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Neuroscience: A quest for consciousness

Article in Nature · August 2012

DOI: 10.1038/488029a

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UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY
Galileo Galilei, pictured centre, after a painting by H. J. Detouche, is imagined in Giulio Tononi’s Phi as an explorer of consciousness.
NE URO SCIENCE
A quest for consciousness
Christof Koch marvels at a journey that explains mind–body theory through a
fantastical lens.
I
n the end, consciousness is all that mat-
ters. So writes Giulio Tononi, whose
stunningly original scientific fantasy,
Phi, is a distant echo of that great deduction
by René Descartes. Tononi, a neuroscien-
tist, psychiatrist and expert on sleep and
consciousness, is also that rarest of modern
scholars — an idealist. In this category-defy-
ing book, he presents his quantitative theory
of how brain produces mind as a voyage of
discovery imagined for Galileo Galilei.
In Tononi’s literary telling of this story,
Francis Crick teaches Galileo basic neuro-
science. Galileo learns that the brain is the
seat of the mind, and that consciousness flees
when neurons turn on and off together dur-
ing deep sleep or seizures, as the pair meet
scholars, scientists, doctors and artists from
the Enlightenment to the modern era. The
vast cast includes Descartes, Nicolaus Coper-
nicus, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Mar-
cel Proust and, eventually, Alan Turing.
© 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT
Galileo negotiates information theory in the twentieth century,
some tricky concepts scholars averred a link between information
on a road long trodden and conscious experience without work-
by neuro­scientists and ing out what that might be or could imply.
neurologists seeking Tononi’s integrated-information theory
to track consciousness does both. Proceeding from two axioms
down to its lair in the that are rooted in everyday phenomenal
brain. Even if we could experience, the theory defines a measure
point to this biophysi- (the eponymous Φ) that is associated with
cal mechanism, and Phi: A Voyage from every system that consists of causally inter-
those nerve cells, as the Brain to the acting parts. This measure is high if a system
mediators of the phe- Soul
GIULIO TONONI
constitutes a single entity above and beyond
nomenal experience Pantheon: 2012. 384 its parts (integration) and if it is endowed
of red, we would still pp. £19.99, $30 with a large repertoire of discriminable states
need to ask — why (information). The more integrated infor-
these particular mechanisms and neurons? mation any system has, the more conscious
Why not others? Historically, the great chal- it is. This framework, couched in a proba-
lenge has been to explain how conscious- bilistic language, also captures the unique
ness emerges from highly organized matter intrinsic quality of experience — why blue,
without invoking magic, soul-stuff or exotic for example, is more similar to red than to
physics. pain or smell.
With the advent of Claude Shannon’s In Phi, this is conveyed through a
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 COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS

series of dazzling thought experi-

ments aided by cameos from Shannon
and philosophers Spinoza, Leibniz and
Thomas Nagel (the only living person
to figure in the book). Through them,
Galileo understands how the algebra of
integrated information is turned into the
geometry of conscious experiences, and
how this links to the physiology and the
anatomy of the brain.
In the book’s final third, Tononi lays
out the implications of his theory. He
discusses a number of points about con-
sciousness: that it ceases in death and
dementia, does not require language or
knowledge of self, exists in animals in
graded forms and can be present, to some
degree, in the fetus.
Hell, Tononi emphasizes, is all in the
mind. One of the most chilling charac-
ters in Phi is the Master, an amalgam of
the captain in Franz Kafka’s 1914 short
story In the Penal
Colony and the
“This is a story Grand Inquisitor
for grown from Fyodor Dos- Gavin Jantjes’ untitled painting depicts a Khoisan girl creating the Milky Way.
men, not a toyevsky’s novel
consoling tale The Brothers Kara- ASTR O N O M Y
for children.”

Under African skies

mazov (1880). The
Master’s obsession
is creating perfect never-ending pain by
manipulating the brain’s informational
content. In the final chapter, the Man-
nequin, a stand-in for Mephistopheles, Ivan Semeniuk follows the gaze of artists from cultures
throws up some logical paradoxes before that have interpreted the heavens for millennia.
leaving the dying Galileo reunited with
his beloved daughter.

G
Phi is extraordinary. In its appeal to the azing up at a sky full of stars is one of The country was selected this year, along

PHOTOGRAPH: F. KHOURY
imagination, it bears some resemblance the most universal of human expe- with Australia, to host the Square Kilome-
to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland novella (1884) riences, cutting across cultures and, tre Array, which will be the world’s largest
or Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, one imagines, stretching back to the dawn of radio telescope; that association adds to the
Bach (Basic Books, 1979). Yet its language humanity. Yet artistic depictions of the heav- sense of interplay between the scientific and
is more poetic, and full of cultural refer- ens in popular culture are predominantly the spiritual that weaves its way through the
ences and images — film stills and often European — from Johann Bayer’s engrav- exhibition. The show seamlessly bridges
modified coloured photos of artworks. ings of the constellations in his the centuries, uniting pieces as
Endnotes to each chapter link the alle- 1603 star atlas Uranometria diverse as traditional moon
gories and metaphors in the text to the to the swirling brilliance of masks from Côte d’Ivoire
science. Van Gogh’s 1889 painting and Trembling Field, an
I believe that in the fullness of time, the The Starry Night. interactive sculpture by
quantitative framework outlined in Phi An exhibition at the South African Karel Nel. Nel
will prove to be correct. Consciousness is US National Museum of is resident artist with the
tightly linked to complexity and to infor- African Art, part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey,
mation, with profound consequences for Smithsonian Institution a project that focuses on
understanding our place in the evolving in Washington DC, may a two-square-degree field
Universe. As Crick says to Galileo, this is help to change that. It of the sky to see how the
a “story for grown men, not a consoling showcases a range of con- Universe has changed over
tale for children”. ■ temporary and historical time.
pieces by African artists. “Africa has a long and
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Christof Koch is chief scientific officer All are connected in one rich history of keen observa-
at the Allen Institute for Brain Science way or another to the Sun, tion of the heavens,” says the
in Seattle, Washington, and professor of Moon or stars. exhibition’s curator, Christine
biology and engineering at the California African Cosmos: Stel- Mullen Kreamer. “Works
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, lar Arts was sponsored in
California. large part by the govern- Figures from Central Africa
e-mail: christofk@alleninstitute.org ment of South Africa. bear lunar patterns.

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