Tegmark’s State of Matter

Physicist Max Tegmark speculates that “the subjective experience that we call consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways,” and he comes to this strong physicalist view because his starting point is, “It's all physics.” This means, he says, “I'm not allowed to have any extra ‘secret sauce’ to add to the physical world and brain. Thus, explaining consciousness is much harder for me, but at the same time, it [i.e., the physicalist constraint] limits or focuses my work to or on very concrete problems” (Tegmark, 2014a).

Consciousness as Information Processing

Clearly, Tegmark says, “there must be some additional principle about information processing in nature that distinguishes between the conscious kind and the unconscious kind.” “I would love to find it,” he continues, “not just because it's philosophically fascinating, but because it's important. Assessing consciousness is a critical need, whether in caring for comatose patients or in communicating with super-advanced AI” (Tegmark, 2014a).

Perceptronium and Principles

Tegmark examines the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a “state of matter,” “perceptronium,” as he coins it, with distinctive information-processing abilities (Tegmark, 2015). Assuming that consciousness is a property of certain physical systems, with no “secret sauce” or non-physical elements, and given that the key difference between a solid, a liquid, and a gas lies not in the types of atoms but in their arrangement, he conjectures that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, he says, there are many types of consciousness.

To distinguish conscious matter from other physical states of matter, Tegmark explores four basic principles: “the information, integration, independence, and dynamics principles.” These principles may identify conscious entities, account for our three-dimensional world, even involve the emergence of time. Tegmark's approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory for neural-network-based consciousness as well as for arbitrary quantum systems.

Founded on his concept that mathematics is the ultimate nature of reality (Tegmark, 2014b, 2014c, 2014d), Tegmark's quest is to better understand the internal reality of our mind and the external reality of our universe, such that they will hopefully co-explain or at least assist each other. This view sits somewhat apart from most materialist theories of consciousness, in which the emergence of consciousness is a contingency of evolution.