Phi

Picked this up because I liked Tononi’s actual scientific concept, integrated information theory, the idea that consciousness might be measurable as a quantity, Phi, generated by how a system’s parts are wired together. That’s a genuinely interesting hypothesis and I wanted to understand it better. What I got instead was a mostly allegorical, deliberately literary journey where Galileo tours dreamlike scenes discussing the brain with historical figures, Descartes, Turing, Proust, Emily Dickinson, and after each chapter an aloof observer steps in to speculate on what just happened and point out who the figures were.

I get what the author was trying to do here, use the poetic sections to gesture at ideas too slippery for direct exposition, then use the notes to ground them back in something concrete. For me it landed in the gap between the two audiences it seems to be aiming for. Too fanciful for the technically-minded reader who wants a serious exposition on consciousness, too erudite and pretentious for the reader without much background in the theory. I found myself wishing more than once that the book would just pick one mode and commit.

The parts that did work, the passages where the golden ratio itself, the actual number Phi, gets chosen as the chord that sounds as the note of consciousness, are genuinely lovely when they land. The plan for this book is impressive, trying to render a scientific theory as something closer to myth. I just don’t think Tononi is able to sustain the concept for the length it asks for, and by the halfway point the notes started sounding less like commentary and more like a scholar footnoting his own book: what the author means by that is unknown.

Three stars. The artwork on nearly every page is genuinely beautiful, the ambition is real, and if I’d known nothing about neuroscience going in I probably would have learned something. I didn’t. I came away less informed about integrated information theory than when I sat down with a modest research paper on the subject a year ago.