Astral Codex Ten

Giulio Tononi

4 min read

Giulio Tononi

Article

Giulio Tononi is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2021 and November 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi”; “Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi”; “In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property”. It most often appears alongside Scott Aaronson, Integrated Information Theory, REM sleep.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 16, 2021
  • Last seen: November 20, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Sleep Is The Mate Of Death
March 16, 2021 · Original source
R&K start by reviewing the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (equally famous around these parts for his integrated information theory of consciousness, see eg Scott Aaronson's discussion here). As you learn stuff throughout the day, your brain builds new synaptic connections representing what you learned. For example, as you read this article connecting depression and sleep, your brain might be forming new synapses between neurons storing information about these two concepts (or strengthening existing synapses). That means as time goes on your brain will get more and more synapses, the synapses will become stronger and stronger, and everything will be more and more connected to everything else. But synapses take lots of energy to maintain. And "everything is maximally connected to everything else" works well for conspiracy theorists and Zen masters, but less well for neural networks trying to perform specific computations.
Inline links: synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep, integrated information theory of consciousness, here
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
May 13, 2022 · Original source
So should we say that the canton of Glarus becomes conscious once a year? Probably... not. There are similarities, and after reading this review you might understand what I mean if I call the Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus. But in any other context, I would just cause utter confusion. More importantly, it goes against the intuitive meaning of consciousness for 99% of the people. So if we want to describe the concept of "all-parts-communicate-and-are-coherent-and-Granger-causal", then we should better invent a new name for it. Actually, there have been attempts to formalize and measure this, most famously the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. But the hope that this could give a formal definition of consciousness has the same problem as the idea that the Landsgemeinde is conscious. In a great rebuttal, Scott Aaronson has discussed the idea that IIT captures consciousness, and concluded that it "is wrong — demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core. [This] puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness."
Inline links: In a great rebuttal
The New AI Consciousness Paper
November 20, 2025 · Original source
In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious. Tononi responded that yup, thermostats are conscious. It probably isn’t a very interesting consciousness. They have no language or metacognition, so they can’t think thoughts like “I am a thermostat”. They just sit there, dimly aware of the temperature. You can’t prove that they don’t.
Inline links: proposed, complained, responded