Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi's PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul takes the reader on an imaginative tour in which Galileo tries to discover an explanation for our conscious selves.
This chapter from PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 2012) describes Tononi’s theory of consciousness as a measure of information. The brain, Tononi postulates, consists of billions of neurons: think of them as if they were transistorlike bits that, when tallied, sum to equal more than their parts. That increment above and beyond—Tononi calls it phi—represents the degree to which any being, whether human or mule, remains conscious.
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