentially called the hard problem of consciousness.
Chalmers claimed that questions such as ‘the ability to discriminate,
categorize, and react to environmental stimuli’ and ‘the ability of a
system to access internal states’ were relatively ‘easy’ compared to the
difficult problem of understanding experience, or as Thomas Nagel called
Wilson 13

it, of describing what it is like to be a conscious thing. In physicist Max

Tegmark’s (2014) quantum mechanical construal of integrated informa-
tion theory, the easy problems of consciousness come down to describing
what Margolus and Toffoli called ‘computronium’, that is, of describing
the minimal material criteria for computation and information process-
ing. The hard problem, on the other hand, refers to the prospect of
describing what Tegmark aptly calls ‘perceptronium’, that is, an exotic
phase of matter that ‘feels’ the information it is processing from its own
intrinsic perspective: it is the information processing’s ‘what-it’s-like-
ness’. In a materialist sense, then, integrated information theory can be
said to attempt a formalization of the distinction between computronium
and perceptronium, that is, to distinguish between a material system that
merely behaves, and a material system that behaves and has an intrinsic
experience of something.
To demonstrate why such a distinction is important, we might refer to
the 2014 news headlines about the 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, Eugene
Goostman. The reason he was in the headlines, as it turned out, was
because he was actually not a pubescent boy at all: he was a ‘chat-bot’
computer program trying to fool people into thinking he was real. He
made the news because he apparently succeeded in beating a version of
the Turing test. But the problem with the Turing test is that it only selects
the extrinsic features that we expect to find in conscious humans. Indeed,
Alan Turing’s (1950) ground-breaking paper, ‘Computing Machinery
and Intelligence’, had proposed to understand consciousness as little
more than a problem of imitation (as in the famous adage, the ‘imitation
game’); if a computer program could fool a conscious human into think-
ing it was conscious by merely imitating extrinsic behaviour, it was to be
considered conscious for all intents and purposes. But as philosophers
eventually noticed, the manipulation of symbols required for imitating
consciousness was a fairly easy problem. It was difficult to see how a
computation could have an intrinsic perspective or interpretation of the
symbols it was manipulating. To quote John Searle (1983: 670), the sym-
bols a computer manipulates ‘have no meaning; they have no semantic
content; they are not about anything’. Thus, a ‘philosophical zombie’ can
in principle pass the Turing test, making us believe it is conscious, while it
is actually just a non-integrated agglomeration of symbol-matching pro-
grams. The Turing test tells us nothing of whether some information is
reserved for the perspective of the thing in question, and whether it
should be considered a who or a what. By prioritising the extrinsic
account, it merely shows us that certain procedural behaviours will
fool humans into attributing experience to an unconscious system.
Thus it is no different from teaching a computer to play chess or go:
an algorithm that behaves in a way appropriate to beat a human at its
own game. But, of course, we would like to have some better way of
understanding whether the thing we are interacting with has a perspective
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

on the world, whether there is something-it-is-like to be that thing. This is

the very appeal of integrated information theory, which seems to consti-
tute a noticeable step beyond the Turing test. If the Turing test compara-
tively only gives us a behavioural account of what it takes to fool an
unsuspecting human, integrated information theory offers us insight into
how we might extrinsically discriminate between a system that has an
intrinsic experience and a system that does not.
Moreover, since the theory of integrated information addresses sen-
tience as a matter of degree, it also has the potential to illuminate the
world of textures and compromises between matter and mind. This is
particularly true when the theory is mapped back onto the contemporary
quantum physical understanding of matter. As we have seen, one of the
challenges for the panpsychist neomaterialist is the combination prob-
lem. William James’s construal of the combination problem was based
on the observation that ordinary objects cannot ‘combine’ to form larger
ones: they only seem to be new wholes from the point of view of an
external observer. The combination problem ultimately stems from con-
sidering matter as ‘object-like’. But, as science now understands it, matter
is ultimately information: if we peer into the microscopic scales of matter,
its objecthood ultimately gives way to the information instantiated by the
relation between observers and the various ‘coherent’ or wavelike entities
which populate the quantum world. Thus we have a material world that
looks a lot like Leibniz’s Monadology: a world ultimately made up of the
various ‘perspectives’ on the world: in other words, correlated, entangled
information between purely relational quantum entities. The object-like
character of everyday things results from what physicists call the
‘decoherence’ of the wavelike character of quantum entities as their
degrees of freedom progressively become entangled. In a sense entangle-
ment just means that if the observer knows something about one particle,
it also knows something about the other particles it is entangled with.
Entangled entities, in other words, share mutual information. This also
implies that entities that become entangled will have increasingly corre-
lated future behaviours, which leads to the locality we typically associate
to material objects, that is, the fact that each thing seems to be in a
specific location at a specific time. Though coherent entities like waves
can be ‘synthesized’ together – they interfere, modulate, multiply or
negate each other as they interact – decohered entities like billiard balls
cannot: they fall prey to the combination problem, and no matter how
you put them together, you still just have a bunch of parts, not a new
synthesized whole. But what decoherence theory shows is that the world
of ordinary, billiard-ball-like objects results from the entanglements,
reciprocal relations, or ‘intra-actions’ (Barad) that somehow even pre-
cede what we come to know as their ‘terms’. Thus there is a close link
between the locality typical of macroscopic reality and the integration
and reciprocal determinations between pre-sentient relational entities.
Wilson 15

