October 8, 2026 ·20 min read·中文版

Is Consciousness a Product of Reality, or Its Ground? From Laszlo's Akashic Field to Glattfelder's Information Ontology

The relation between consciousness and reality is one of the few questions in metaphysics that still has no accepted answer. Following Laszlo and Glattfelder, this piece separates the claims with empirical support from the speculative ones, then looks at how these positions judge whether animals, cell collectives and AI have minds.

science

On 29 June 2026, the Hungarian-born systems philosopher Ervin Laszlo died in Tuscany, Italy, aged 94 (IONS tribute[1]). For more than half a century he argued one thing again and again: the universe is an interconnected whole, and consciousness is not an accidental by-product of the brain but is connected to the deepest level of the cosmos. James Glattfelder, a Swiss complex-systems scholar a generation younger, started from research on financial networks and arrived at a similar conclusion: reality is woven from information, and consciousness is information’s inner side.

What this piece attempts is a survey, not a defence. The question is specific: is consciousness a product of material processes, or the very ground of reality? It is worth discussing now for two reasons. First, consciousness science is going through a round of public theory-testing, and the results make no side comfortable. Second, AI and basic biology are both turning “what kind of system counts as a mind” from a philosophical question into a practical one. How we answer the first question directly shapes how we pose the second.

A note on stance first: both authors discussed here hold minority views. Below I try to restate their arguments faithfully, while marking which claims have empirical grounding and which are speculative or contested.

The shape of the problem: the hard problem and four kinds of answer

Any discussion of consciousness and reality has to go through the distinction David Chalmers drew in 1995 (Chalmers 1995, JCS[2]).

The hard problem: explaining how the brain performs functions such as discrimination, integration and report is called the “easy problem”; explaining why performing those functions is accompanied by subjective experience — “why there is something it feels like, rather than nothing” — is called the “hard problem”.

Chalmers’s point is that even if every functional question were solved, the question of why experience exists would still be there. Twenty-odd years earlier, Thomas Nagel had raised a similar doubt in another way: we could know every physical detail of a bat’s echolocation and still not know “what it is like to be a bat” (Nagel 1974, Philosophical Review[3]).

Metaphysical answers to the problem fall roughly into four kinds.

The first is physicalism: everything is ultimately physical, and consciousness is either identical to, or realised by, some physical or functional state. The second is dualism: mind and matter are two different fundamental kinds of thing. The third is panpsychism: the basic constituents of matter themselves carry some most primitive experiential property, and complex consciousness is composed of them (Strawson 2006, JCS[4]). The fourth is idealism: reality is fundamentally mental, and what we call matter is one way mental contents appear.

Idealism: the view that the basic level of reality is mind or consciousness, and the physical world is how the contents of consciousness appear from a certain perspective. It differs from solipsism, which denies the external world: most contemporary idealists accept that there is a world independent of any individual mind, but hold that this world is itself mental.

These four positions are unevenly distributed among professional philosophers. In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, of the 1,733 respondents to “Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism”, 51.9% accepted or leaned towards physicalism and 32.1% towards non-physicalism; on the question about consciousness, about 7.6% chose panpsychism; and 62.4% of respondents held that the hard problem is real (PhilPapers Survey 2020[5]).

The data say two things. Physicalism is still the majority view, but far from a consensus; and a good share of physicalists also concede that the hard problem has not been dissolved by existing theories. This is the gap Laszlo and Glattfelder start from.

Laszlo: from systems philosophy to the Akashic field

Laszlo was born in Budapest in 1932. A child prodigy at the piano, he performed with a Budapest orchestra at the age of nine before turning to philosophy (Wikipedia[6]). His academic starting point was Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory. His 1972 Introduction to Systems Philosophy tried to fit physical, biological and social systems into one framework of organisation and evolution. In 1993 he founded the Club of Budapest, devoted to the evolution of human values and consciousness; in 2010 he was elected an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The Laszlo of this period belongs to mainstream systems science: an emphasis on wholes, hierarchy and self-organisation, without any verdict on the ontological status of consciousness. The turn came in the 2000s.

Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, published in 2004, introduced the core concept of his later life. “Akasha” (ākāśa) comes from Sanskrit and in Indian thought denotes all-pervading space or ether. Laszlo used it to name a hypothetical information field and linked it to the quantum vacuum and zero-point field of physics. As the publisher puts it, the field is the substrate from which atoms, galaxies, life and consciousness emerge, and also “the enduring memory of the universe”, preserving a record of past events (Inner Traditions, second edition 2007[7]).

