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（即存在某种“感受性”的状态）既显得丰富而充满细节，又难以完全描述或回忆——这种不可言说性尤为棘手，是哲学中长期悬而未决的问题，部分驱动了解释鸿沟的信念：即意识无法还原为底层物理过程。本文从信息论与动力系统视角出发，探讨意识丰富性与不可言说性的本质。在我们提出的框架中，意识体验的丰富性对应于意识状态包含的信息量，而不可言说性则对应于不同处理阶段损失的信息量。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，语言离散符号特性何以不足以描述体验的高维丰富结构，以及两位个体认知功能相似性如何影响彼此体验的可交流性。尽管该模型未必能彻底解决与解释鸿沟相关的所有问题，但它朝着对意识体验之丰富性与不可言说性（这两个看似构成质性特征谜题核心要素的重要方面）提供完全物理主义解释的方向迈进了重要一步。