Intrinsic units: identifying a system’s causal grain
William Marshall, Graham Findlay, Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi · 2026
Read Intrinsic units: identifying a system’s causal grain by William Marshall, Graham Findlay, Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13082400.txt.
Description
What grain of parts makes up a conscious system: single cells, groups of cells, or larger blocks? William Marshall and three co-authors tackle that question inside a theory that ties consciousness to a system's power to shape its own past and future. Their 2026 work builds a frame for scoring that power when the parts are coarse blocks, not just fine ones.
The right grain, on this view, is the one that makes the system's shared power peak. The team first sets out what such parts must meet to count as real in the theory's terms. They then stretch the theory's math, in its fourth version, to weigh cause and effect across grains. Simple test systems show the method at work. The prize is a way to name a system's true units from its own stance.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | William Marshall, Graham Findlay, Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 218 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |