Information Theory and Consciousness

Abstract

• Consciousness is a subjectively experienced phenomenon that cannot be doubted, as Descartes famously observed. As such, while it may admit gradations, it is experienced as an all-or-none phenomenon, that is, one is either conscious or not. • It has different aspects, from a sense of awareness to the qualitative aspects of feelings and of the sensations that give rise to feelings and to the sense of selfhood, identifying the self as an integrated system distinct from the rest of the world. • It is correlated with neurophysiological dynamics and depends on neuroanatomical structures (see, for instance, [1]), although much has been argued about the underlying causality. Neuroscience has identified some of these dynamics and structures, although the answers at present are not yet conclusive. It is not simply a question of numbers of neurons, as some parts of the brain, such as the cerebellum, apparently do not play an essential role for consciousness. Some curious phenomena have been observed in split-brain patients where for medical reasons, the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres of the brain has been cut. It seems that in such patients, the two halves of the brain are separately conscious, even though only the left hemisphere can express itself verbally. • Human consciousness seems to depend on language and on a social context. Humans who have been brought up in complete isolation cannot learn to speak normally and may only have some rudimentary form of consciousness, if at all.