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：意识状态（即主体在其中具有某种感受的状态）似乎既丰富或充满细节，又难以言说或难以完全描述或回忆。尤其是不可言说性问题，是哲学中一个长期存在的难题，部分原因在于它激发了解释鸿沟：即认为意识不能还原为潜在物理过程的信念。在此，我们提供了关于意识丰富性和不可言说性的信息论动力学系统视角。在我们的框架中，意识体验的丰富性对应于意识状态中的信息量，而不可言说性则对应于不同处理阶段丢失的信息量。我们描述了工作记忆中的吸引子动力学如何导致对原始体验的贫乏回忆，语言的离散符号性质如何不足以描述体验的丰富且高维结构，以及两个个体认知功能上的相似性如何与他们之间体验可交流性的提升相关联。尽管我们的模型可能无法解决与解释鸿沟相关的所有问题，但它朝着对意识体验的丰富性和不可言说性——这两个似乎是导致定性特征如此令人困惑的重要方面——进行完全物理主义解释的方向取得了进展。