Consciousness may be a form of neural information—specifically, information encoded in the spatiotemporal patterns of electrochemical signaling within certain neural circuits. This hypothesis is derived by analyzing the essential properties of consciousness and evaluating candidate non-material entities in the brain, such as electrical fields, magnetic fields, electromagnetic waves, and neural information. Neural information most parsimoniously meets the required criteria without invoking new forces or physical laws. The hypothesis generates empirically verifiable predictions, making it falsifiable. It also proposes neural mechanisms for how some information manifests phenomenally as consciousness and why this occurs only from a first-person perspective. The framework is grounded entirely in established neuroscience.
Qualia and consciousness are not inert but influence neural and behavioral events through a non-mechanistic, information-based causal role. Events before or concurrent with the emergence of a pain quale are unaffected by it, while activities that explicitly involve phenomenal content—such as experiencing or reporting the quale—are influenced by its occurrence and character. This influence does not rely on particle-force interactions but operates as higher-level factors in stable, constitutive counterfactual relations to downstream effects. Qualia provide phenomenal information necessary for initiating and structuring neural causal chains and determining output content, though they require intact neural circuits to implement mechanistic processing. Thus, qualia and consciousness are causally efficacious in a restricted, information-based sense.