Taming the Brute Fact: A Falsifiable Resolution to the Hard Problem and the Explanatory Gap
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Tyler, Steven
Consciousness, or the subjective experience of 'what it is like,' may arise from the brain's metabolic registration of thermodynamic state transitions. A proposed framework suggests that the sense of self is a late-arriving, post-hoc narrator, created by a 300–500 millisecond delay in neural processing. This process generates measurable 'friction signatures' as the brain recursively audits a constructed self. A theoretical index quantifies this at approximately 36.2 bits, based on the brain's energy budget and Landauer's principle. The Venus flytrap's simple threshold integration shows similar scaling from minimal energy levels to human cognition. Anesthetic agents that block this integration across species support the idea that awareness requires a specific mechanical, dissipative process, offering a pathway to measure aspects of consciousness.