The Number of the Soul

Following the claim in Fides et Ratio that »[m]etaphysics … plays an essential role of meditation in theological research« (John Paul II 1998), I examine how the neuroscientists Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) challenges a physicalist view on consciousness and even life. I discuss IIT in relation to the mathematician Norbert Wiener's Augustinian view on the organism as a message and to the German cybernetician Gotthard Günther's Paulinian understanding of life and consciousness. By examining what these 'secular theologies' imply for the understanding of life and relating them to Davide Tarizzo and Ivan Illich's discussion on the transformation of the concept of life during modernity, I claim that IIT points to the possibility of a theology of being.