Throughout this series, we have investigated various ways to explain the mind, navigating the tension between physicalists and idealists. We have looked at the purely materialist “user-illusion” of Daniel Dennett, the inherent “teleological” purpose proposed by Thomas Nagel, and the perspective of process philosophy, which views consciousness as a continuous flow of creative events. We even explored the radical “real materialism” of Galen Strawson, who argues that if we take physics seriously, we must conclude that matter is inherently experiential, and the classical substance dualism which insists that the mind and body are two distinct types of “stuff.” We have also considered the Idealism of George Berkeley, who famously claimed that “to be is to be perceived,” and modern thinkers like James Tartaglia, who suggest that reality is ultimately mental. Yet, a growing movement in both physics and philosophy suggests that we might be looking at the wrong building blocks entirely. This movement argues that the fundamental substrate of the universe is neither dead matter nor a separate ghostly spirit, but Information—a concept most rigorously defined in the study of consciousness through Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

Shannon and the Physics of Data

To understand the modern landscape of consciousness, we must start with the technical facts established by Claude Shannon in 1948. Before Shannon, “information” was a vague, psychological term associated with knowledge or meaning. Shannon redefined it as a purely physical, mathematical quantity. He argued that information is essentially the reduction of uncertainty. If you toss a coin, the “information” produced by the result is exactly one bit, because it resolves a choice between two equally likely possibilities. This perspective, often called the “It from Bit” hypothesis, suggests that every physical object is ultimately an outcome of binary informational states.

Shannon’s primary insight was that the meaning of a message is irrelevant to the amount of information it contains. This allowed science to treat information as a physical variable, much like energy or mass. In thermodynamics, the concept of entropy is used to measure the disorder of a system. Shannon realized that his mathematical formula for information was identical to the formula for entropy ($S$). This connection suggested that information is a physical property. If you know the exact position and velocity of every molecule in a gas, you have high information and low entropy. If the gas becomes chaotic and you lose that data, entropy rises.

The Landauer Principle later proved that erasing one bit of information generates a specific, measurable amount of heat. This confirmed that information is not an abstract concept; it is tied to the laws of energy and the very behavior of matter. If you are a physicalist, this is an exciting development because it suggests that the “mind” (which processes information) and the “body” (which obeys physics) are speaking the same mathematical language. However, Shannon’s theory only explains how information is transmitted—it does not explain how it becomes felt as an experience.

The Integration Factor: Why the Brain is Special

For proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), such as neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch, Shannon’s “bits” are only the beginning. To explain why a brain is conscious while a high-powered digital camera or a sprawling telephone network is not, they point to a specific mathematical property: Integration. IIT is unique because it does not start with the brain’s anatomy; instead, it starts with the essential properties of experience itself.

Tononi identifies five “Axioms” that are true of every conscious experience:

1. Existence: My experience exists here and now, intrinsically, from its own point of view.
2. Composition: Experience is structured; it contains different components (shapes, colors, sounds) in specific relations.
3. Information: Each experience is unique and differentiated from trillions of other possible experiences.
4. Integration: Experience is unified; it cannot be divided into independent components.
5. Exclusion: Experience is definite; it contains exactly what it contains, no more and no less, at a specific “grain” of time.

The Axiom of Integration is the most critical for distinguishing the mind from a machine. It states that every conscious experience is unified and irreducible. You cannot experience the left half of your visual field independently of the right half; they are bound together into a single “whole.” IIT argues that for a physical system like a brain to produce consciousness, its physical architecture must be integrated in a way that makes the system “more than the sum of its parts.”

To understand this “magic ingredient,” consider a high-resolution digital camera sensor. A 50-megapixel sensor possesses an enormous amount of Shannon information. It can distinguish between billions of different light patterns. However, according to IIT, a camera has zero consciousness because the information is not integrated. In a camera sensor, each pixel is independent. Pixel A does not interact with Pixel B. The system is “reducible.” You could chop the sensor in half, and the two halves would still do exactly what they did before. In contrast, the human brain is highly integrated. The neurons processing color are constantly interacting with the neurons processing shape. The measure of this irreducibility is a mathematical value called $\Phi$ (Phi). The higher the $\Phi$ value, the more conscious the system.

Consciousness as Causal Power

This leads to the concept of consciousness as causal power. For proponents of IIT, consciousness is the causal power that a system has over itself. A conscious system is one where the state of the parts determines the state of the whole in a way that cannot be broken down into independent sub-processes. This is an “internal” view of information. While a computer has “extrinsic” information (bits that mean something to a human user), a brain has “intrinsic” information (bits that mean something to the system itself).