The Akashic field (A-field): Laszlo’s hypothesis that the quantum vacuum carries not only energy but also information, which it stores, and through which things in the universe are interconnected. He used it to explain the fine-tuning of cosmological constants, the non-randomness of evolution and quantum non-locality.

In The Self-Actualizing Cosmos (2014) he recast the framework as two dimensions: an unobservable deep dimension, the A-dimension (Akasha), and an observable manifest dimension, the M-dimension, linked by a kind of “quantum resonance” (Inner Traditions 2014[8]). The Immortal Mind, co-written with Anthony Peake the same year, went further: citing reports of near-death experiences, after-death communication and past-life memories, the authors argued that consciousness can persist outside the brain and even continue after bodily death (Inner Traditions 2014[9]).

By What Is Reality? The New Map of Cosmos, Consciousness, and Existence (2016), his position was explicitly idealist: the universe is a seamless whole, informed by a single, coherent consciousness that manifests in each of us (SelectBooks 2016[10]).

How to assess the Akashic field

Laszlo’s system needs to be looked at in layers.

The first layer is the holism of systems theory: complex systems have organisational features that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts, and evolution happens at many scales. This layer is broadly compatible with mainstream complexity science and not very controversial.

The second layer is specific claims about physics: that the quantum vacuum stores information about macroscopic events and thereby links biology and consciousness. This is where the problem lies. In mainstream quantum field theory, the vacuum is the lowest-energy state of a field, and zero-point fluctuations have observable consequences (the Casimir effect, for example). But as far as the physics literature we could find goes, there is no accepted mechanism by which the vacuum records and feeds back information about macroscopic events. Laszlo’s account borrows the vocabulary of physics without giving equations that could be computed or experimentally refuted. That makes it closer to metaphysics expressed in the language of physics than to a physical hypothesis.

The third layer is the claim that consciousness survives. The near-death experiences and mediumship reports it relies on are mostly retrospective individual cases; mainstream neuroscience has other explanations for them, and their evidential standing is in a different league from the first two layers.

The point of separating layers: rejecting the second and third does not automatically overturn the first; and conversely, the plausibility of the first cannot be borrowed to vouch for the other two.

Glattfelder: from network science to “only information exists”

Glattfelder’s path runs almost opposite to Laszlo’s: he did not move from holism to consciousness, but started from mathematics and data.

He earned a PhD in complex systems at ETH Zurich and was co-head of quantitative research at Olsen Ltd in Zurich (TED speaker profile[11]). In 2011, with Stefania Vitali and Stefano Battiston, he analysed the ownership network of 43,060 transnational corporations and found that control was highly concentrated in a small, tightly connected core dominated by financial institutions (Vitali et al. 2011, PLoS ONE[12]). His doctoral thesis, Decoding Complexity, was published in the Springer Theses series (Springer 2013[13]).

In 2019 he published the open-access Information—Consciousness—Reality in Springer’s Frontiers Collection, 15 chapters in three parts: “Ascent”, “Fall” and “New Horizons” (Springer 2019[14]). The book’s structure is itself the argument.

Step one: the book of nature in two volumes

In the first part, Glattfelder likens humanity’s formal knowledge of reality to a “book of nature” and divides it into two volumes by what they describe and how they represent it (chapter 5[15]).

Volume one deals with reality at the fundamental level and is expressed in analytical mathematical equations; physics is its paradigm. Volume two deals with the complexity of the real world — life, self-organisation, emergence — and is encoded in algorithms and simulations, because such systems are usually non-linear and hard to solve in closed form. In his view, the two volumes rest on continuous and discrete mathematics respectively, so human knowledge production is mathematically unified.

This part is largely a description of scientific method. Readers need not accept the metaphysics that follows to take a useful distinction from it: physics’ “understanding by equation” and complex systems’ “understanding by simulation” are two different ways of knowing. Readers working in computational biology will find the distinction familiar.

Step two: information before matter

The second part turns to the predicament of epistemology: from Berkeley and Hume to Kant, philosophy has argued that we have no direct access to a mind-independent world. The third part offers his way out.

