For this psychophysical framework, I have a couple of very speculative ideas about this involving aspects of information. The idea is that information may have a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect. Information is embodied physically in the brain in such and such a way, but at the same time, it has an experiential, or phenomenal side. Information has this double-sided nature and our conscious lives are in a sense the mental side of this information which is also embodied physically. And maybe we can take that very speculative principle and develop it into a systematic simple framework which will then be a fundamental psychophysical theory. On the other hand that may be completely wrong. We may need to go in another direction completely. I think there is nevertheless a research program there and one of the things I'm going to be interested to see over the next few decades, century, whatever, is whether this hope for a fundamental theory might eventually pan out.

SJ: Do you think this dual aspect to information is going to require a new physics?

DC: One doesn't necessarily need to bring in new physics to explain the physical side of information. It's something that's there, it's the product of the mass, the charges and the forces that are out there already. And so we take that information that is already implicit within physical theory and then we add this extra component - the phenomenal component - and we say: "Hey, If I bring in the hypothesis that information has this two sided nature..." that may then give us what we need to then bring consciousness into our picture of the natural world.