In other words, to borrow the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, decoher-

ence is the transition from the and-and-and of quantum superposition and
alocality, to the or-or-or of classical macroscopic locality and objecthood.
As Tegmark’s (2014) work attempts to formalize it, entanglement, or the
integration of information (the production of mutual information),
seems to be the mechanism of this transition from and-and-and to
or-or-or. Thus the quantum version of integrated information theory
neatly avoids the combination problem, so long as we allow that
its fundamental constituents are not ‘conscious’ per se, but somehow
perspectival: they mutually reflect each other’s existence (mutual infor-
mation), but to various degrees of clarity. Thus, as in the metaphysics of
Leibniz, a world is nowhere but in the reciprocal compossibility of its
perspectival expressions.
Now, with regard to the neomaterialist divide between vitalist and
eliminative materialisms, it is important to underline that this quantum
physical construal of integrated information theory does not mean that
matter is everywhere sentient or imbued with subjectivity. Crucially, as we
have seen, in integrated information theory the only subsystem of a com-
plex that achieves subjectivity is the one that is maximally irreducible with
regard to its context. This is due to the postulate of exclusion, which is
meant to mirror the way phenomenal experience excludes or occludes
parts of the world. One cannot have multiple holistic experiences at once,
for the concrescent nature of the integration will either collapse them into
one experience or exclude them entirely, in which case we would have
multiple systems to speak of, several consciousnesses, rather than one.
This suppression of the influence of the subsystems is closely related to
the question of ‘downward causation’. Typically, in theories of emer-
gence, the whole is said to constrain the expression of the parts.
Similarly, in integrated information theory the sentient system suppresses
the information generated by the parts. In effect, since each perspectival
‘simple substance’ has the potential to be bootstrapped into experience,
all of material reality can be thought of as protopsychic. In other words,
the ontological landscape suggested by integrated information theory is
not quite panpsychism, because some aspects, slices and groupings of
reality are not themselves experiencing but rather are vectors of potential
experience, akin to what A. N. Whitehead (1982) called prehensions.
Indeed, readers of Whitehead will notice the similarity of this theory’s
framework with the central process of his philosophy of organism:
prehensions concress into fulfilled actual experiences. Thus simple sub-
stances are not quite little perceptions, as Leibniz thought, but rather,
infra-perceptive prehensions; they are material instantiations of their
compossible differences, as encoded by their mutual information. In
this light, integrated information theory implies that experience as such
only appears in those regions of this web of reciprocal prehensions where
a local asymmetry occurs, and where the interplay of concression and
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

suppression, integration and exclusion, takes place. So with regard to the

combination problem’s question of whether each entangled particle at
the basis of reality has its own phenomenal experience, the answer is
‘probably not’: the information contained in the single logical node of
an integrated system is not sufficient for phenomenal subjectivity.
Rather, it is the holistic integration of this information that is key to
the emergence of intrinsic subjective or phenomenal unity. Thus inte-
grated information theory is not panpsychism, but panpsychism -1,
and thereby proposes a resolution of the untenable dilemma of the
new materialisms as I have described it.
Now, as a scientific theory, integrated information theory does make
predictions about the world, and it is no surprise that some of these
predictions have been met with discomfort. For example, John Searle’s
(2013) critical review of Christof Koch’s book on integrated information
theory is filled with sarcasm about those predictions. One such claim
Searle finds difficult to swallow is that ‘for these authors, there is nothing
especially biological about consciousness’. For them, he objects, ‘such
information is not confined to biological systems. You also find con-
sciousness in, say, smartphones.’ Searle is clearly not ready to abandon
the ‘folk’ idea that consciousness must be fundamentally linked to life.
A related, yet more sophisticated, critique has been presented by the MIT
quantum computing engineer Scott Aaronson.

IIT fails [. . .] because it unavoidably predicts vast amounts of con-

sciousness in physical systems that no sane person would regard as
particularly ‘conscious’ at all: indeed, systems that do nothing but
apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transform-
ations of their input data. Moreover, IIT predicts not merely that
these systems are ‘slightly’ conscious (which would be fine), but that
they can be unboundedly more conscious than humans are.
(Aaronson, 2014)

