Giulio Tononi

Foreword

By Edo Segal

I've spent my career building systems that process information. Feeds, signals, data flowing through architectures I designed — watching patterns emerge from the interaction of simple parts. I know what it looks like when a system does something intelligent. I also know what it feels like when *I* do something intelligent. And I have never been able to reconcile those two experiences.

When I first encountered Giulio Tononi's work, I felt something I rarely feel anymore in technology: genuine vertigo. Not because his math was complex — though it is — but because he was asking the question I had been avoiding for twenty years. Every system I've ever built processes information. Every app, every platform, every algorithm takes inputs, transforms them, and produces outputs. Some of them