Sources of richness and ineffability for phenomenally conscious states.
Neuroscience of consciousness January 1, 2024 Xu Ji, Eric Elmoznino, George Deane et al. 13 citations
Conscious experiences feel rich and hard to fully describe or recall, a puzzle that partly motivates the explanatory gap—the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical processes. This work offers an information-theoretic dynamical systems framework: richness corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state, and ineffability to information lost during processing. Attractor dynamics in working memory cause impoverished recollections, language's discrete symbolic nature cannot capture high-dimensional experiential structure, and similar cognitive function between individuals improves communicability. The model advances a physicalist explanation of these puzzling aspects, though it may not settle all questions about the explanatory gap.