Schetselaar, Daan
(2025)
Consciousness as the dissipation of information.
[Preprint]
Abstract
Despite its growing appeal for the study of consciousness, the notion of entropy has yet to lead to widely supported new insights about the nature of phenomenal experience. Typically, entropy measures of brain activity are found to correlate with cognitive functions that are assumed to index consciousness. Taking a very different approach, this theoretical framework does not conflate consciousness with any function. It presents a series of premises to argue that consciousness is fundamentally characterized as inactionable perception, i.e. that does not give rise to macrophysical action. This is then fitted in a framework of perception and action as informational changes in a dynamical neural state space. In this model, inactionable perception naturally arises as the prediction-driven increase of concept-related entropy. This entails an increase of (Shannon) information while its efficacy to produce macrophysical effects decreases, which is here referred to as information dissipation, analogously to energy dissipation in thermodynamic systems. It results from inefficient sensorimotor coupling with the environment, which occurs when behavior is not fixed relative to the stimulus. Despite the posited inefficacy of conscious perception, it consists of action-specific information and can therefore be interpreted as potential behavior.
Starting from fundamental properties, this framework may provide a new and coherent conceptual basis for a fuller understanding of what consciousness is and how it relates to the physical world. Although many of its implications remain to be explored, it appears consistent with empirical findings, and prompts subtle reinterpretations of some classical results in perception research.
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[img]](https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/text.png)
![[feed]](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}