Phenomenology: Consciousness as

integrated information Everybody knows what consciousness is: it is what vanishes every night when we fall into dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or when we dream. Thus, consciousness is synonymous with experience – any experience – of shapes or sounds, thoughts or emotions, about the world or about the self. It is also common knowledge that our consciousness depends on certain parts of the brain. For example, the widespread destruction of the cerebral cortex leaves people permanently unconscious (vegeta-tive), whereas the complete removal of the cerebel-lum, even richer in neurons, hardly affects con-Integrated information theory of consciousness: an updated accoun