What Aaronson seems to overlook, however, is that integrated informa-

tion theory is not a theory of intelligence, but a theory of consciousness.
This is important. Indeed, the theory’s postulates say nothing about how
intelligent, rational, or predictive a system is. Rather, it suggests a strict
qualitative distinction between intelligence and experience, which appear
to be two independent potential behaviours of matter. A system might be
intelligent while being completely unconscious; another system might
have the most vivid experience of a certain field of potentials while
having no intelligence whatsoever. Intelligence concerns effective prob-
lem solving, not subjectivity as such, and so these two potential attributes
of matter are orthogonal to each other, different things matter can do.
Though we humans might have both intelligence and consciousness inter-
secting the same embodied organism, this does not mean that we will
Wilson 17

necessarily always find intelligence and consciousness in the same places

when we look for them outside of ourselves, nor should we expect to find
these attributes always mixed in the same proportions (as Aaronson
seems to in his rejection of the theory). Though well beyond the scope
of the present article, this question deserves to be explored in greater
depth to see whether and to what extent the formal distinction between
consciousness and intelligence may be mapped onto the dichotomous
concepts of sentience and sapience, sensation and thought, affect
and reason.
Searle’s and Aaronson’s reactions to integrated information theory
highlight how such predictions are indeed difficult to grapple with. But,
in a sense, this is precisely the value of a good theory: it is supposed to
challenge our conceptual perspective on things. The Copernican charac-
ter of integrated information theory’s displacement of what subjectivity
implies is bound to be difficult to swallow. But it seems obvious that our
common sense understandings about the world need to be challenged if
we are to escape the materialist limbo we find ourselves in. Our knee-jerk
reactions to propositions that displace humans – or, as in this case, life
itself – from the world stage have a long history of holding us back.
Ironically, in his defence of integrated information theory, even
Christof Koch falls prey to his own common sense understanding.
Koch misrepresents integrated information theory as full-on panpsych-
ism, rather than the more modest panpsychism -1 that it clearly is, due to
the exclusion principle. Koch evokes an almost mystical world view
where all is conscious, not realizing (or wanting to admit) that the real
interest in integrated information theory is its potential capacity to dis-
criminate between consciousness and non-conscious matter, and to help
negotiate between panpsychism and eliminativism.
A related issue intersected by IIT’s predictions is that of the
‘hive mind’ or ‘universal consciousness’. If integrated systems are con-
scious, does this mean that a society, a nation, an economy, the earth as a
whole or even the totality of all matter in the universe is conscious? Once
again, within the framework of integrated information theory, the
answer is a tentative ‘no’. The idea of a collective or global consciousness
– the subject of many post-human and new-age narratives alike – is again
severely constrained by the theory’s postulate of exclusion. For it implies
that if ever a global or overarching consciousness were to ‘come online’,
as it were, and integrate such that it were maximally irreducible with
regard to its subsystems, then all the subsystems – including our own
conscious experiences – would go offline. Our mental integration would
immediately blank out, being suppressed by the higher level of integra-
tion we are subsumed by. Luckily for us, by appealing to our bias as
observers, as long as we are certain that we ourselves are (still) conscious,
we can be fairly certain that a global integration at the level of the col-
lective is not (currently) happening.
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

However, this leaves open the possibility that assemblages of experi-

ential integration occur between the gaps of our own waking awareness.
Integrated information theory seems to allow for the momentary boot-
strapping of individual substrates of experience (say, individual bodies
and brains) into collective modes of awareness. This might recall the
controversial concept of the ‘mob mentality’, a collective mode of
agency that is hypothetically triggered when a critical mass of collectively
synchronized emotions erupts in a crowd and seems to determine the
individuals’ actions from the top-down. There is nothing in the theory
preventing such events from intersecting the experiential life of the indi-
vidual, in the non-experiential gaps between individually-felt events.

Conclusion
I believe we have in this physicalist account of subjectivity the means to
cut across the otherwise-opposed schools of thought on the relation of
matter and mind, which characterize the current divide in the neomateri-
alist movement. Though it remains to be seen what integrated informa-
tion theory will bring to the study of cognition, free will, and artificial
intelligence, I submit that it should at the very least be considered by the
new materialisms, especially in its quantum physical construal, as a pos-
sible step toward collapsing the unacceptable alternative between a
worldview that eliminates experience completely and a worldview that
attributes it to all of matter indiscriminately. These ideas do begin to
address the neomaterialist divide’s untenable alternative with practical
conceptual tools that lend themselves well to further development.
In sum, while on the one hand integrated information theory allows
for the existence of ‘dead’ matter, an idea that will charm the rationalist,
on the other hand it also favours looking at subjectivity as a fairly
common occurrence in the material world, and consequently lends sup-
port to a radical critique of human exceptionalism, which should satisfy
the open-minded vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialists. Finally, it is a
theory that does not shy away from facing the implications of regarding
experience as material, and fully pursuing predictions that shake up our
common sense notions of what it is to be alive, conscious, or human.

Note
1. I realize that not all thinkers in the field fit neatly onto either side of the
dichotomy I present here, and that several authors submit disclaimers that
nuance their argumentative positions. However, a certain amount of rhet-
orical generalization is mobilized here to help orient the reader and clarify
some of the major stumbling blocks faced by contemporary materialist
thought.
Wilson 19

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Alexander Wilson is a postdoctoral fellow in Communication and

Culture at Aarhus University (Denmark), where he examines the logical
and material conditions of sentience with regard to aesthetics and tech-
nology, with a special focus on the question of the human future.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section on
‘Questioning New Materialisms’ (TCS 35(7–8), December 2018), edited
by Charles Devellennes and Benoı̂t Dillet.