Chapter 13, “A Universe Built of Information”, gathers lines of thought in physics that treat information as fundamental (chapter 13[16]): Landauer showed that erasing information has an unavoidable thermodynamic cost, so information is physical; John Wheeler proposed “it from bit” in 1989, arguing that physical entities derive their existence from answers to yes-or-no questions and that the universe is participatory (Wheeler 1989[17]); Anton Zeilinger holds that the concepts of reality and information cannot be separated; and Seth Lloyd describes the universe as a quantum computer.

Information ontology: the view that the basic constituent of reality is information, not space, time or matter, and that physical objects are a manifestation of informational structures. It differs from the ordinary usage in which information is a quantity describing physical systems, which makes no ontological commitment.

Step three: consciousness as information’s inner side

Chapter 14 first introduces Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) and its critics, then surveys formulations of panpsychism and “consciousness first”, citing Chalmers, Christof Koch, Philip Goff, Donald Hoffman and others. Here Glattfelder intersects directly with Laszlo: he discusses Laszlo’s 1996 The Systems View of the World, and quotes an essay by Peter Russell in Laszlo’s 2006 Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos that mentions Laszlo’s matching of the quantum vacuum with the Akasha of Indian thought (chapter 14[18]). On panpsychism his wording remains tentative: panpsychism “may well be” the key to completing the paradigm shift towards information.

Chapter 15 gives his synthesis (chapter 15[19]). He condenses his position into one sentence: “Only information exists.” Information has an outer and an inner side: the outer side appears as objective physical structure, the inner side as subjective experience. In his words, in this new paradigm consciousness is “rediscovered as the inner side of information”.

In philosophical taxonomy, this version is closer to dual-aspect monism or panpsychism than to idealism in the strict sense: what is fundamental is information, and matter and consciousness are two of its aspects.

2025: a turn to explicit idealism

Six years later, his position became more explicit. In April 2025 he published The Sapient Cosmos, 776 pages, with Essentia Books, on the emergence of information, consciousness and meaning (Simon & Schuster listing[20]). In “Re-enchanting the universe”, published in March that year on the Essentia Foundation website, he wrote that idealism holds reality to be “fundamentally and solely mental”, calling it “a compelling alternative” to physicalism; in his account panpsychism becomes a stepping stone, with a “final step” still to come (Glattfelder 2025, Essentia Foundation[21]).

The shift from “information has two sides” in 2019 to “reality is solely mental” in 2025 is worth noting. The former puts consciousness and matter on an equal footing; the latter demotes matter to an appearance of consciousness.

Figure 1 | Two two-layer pictures of reality: Laszlo's unobservable A dimension underlies the manifest M dimension; Glattfelder (2019) takes information as the base, with physical structure and subjective experience as its outer and inner faces · Source: drawn by 一目半 (Yimuban)

Back on the map: where the two routes meet and part

Taken together, the two share three things: both reject physicalism; both place some not directly observable whole (the A-field, or information) beneath matter; and both end up putting consciousness at the foundation of reality.

The differences are just as clear.

First, they use evidence differently. Laszlo makes direct claims about the physical world (the vacuum stores memory) and takes in parapsychological reports; Glattfelder relies mainly on published views in physics and information theory and builds philosophical interpretation on top, and is himself more restrained about empirical claims.

Second, their arguments take different forms. Laszlo’s writing is closer to a comprehensive statement of a worldview; Glattfelder’s book follows epistemology as its main thread, asking first what we can know and only then what reality is.

Third, they stand at different distances from contemporary academic philosophy. In academic philosophy, the most systematic contemporary defence of idealism is Bernardo Kastrup’s “analytic idealism”. He argues that there is only universal consciousness, that we and other living beings are “dissociated” alters within it, and that the inanimate world is the extrinsic appearance of universal consciousness’s thoughts (Kastrup 2018, JCS[22]). Glattfelder’s 2025 book was published by an imprint of the Essentia Foundation, of which Kastrup is executive director, and his later position is clearly close to analytic idealism.

The combination and decombination problems: panpsychism has to explain how micro-level experiential properties combine into a single unified subject — the combination problem. Idealism faces the mirror problem: if there is only one universal consciousness, how does it split into many individuals who cannot directly access each other’s experience — the decombination problem. Kastrup answers it with the psychiatric notion of dissociation.

