How entropy and equilibrium can help explain consciousness

WHAT is consciousness? That’s arguably the most important remaining thriller of the human thoughts. No marvel it’s named “the hard problem”. We’re in a position to’t even agree whether or not or not consciousness is one issue or various fully totally different states. Nonetheless, new strategies of exploring that question shed some intriguing gentle on this most elusive of concepts.

Though we use language like “dropping consciousness” for fainting or falling asleep, researchers have prolonged understood that consciousness is further troublesome than merely flipping a metaphorical change from “on” to “off”. Nonetheless, there’s nonetheless lots debate over whether or not or not it’s a single phenomenon with many regular shades, which you will picture as a dimmer change, or a bunch of discrete states, like separate television channels.

Fascinated by consciousness from the angle of a physicist may help resolve the question. That’s on account of the thoughts at all times shifts between states outlined by patterns {{of electrical}} alerts, and physicists have metrics for analyzing such busy, ever-changing packages. In 2014, Robin Carhart-Harris on the School of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues hypothesised that entropy may be a particularly useful one.

Entropy describes how disordered a system is. One measure of entropy is what variety of fully totally different microscopic configurations (much like preparations of water molecules in a glass) there are in a given macroscopic property (much like the quantity of that tumbler). The researchers proposed that thoughts states with higher entropy, as measured…