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THE quest to understand the human brain and its most mysterious output – consciousness – has been ongoing for centuries. There are now several competing ideas that seek to explain how we generate the sensations of sentience, but, so far, progress has been slow.
One idea, known as integrated information theory (IIT), is an attempt to mathematically quantify the level of consciousness of any information-processing system. But it is currently impossible to work out a value for the entire human brain because we don’t yet know the structure of this 86-billion-neuron organ in detail. Even if we did, the calculations would be…
