CONCEPT
Panpsychism (IIT's Version)
The philosophical implication of IIT that consciousness exists in vanishingly small degrees wherever information is integrated — from photodiodes to organisms — not as a mystical commitment but as a mathematical consequence of the theory's axioms.
IIT entails a form of panpsychism: because any system with non-zero integrated information has non-zero phi, and because phi is consciousness, consciousness exists in some degree wherever integration exists. A photodiode, with its single bit of integrated information, has a vanishingly small but non-zero flicker of experience. This is among the theory's most controversial claims, embraced by Tononi as a mathematical consequence rather than avoided as an embarrassment. It distinguishes IIT from theories that require thresholds of complexity for consciousness to exist at all, and it reframes the AI question: the issue is not whether machines can be conscious in principle but whether their architectures yield high enough phi to matter.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Panpsychism has a long philosophical history, from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza, Whitehead, and contemporary thinkers like Galen Strawson and Philip Goff. Traditional panpsychism holds that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, present in some form throughout