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（即具有某种体验感受的状态）似乎既丰富充实、充满细节，又难以完整描述或回忆。尤其是不可言说性问题，是哲学中长期存在的难题，部分构成了解释鸿沟的动机：即认为意识无法还原为底层物理过程的信念。在此，我们从信息论与动力系统视角探讨意识的丰富性与不可言说性。在我们的框架中，意识体验的丰富性对应意识状态所包含的信息量，而不可言说性则对应信息在不同处理阶段丢失的量。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化回忆，语言离散符号化特性如何不足以描述体验的丰富高维结构，以及两个个体认知功能的相似性如何影响其彼此体验的可沟通性。尽管我们的模型未必能解决与解释鸿沟相关的所有问题，但它朝着对意识体验丰富性与不可言说性（这两个重要方面似乎构成了定性特征令人困惑的核心要素）做出完全物理主义解释的方向迈出了进展。