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“感受质”的状态）似乎既丰富、充满细节，又难以言说、难以完全描述或回忆。其中，不可言说性的问题是一个长期存在的哲学难题，部分原因在于它激发了“解释鸿沟”——即认为意识无法还原为底层物理过程的信念。本文从信息论与动力系统的视角出发，探讨意识的丰富性与不可言说性。在我们的框架中，意识经验的丰富性对应意识状态中蕴含的信息量，而不可言说性则对应信息在处理的不同阶段所损失的量。我们描述了工作记忆中的吸引子动力学如何导致原始经验的贫乏回忆，语言离散符号化的本质如何不足以描述经验丰富且高维的结构，以及两个个体认知功能的相似性如何促进彼此经验的可沟通性。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，但它朝着对意识经验丰富性与不可言说性的完全物理主义解释迈出了进展：这两个重要方面似乎正是使“质性特征”如此令人困惑的部分原因。