Daan Schetselaar

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, but what mechanism underlies this relation is not clear. This paper offers an explanation based on an operationalization of consciousness as inactionable perception, which is derived from its conventional properties. To see how consciousness, as such conceived, might indeed arise from brain activity, it is fitted in a unified framework of perception and action defined 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 not all perceptual information is used for action. The contents of consciousness then can 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.

It is a common opinion among academics that the study of consciousness is making progress. As we learn more about associated neurocognitive functions, we are expected to eventually understand the internal aspect of our existence. This view dismisses persistent arguments that experience cannot be reduced to objective knowledge. Here I argue that although such a claim may be impossible to prove, it should nevertheless be assumed to be true. To make real progress, we have to face up to subjectivity.