Sizing up Consciousness: Towards an objective measure of the capacity for experience

Everyone knows what consciousness is: it is what vanishes when we fall into dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or when we dream. However, we become less and less confident when we are called to answer fundamental questions about the relationships between consciousness and the physical world.

Using the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a guiding principle, Sizing up Consciousness takes the reader vis-a-vis with these question along a fascinating journey from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum, from wakefulness to sleep, anesthesia, and coma, supercomputers, octopuses, dolphins, and much more besides.