Resonant closure: consciousness as a dynamically self-stabilized informational state.
Frontiers in human neuroscience January 1, 2026 Borros Arneth
Subjective experience arises when a system's internal predictions and sensory inputs become recursively coupled, minimizing entropy exchange with the environment while maintaining high internal informational dynamics. This metastable condition, termed dynamic entropic closure, produces a self-referential, phase-coherent pattern that constitutes awareness. The framework builds on predictive processing and the Free Energy Principle, offering operational constraints and falsifiable predictions for neurophysiology, and is compatible with but distinct from Integrated Information Theory and global-workspace accounts.