Context: Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas

The holistic turn in Giulio Tonini’s integrated information theory is compelling. Attempts to isolate consciousness in this manner must run the gauntlet of some interesting logical antinomies. If a holistic organisation of information or energy-processing is considered as axiomatic to consciousness, the mischievous bootstrap of recursive systemic self-containment is invoked.

If consciousness is a holistic property of information and energy-processing systems, or even a “phase” of matter, it must have some very special logical properties. That sufficiently sophisticated axiomatic (or organisational, ordered and logical) systems are endlessly extensible by self-inflection is no new revelation. The flip-side of this is that any complex emergent and self-organisational information or energy-processing (i.e. biogical) principle deploying holistic symmetries must have successfully negotiated the logical discontinuity of self-containment at some point.