These two problems show clearly where each position’s costs fall. Physicalism has to explain where subjectivity comes from; panpsychism has to explain how tiny experiences add up to an “I”; idealism has to explain how one mind splits into many, and why physical laws are so stable that equations can describe them. No position comes free.

Figure 2 | Where consciousness sits in reality: the spectrum from physicalism to idealism, with the rough positions of Laszlo, Glattfelder and Kastrup, and under each position the main explanatory price it has to pay · Source: drawn by 一目半 (Yimuban)

The diversity of minds: how metaphysics rewrites “who has a mind”

For readers working where AI meets the life sciences, the most direct consequence of this debate is that it changes how the question “which systems count as minds” is posed.

At the empirical level, the boundary is expanding. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, released in April 2024, holds that for all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including at least cephalopods, decapod crustaceans and insects, there is “at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience” (Quanta report[23]). At a more basic level, Michael Levin’s TAME framework treats cognitive capacity as continuous rather than binary, and regards morphogenesis as a form of “basal cognition” in cell collectives (Levin 2022, Front Syst Neurosci[24]). On the AI side, Butlin, Long and 17 co-authors in 2023 distilled “indicator properties” of consciousness from mainstream neuroscientific theories, concluding that no AI system at the time was conscious, but that there were no obvious technical barriers to building systems that satisfy the indicators (Butlin et al. 2023, arXiv[25]); an updated version of the method was later published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Butlin et al. 2025[26]).

Most of this work proceeds under the default assumption of physicalism or functionalism. Change the metaphysics and the shape of the question changes.

Under functionalism, the question is: does a system implement the kind of computation or functional organisation associated with consciousness? The criteria are structural and behavioural indicators; the answer is in principle independent of substrate, and AI can be conscious.

Under IIT, the question is: how much information does a system’s physical causal structure integrate? The criterion is causal structure, not behaviour. On Tononi and Koch’s account, purely feed-forward structures integrate zero information, so a conventional digital computer, even if it simulated a human perfectly in behaviour, might have almost no consciousness (Tononi & Koch 2015, Phil Trans B[27]).

Under panpsychism, experience is everywhere, and the question becomes: which combinations form a unified subject? That the molecules of a stone each have faint experiential properties does not mean the stone is a subject.

Under analytic idealism, the question flips again: consciousness is already everything, and what we must ask is which systems correspond to a dissociated, separate perspective. Kastrup’s abstract matches such alters with living beings; by that reasoning, whether a system becomes a subject depends on whether it has the kind of self-maintaining boundary living beings have, not on its computational power. This inference is mine, drawn from his framework, and is not a generalisation about all idealists.

In Laszlo’s system, everything that exists is an expression of the same universal consciousness, and differences between minds are differences of degree and coherence. As his publisher summarises it, he held that consciousness manifests in living beings in order to keep evolving.

Position	What it asks in judging “who has a mind”	Typical stance on AI
Functionalism	Does it implement the computation or functional organisation associated with consciousness?	Possible in principle
Integrated information theory	How much information does its physical causal structure integrate? (structure, not behaviour)	Conventional digital computers may have almost none
Panpsychism	Experience is everywhere; which combinations form a unified subject?	Depends on the theory of combination
Analytic idealism	Does it correspond to a dissociated perspective? (tied to the boundary of a living being)	Leans towards no (the author’s inference)
Laszlo	Expressions of one universal consciousness; differences of degree and coherence	Not explicitly discussed

Figure 3 | One question, five framings: the criteria different metaphysical positions use to judge "who has a mind", and their typical stance on AI systems · Source: compiled by 一目半 (Yimuban)

This comparison has an easily overlooked implication: many disagreements about whether AI is conscious are not disagreements about evidence but about criteria. When two people look at the same behavioural data and reach opposite conclusions, it is often because they are assuming different metaphysics. Saying that premise out loud makes the discussion much clearer.

The strongest objection: how much can empirical science decide?

The most forceful objection to Laszlo and Glattfelder is not “they are wrong” but “questions of this kind cannot currently be decided by experiment, and their accounts sometimes read as if they had been”.

