I bought Phi because a friend described it as “Dante’s Inferno but for neuroscience” and honestly, how do you not pick that up. Giulio Tononi is a real consciousness researcher, the guy behind integrated information theory, and instead of writing a normal popular-science book he wrote this odd illustrated fever dream where Galileo gets a tour guide’s tour through the brain, ushered along by Francis Crick, Alan Turing, and Charles Darwin, of all people. Each stop is a different angle on what makes something conscious, phrased as allegory instead of argument.
When it works, it really works. There’s a chapter about a man who can’t sleep that stuck with me for days, and the art on nearly every page earns its keep, it’s not decoration, it’s doing some of the explaining the prose won’t do plainly. But I’ll be honest, I put this down twice while cooking and once genuinely burned a pan of onions because I was three pages into a “notes” section trying to figure out who exactly this book thinks I am. It wants to be read by someone who already owns Gödel, Escher, Bach and made it past page seventeen, and if you haven’t, some of the allegory just floats there, untethered.
I don’t think it’s trying to explain consciousness to me so much as perform its own relationship to the idea, and I respect that more than I enjoyed it. The concept of integrated information, the actual “phi,” gets a real workout in the second section and that’s the part I’d hand to someone else. The rest I’d hand with a warning: gorgeous, occasionally maddening, best read slow with something else on the stove that isn’t onions.
Three stars, mostly for the ambition and the art. If you want a way into consciousness studies that doesn’t feel like homework, this isn’t quite it, but if you already like being a little lost in a book on purpose, it might be exactly your thing.