Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, the richness of conscious experience corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state and ineffability corresponds to the amount of information lost at different stages of processing. We describe how attractor dynamics in working memory would induce impoverished recollections of our original experiences, how the discrete symbolic nature of language is insufficient for describing the rich and high-dimensional structure of experiences, and how similarity in the cognitive function of two individuals relates to improved communicability of their experiences to each other. While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation of the richness and ineffability of conscious experience: two important aspects that seem to be part of what makes qualitative character so puzzling.
翻译:感知状态(指出它似乎处于某种状态)似乎既丰富又充分的细节,并且无法或难以充分描述或回顾。不起作用的问题尤其是一个长期的哲学问题,其部分原因就是解释性差距:认为意识不能缩减为基本物理过程;在这里,我们提供了关于意识丰富和不起作用的信息理论动态系统观点;在我们的框架内,意识丰富的经验与意识状态和不起作用的信息数量相对应,与在不同处理阶段丢失的信息数量相对应。我们描述了工作记忆中的吸引力动态如何导致我们原始经验的贫乏回忆,语言的离散象征性质如何不足以描述丰富和高维度的经验结构,以及两个个人的认知功能与改善他们的经历相互之间沟通的相似性。虽然我们的模型可能没有解决与解释性差距有关的所有问题,但它在充分实际解释意识经历的丰富性和不准确性方面有所进展:两个重要方面似乎是定性特征的一部分。</s>