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.

通过信息论动力系统的视角看待意识的复杂性和难以言表性，阐述工作记忆中的吸引子动力学如何导致我们原始体验的贫瘠回忆，语言的不足和两个人的认知功能相似性如何提高沟通能力，从而解释思维定势，使得我们对定性特征是什么产生了疑惑。