From synergy to redundancy: An information-relation account of consciousness
Andrés Canales-Johnson, Daniel Rebbin, Borjan Milinkovic, Robin A A Ince, Martin Vinck
PsyArXiv September 4, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/cz4bw_v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | The authors argue that information relations among neural representations—synergy and redundancy—can connect theories of consciousness by linking irreducibility, recurrence, and global availability. They propose that conscious contents are constructed through synergy-dominant interactions and stabilized through redundancy-dominant representations, with contributions from aperiodic and oscillatory activity, framing conscious content as a dynamically organized information structure. |
Abstract
Research on the neural basis of consciousness has largely focused either on where and when neural activity represents conscious contents, or on the interactions through which distributed neural populations become integrated. We argue that these approaches can be connected by analysing information relations among neural representations. A perceptual content can be synergistic when it is carried by the joint state of multiple neural sources, or redundant when overlapping information about that content is shared across sources. We propose that these information-relations provide a common language for major theories of consciousness, linking irreducibility, recurrence, and global availability. Recent evidence suggests that conscious contents may be constructed through synergy-dominant interactions and subsequently stabilized through redundancy-dominant representations, with specific contributions by aperiodic and oscillatory activity. Together, this account reframes conscious content as a dynamically organized information structure, in which synergistic interactions construct nonseparable representations, and redundancy makes those representations stably shared across the system, thereby providing a common framework and an information-theoretical axis for relating major theories of consciousness.