Since the time of Galileo, science has tried to explain what exists by starting from a “physical world” of matter and energy. In doing so, it has been immensely successful in understanding the world around us and our ability to control it through technology. However, current science’s extrinsic ontology has no account for the existence of the inner world of experience—of feeling, meaning, and purpose. In fact, it has led many to conclude that our place in the universe is both peripheral and ephemeral, that our origin is an evolutionary game of chance and circumstance, that all we feel and think is ultimately a byproduct of neural computations, and that our inner life may soon be eclipsed by AI. No wonder our societies face a profound crisis of meaning, compounded by the widespread collapse of shared values and unraveling of social ties.

However, the inner world of experience cannot be ignored or treated as an unexplainable byproduct of the outer physical world. Instead, the immediate, irrefutable existence of experience should be the starting point of ontology. Only an approach that starts from consciousness itself—from the intrinsic perspective of ourselves as conscious beings—can properly account for what consciousness is, in a way that fits what we know about the brain and opens the way to a unified view of nature. Such an intrinsic ontology overcomes the inadequacies and contradictions of the dominant reductionist–materialist as well as computational–functionalist paradigms and has the potential to provide a rigorous scientific foundation for the insights of time-honored religious and spiritual traditions.

This proposal intends to develop such an intrinsic scientific ontology, one that puts human experience first and radically changes the dominant scientific conception of meaning, value, and purpose, and our place in the natural world. We will build on integrated information theory (IIT), a scientific theory of consciousness developed by our group over the past twenty years. IIT offers a unique approach to characterizing “what exists intrinsically,” and it does so in a rigorous, mathematically explicit, and testable manner. The intrinsic ontology differs significantly from the prevailing approaches in science because it fully incorporates human experience—“what it is like” to exist as a conscious being—into its premises and methodology and provides a unified understanding of the natural world. We have described this “phenomenology-first” approach in recent publications (Albantakis et al., 2023; Ellia et al., 2021).

We aim to show that the intrinsic ontology of IIT allows us to bring scientific and mathematical rigor to the issues that are central to human flourishing. The initiative is strongly in line with Sir John Templeton’s vision to discover “new spiritual information” and progress in understanding “the deepest realities of human nature and the physical world using the tools of modern science.”

References:
Albantakis, L., Barbosa, L., Findlay, G., Grasso, M., Haun, A. M., Marshall, W.,…Tononi, G. (2023). Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0: Formulating the properties of phenomenal existence in physical terms. PLoS Comput Biol, 19(10), e1011465. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011465
Ellia, F., Hendren, J., Grasso, M., Kozma, C., Mindt, G., P. Lang, J.,…Tononi, G. (2021). Consciousness and the fallacy of misplaced objectivity. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niab032