This is why IIT proponents push back against the idea that a standard computer simulation of a brain would be conscious. In a standard computer, information flows in one direction (feed-forward). Even if the simulation looks perfect on a screen, the underlying hardware is just a collection of independent switches turning on and off. Tononi and Koch argue that a purely feed-forward system, no matter how complex, has a $\Phi$ value of zero. It is a “zombie.” Consciousness requires re-entrant or feedback loops, where the system “talks to itself” and constrains its own future states. You cannot “simulate” $\Phi$ any more than you can “simulate” the wetness of water. To have the experience, you must have the physical architecture of integration.

If we accept that $\Phi$ is a fundamental property of matter, then the universe is likely teeming with “proto-conscious” states. Wherever you have the right informational architecture—specifically, an architecture that is integrated and irreducible—consciousness is simply a fact of the universe. This suggests that information has two sides: an external, physical side and an internal, phenomenal side. IIT provides the mathematical ruler to determine exactly when that internal side “wakes up.”

The Ethical and Existential Implications

This perspective also impacts the realm of ethics. If the universe is a coherent structure of integrated information, then the destruction of that information—the extinguishing of a complex, integrated system—is a form of informational corruption. Luciano Floridi argues that we have a duty to preserve the “infosphere.” Ethics, in this view, is the duty to preserve the integrity and complexity of these informational structures. We protect things not necessarily because they have a “soul” in the religious sense, but because they are unique, integrated entities that contribute to the cosmic data set. This provides a bridge between environmentalism, animal rights, and human ethics, all based on the value of integrated complexity.

Furthermore, the philosophy of information allows us to reconsider the nature of the self. The self is not a specific piece of brain matter, but a stable pattern of integrated data. This pattern persists even as the physical atoms of the body are replaced over time. This treats the human person as a unique, complex algorithm that has achieved a high degree of integration. The Exclusion Principle in IIT further defines this individual self. It states that consciousness exists only at the level where $\Phi$ is at its maximum. Because the integration within a single brain is orders of magnitude higher than the integration between two people talking, the conscious experience stays locked at the level of the individual mind. This gives us a factual, structural reason for why we experience ourselves as single, unified observers rather than a collection of independent cells or a giant “social” mind.

Computational Emergence and Intelligibility

To expand on the physical reality of this theory, we must look at “computational emergence.” This suggests that the complexity we see in the world is the result of simple informational rules being applied over and over. If you have simple rules (bits) and enough time, you will inevitably end up with a universe that contains conscious observers. This provides a factual framework for the “teleology” we discussed earlier: the “goal” of the universe isn’t a mystical destination, but a mathematical inevitability toward higher informational density and integration. The universe “wants” to be integrated because integration is a stable state of complex information.

Ultimately, the Informational Turn in philosophy represents a shift in how we define what is “real.” In the old world, something was real if you could kick it. In the new world, something is real if it possesses a specific informational structure that interacts with other structures. This allows us to grant reality to things that materialism struggled with, such as mathematics and logic. All of these are informational entities. They are not “physical” in the sense of being made of atoms, but they are “real” because they govern the behavior of the universe.

The logical conclusion of this view is that we live in a world that is fundamentally intelligible. If the universe were made of “dumb” matter, there would be no reason for it to follow mathematical laws. But if the universe is made of information, then mathematics is its native language. Our minds are informational processors built from the same code as the rest of the universe. We are not looking at a strange, alien world; we are looking at a mirror of our own internal logic. By identifying information as the fundamental substrate and integration as the catalyst for awareness, we can finally bridge the gap between the objective mechanics of the brain and the subjective reality of the mind. In this view, consciousness is not an “add-on” to the universe; it is the feeling of the universe being integrated.

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📚 Recommended Reading on the Philosophy of Information and IIT

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. A comprehensive history of how information evolved from human communication into a fundamental physical theory.

The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed by Christof Koch. A highly accessible explanation of IIT, focusing on why “simulation” is not “reality.”

The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality by Luciano Floridi. An essential text on the ethical and metaphysical implications of living in a world defined by data and informational structures.

Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul by Giulio Tononi. A creative narrative that uses Galileo as a character to explain the technical axioms of Integrated Information Theory.

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information by Vlatko Vedral. A physicist’s argument for why information theory is the most fundamental way to explain the laws of nature.