Start with the state of empirical science itself. In April 2025 the Cogitate Consortium published in Nature an adversarial test of IIT and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT), with 256 participants studied by fMRI, MEG and intracranial recordings. The results matched some of each theory’s predictions but posed substantial challenges to both theories’ core claims: the posterior cortex lacked the sustained synchronisation IIT predicts, and the “ignition” GNWT predicts at stimulus offset was generally absent (Cogitate Consortium 2025, Nature[28]). The same year, a group of researchers argued in Nature Neuroscience that IIT’s core claims are “untestable even in principle” and therefore unscientific (Klincewicz et al. 2025, Nat Neurosci[29]).

If even theories that make specific predictions about neural correlates are this hard to adjudicate, metaphysical positions on what reality is made of are still less likely to be settled by current experiments. Idealism and physicalism can each give a self-consistent reading of the same experimental data. This holds for both sides equally, and it means the case for idealism rests mainly on theoretical parsimony and on sidestepping the hard problem, not on new empirical findings.

Then there is a tension inside the argument. In chapter 13 Glattfelder cites Landauer: information is not an abstract entity detached from its carrier; it is always bound to some physical representation. In physics, the point of that statement is to pull information back into the physical world — whereas “only information exists” needs exactly a concept of information that does not depend on a physical carrier. Getting from “information is physical” to “the physical is informational” takes an extra step of philosophical argument that physics itself does not supply.

Laszlo’s problem is more direct: his Akashic field borrows the name of the quantum vacuum without accepting the constraints a physical theory should accept — giving computable quantities and predictions that could be refuted.

To be fair, the objection has its own objection. Physicalism hasn’t solved the hard problem either; 62% of philosophers accept that the problem exists. Pointing out that idealism lacks experimental support does not prove physicalism. Physicalism’s methodological advantage is real: it requires every claim to connect ultimately to measurable quantities, which makes it extremely effective in scientific practice. But methodological success and ontological correctness are two different things.

The contest between metaphysical positions is currently decided not by experiment but by the explanatory price each is willing to pay: physicalism has to explain where subjectivity comes from; idealism has to explain why matter is so well behaved.

Conclusion, and questions still open

Back to the opening question. Laszlo and Glattfelder represent two routes to “consciousness first”. Laszlo set out from systems philosophy, ended by linking a hypothetical information field with the Akasha of Eastern thought, and built claims about the survival of consciousness on top of it; his holism has value, while his claims at the level of physics and parapsychology lack empirical support. Glattfelder set out from complex systems and the physics of information, first proposed that “information has an outer and an inner side”, then turned to explicit idealism in 2025; his argument is more restrained, but the leap from “information is physical” to “only information exists” still depends on philosophical premises outside physics.

Neither has shown that consciousness is the ground of reality, and physicalism has not shown the opposite. The safer judgment is that this is a question currently decided by theoretical costs rather than experimental data — and that the choice directly changes how we judge whether animals, cell collectives and AI systems have minds.

This survey has some limitations that should be stated.

First, my summary of Glattfelder’s 2019 book is based on the open-access chapter texts and abstracts; what I know of the 2025 book comes mainly from publication information and his articles from the same period, and I could not check the new book chapter by chapter.

Second, Laszlo wrote a great many books; I have chosen only the few directly concerned with consciousness and reality, and have not covered his work on global governance and the evolution of civilisation.

Third, I have simplified the metaphysical positions into a single spectrum; the real map is more complicated — neutral monism, Russellian monism and the many variants of dualism, for example, are not developed here.

Key points

The hard problem has not been dissolved by any mainstream theory; in the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, physicalism is the majority view (about 52%) but far from a consensus.
Laszlo’s holism is compatible with systems theory, but claims such as “the quantum vacuum stores cosmic memory” and the survival of consciousness lack a testable physical formulation; Glattfelder moved from “information has an outer and an inner side” to explicit idealism, with a more restrained argument that nonetheless depends on philosophical premises outside physics.
Metaphysical positions set the criteria for “who has a mind”: functionalism looks at functional organisation, IIT at causal structure, panpsychism asks about combination, idealism about dissociation; many disagreements about AI consciousness are at bottom disputes over criteria.

At least two questions remain open. First, is there a class of experiments for which physicalism and idealism would make different predictions? If not, is the difference between them just two ways of describing the same empirical content? Second, as we build artificial systems that look more and more like living beings — systems with self-maintaining boundaries and metabolism-like processes, say — will the judgments of the different positions converge, or diverge further? The second question may need an answer sooner than the first.