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.
No current AI systems are conscious, but there are no obvious technical barriers to building ones that might be, according to an analysis grounded in neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The report surveys prominent theories—recurrent processing, global workspace, higher-order, predictive processing, and attention schema—and derives computational indicator properties from them. Applying these indicators to recent AI systems yields no evidence of consciousness, but the authors argue that future systems could potentially implement the necessary properties.