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. While not strictly IIT, this book explores how self-referential information processing creates the “I” that we experience.

Thomas Nagel, Emeritus Professor at NYU, presents a philosophical position that challenges the completeness of the current scientific worldview. In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that the standard materialist model of nature—the one holding that life and mind are accidental byproducts of physical laws—is logically insufficient. His work is not a defense of religious creationism, as Nagel is a self-identified atheist. Instead, it is an analytical critique of the “ideological” assumptions within modern science that fail to account for the existence of consciousness, reason, and value. Nagel posits that the very existence of these phenomena suggests that the laws of physics alone are not enough to explain the history of the universe.

The foundation of Nagel’s work began in 1974 with his paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? This text established the distinction between objective physical facts and subjective experience. Nagel argued that while a scientist can possess a complete physical map of a bat’s sonar and neurobiology, those objective facts do not provide the subjective “first-person” experience of being a bat. This established that “perspectival” facts exist in the universe that cannot be reduced to physical brain states. In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel expands this to a cosmic scale, arguing that if science cannot account for the “inside” of reality, it cannot claim to be a comprehensive theory of the universe. He suggests that we are currently operating with a truncated view of nature that purposefully ignores the most salient feature of our existence: our own awareness.

Nagel argues that modern science has been defined by a specific tactical choice made during the Scientific Revolution. Thinkers like Galileo and Newton decided to treat the world as a collection of “primary qualities”—mathematically measurable units like size, shape, and motion. They purposefully excluded “secondary qualities” such as color, taste, and sensation, categorizing them as human subjectivity rather than objective reality. This allowed science to make incredible progress in physics and chemistry because it removed the “messiness” of human perception from the laboratory. However, Nagel claims we have reached a point where we are trying to use those “mindless” equations to explain the mind itself. He characterizes this as an ideological failure; a theory of the universe that cannot explain the existence of the observers who created the theory is, by definition, incomplete.

Nagel identifies two distinct ways in which materialism fails: the constitutive and the historical. The constitutive failure is the “Hard Problem” we have discussed in previous installments—the fact that no amount of physical arrangement seems to logically necessitate the presence of a “feeling.” The historical failure, however, is Nagel’s newer and more controversial focus. He argues that even if we could explain how a brain produces a thought, we still haven’t explained why the universe was able to produce a brain in the first place. He contends that the probability of life and mind emerging through purely random, non-directed processes is so low as to be practically impossible.

The most substantial portion of Nagel’s critique is directed at the current understanding of evolution. Neo-Darwinism suggests that the emergence of life and consciousness is the result of random genetic mutations filtered through natural selection. Nagel argues that the probability of such blind, non-directed processes producing conscious, reasoning beings is extremely low. He identifies a “structural gap” between the basic laws of physics and the complex existence of subjective experience. From a strictly materialist standpoint, a “Philosophical Zombie”—a creature that functions exactly like a human but has no inner life—would be just as successful at survival. Therefore, there is no clear evolutionary requirement for the “glow” of subjective experience to exist if the physical machinery works perfectly well without it. Evolution selects for behavior (what a creature does), not for phenomenology (how it feels while doing it).

Because the physical machinery does not require consciousness for survival, Nagel suggests that the emergence of mind indicates that the universe is not “blind.” He proposes a return to Natural Teleology, a concept derived from the Greek word telos, meaning goal or end. While modern science assumes that causes only move from the past to the future (efficient causation), teleology suggests that nature possesses inherent tendencies or “laws of development” that pull matter toward specific outcomes (final causation). Nagel’s proposition is that the universe is “sloped” toward the production of consciousness. In this framework, the universe is a system biased toward mind. It is not that mind is a random accident, but that the universe contains an inherent drive to develop into a self-aware state.

It is necessary to distinguish Nagel’s teleology from religious “Intelligent Design.” Religious frameworks typically posit a Designer who exists outside the system and intervenes in its functions. Nagel’s teleology is “immanent,” meaning the direction or drive toward consciousness is built into the fabric of the physical laws themselves. He suggests that just as an embryo has an internal direction to develop into a human, the universe has an internal direction to develop into a self-aware state. This makes mind a fundamental feature of the cosmos rather than an accidental byproduct. He argues that if mind is a product of the universe, then the potential for mind must have been present in the universe from the very beginning. This moves the discussion away from “miracles” and toward a broader definition of what is “natural.”

