How entropy and equilibrium can help explain consciousness

WHAT is consciousness? That is arguably the largest remaining thriller of the human mind. No marvel it is named “the hard problem”. We are able to’t even agree whether or not consciousness is one factor or quite a lot of completely different states. Nevertheless, new methods of exploring that query shed some intriguing mild on this most elusive of ideas.

Although we use language like “dropping consciousness” for fainting or falling asleep, researchers have lengthy understood that consciousness is extra difficult than simply flipping a metaphorical change from “on” to “off”. Nevertheless, there’s nonetheless a lot debate over whether or not it’s a single phenomenon with many steady shades, which you may image as a dimmer change, or a group of discrete states, like separate television channels.

Fascinated by consciousness from the angle of a physicist could assist resolve the query. That’s as a result of the mind always shifts between states outlined by patterns {of electrical} alerts, and physicists have metrics for analyzing such busy, ever-changing programs. In 2014, Robin Carhart-Harris on the College 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 number of completely different microscopic configurations (similar to preparations of water molecules in a glass) there are in a given macroscopic property (similar to the amount of that tumbler). The researchers proposed that mind states with better entropy, as measured…