Integrated information theory (IIT), identified in your article as the best bet for a mathematical model of consciousness, may not point towards panpsychism, the universal consciousness of matter, as suggested. This is for the simple reason that it points clearly towards something else entirely. The way that IIT focuses on information may not be its greatest weakness, but its greatest insight. As far as IIT is concerned, it isn't the brain that is conscious, but the information flowing through it. A close, if not perfect, parallel may be drawn with the meaning of this letter being a property not of my computer, but of the information that flowed through it. We may simply have been looking for the origin of consciousness at the wrong level of neural activity.
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