Nagel identifies three specific pillars of reality that he believes materialism cannot explain: consciousness, reason, and value. Regarding consciousness, he argues that if the universe is capable of producing experience, then the potential for experience must have been present in the basic constituents of matter from the beginning. You cannot logically derive “feeling” from “non-feeling” stuff unless the universe was structurally primed for it. This is a rejection of “emergentism”—the idea that if you just stack enough “dead” matter together, it eventually starts “feeling.” Nagel argues that such a jump is a logical impossibility; the “building blocks” of reality must themselves contain the seeds of mind.

Regarding reason, Nagel points out that if our brains are merely survival mechanisms, our thoughts are just chemical reactions designed for biological fitness. If that is the case, there is no reason to assume our thoughts are “true” or “accurate” regarding the nature of the universe. In a purely Darwinian world, a belief only has to be “useful” for survival, not “correct.” For example, if a creature believes that a predator is a “ghost” and runs away, it survives. The belief is useful but false. Nagel argues that the fact that human reason can discover objective mathematical and logical truths suggests that the mind is aligned with the actual structure of reality. The universe is “intelligible,” and we possess the “intelligence” that matches it. This suggests a deep, non-accidental connection between the human mind and the cosmos.

Regarding value, Nagel contends that “Good” and “Evil” are not merely subjective feelings evolved for tribal cooperation. He argues that Value is an objective part of reality. For instance, he suggests that pain is “bad” as an objective fact, not just a biological signal. If value is an objective feature of the world, then a purely materialist universe composed of value-neutral atoms could not have produced it. A world made only of “facts” (is) cannot, by itself, produce “values” (ought) unless value was already a part of the system’s foundational structure. This led Nagel to a version of Panpsychism-adjacent thought, similar to the views of Galen Strawson, though Nagel focuses more on the systemic “direction” of nature rather than the internal life of individual atoms.

Nagel’s position suggests that human beings are the “organs” of the universe. In this view, the universe is a process that has achieved self-awareness through us. When humans observe the cosmos and attempt to understand its laws, it is the universe itself becoming conscious of its own existence. This shifts the status of the human subject from a “biological accident” to a “cosmic necessity.” The mind is not a glitch in the machine; it is the point at which the machine’s internal logic becomes explicit. Nagel describes this as a “unified” view of nature—one that doesn’t split the world into “physical stuff” and “mental stuff,” but sees them as two aspects of a single, teleological process.

This philosophical shift addresses what Nagel describes as a modern crisis in the scientific world. When we operate under the assumption that we are “meat computers” in a dead world, we create a disconnect between our scientific theories and our lived experience. We are forced to treat our moral convictions as biological baggage and our reasoning as a mere survival tool. By adopting a teleological framework, these human capacities are recognized as being in sync with the structure of the universe. It provides a way to acknowledge the reality of the mind and moral value without requiring a religious or supernatural framework. Nagel argues that we should be “Naturalists” in the broadest sense, accepting all the data of our lives—including the data of consciousness—as parts of the natural world.

Nagel’s work is ultimately an exercise in philosophical realism. He argues that we must start with the facts of our existence—the facts of consciousness and reason—and build a theory of the universe that can actually hold them. If the current materialist theory cannot hold them, then the theory must be revised. This is a direct challenge to the “reductionism” that has dominated philosophy for the last century. Instead of trying to “reduce” the mind to the brain, Nagel suggests we must “expand” our definition of nature to include the mind. Nagel’s “heresy” is the claim that the mystery of our own awareness is far greater than the current scientific consensus suggests, and that a truly comprehensive science would have to include these teleological “laws of mind” to be complete. It is an invitation to reconsider the basic “stuff” of the universe and the direction in which it is moving.

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📚 Recommended Reading on Thomas Nagel and Teleology

Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links below are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you choose to make a purchase.

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel. The central text for this post, focusing on the failure of materialism to account for mind, reason, and value.

The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. A detailed exploration of how the subjective “inner” perspective and the objective “outer” perspective conflict and how philosophy attempts to bridge them.

The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman. A scientific perspective on how evolution does not prime us for “truth,” but for “fitness,” supporting Nagel’s skepticism of blind evolution’s ability to produce objective reason.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The foundational defense of the non-teleological, materialist view of evolution, serving as the direct intellectual counterpoint to Nagel’s thesis.

Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. A collection of seminal essays, including the “Bat” paper, which first defined the “Hard Problem” of subjective experience in modern philosophy.