The Singularity Within: How the language of information reveals the hidden hand of consciousness.

You are standing just outside a black hole. If only you could reach out and grasp the unobservable singularity, you might resolve the deepest tensions that have plagued our best physical descriptions of the universe.

You can't see past the event horizon, but you can still observe how its mass warps and contorts the space around it. Stars and gas spiral inwards. Jets of gamma radiation are ejected from its edges. Strange gravitational ripples emanate out into the surrounding cosmos. It's still possible to describe the black hole, not by traveling into its core, but by noticing its influence on the space in which it is embedded.

Within all of us, a similar anomaly exists. We each possess our own inner cosmos of intentions, feelings, and beliefs. From the outside, however, we cannot access this subjective world — the mind — with our observational tools.

These features that define the mind: experiencing a world drenched in beauty, feeling a lover's embrace after prolonged distance, or the aching chasm left behind by grief, sidestep our attempts at direct physical measurement. When we look for mental qualities in their suspected places, all we see are electrical signals, blood, and tissue.

Pinning down our experiences with the tools of science is not unlike looking up at the night sky and seeing a glistening star in our peripheral vision. But when we shift our eyes towards the space it resides in, it promptly disappears. We know we possess experience, we just can't capture it.

But just as we infer the black hole's hidden singularity through its gravity-distorting effects, we might also come to know the hidden mind via its effect on the physical world — through ripples captured by the language of information.

Entropy and consciousness

During the Second World War, a young American mathematician named Claude Shannon was developing a new informational language. Working out of Bell Labs in New Jersey, Shannon wanted to determine the most efficient way to send signals across crackly transatlantic telephone lines.

Shannon's ideas would set the theoretical foundations for the telecommunication networks that sprawl across the surface of our planet. He could not have foreseen that over half a century later, his notion of informational entropy would go on to shape the scientific investigation of nature's most enigmatic phenomena.

His formula for entropy described how to mathematically capture the uncertainty, or what he called the 'surprise' of a random variable in any given set of signals. The more seemingly chaotic or unpredictable a body of data, the higher its Shannon entropy. A highly entropic signal, therefore, can carry a lot of information, but is much harder to compress or interpret.

Consider a simple coin toss. In a normal state of affairs, the expected outcome is either heads or tails — either of these results are not very 'surprising'. But now imagine the coin lands perfectly on its side. This outcome is highly unexpected and is therefore more entropic in the Shannon sense. It carries more informational 'surprise'.

Though fundamentally related, Shannon's informational entropy subtly differs from the thermodynamic entropy described by physics. The former measures the uncertainty of information. The latter describes the relentless march of physical systems towards energetic equilibrium — a tendency which gives the universe its appearance of directionality. For this essay, is it entropy in the Shannon sense that matters.

After the publication of his ideas in 1948, neuroscientists soon realized that they could retrofit this abstract notion of information into the hot, wet circuitry of cognition. Seeing the brain as a passive information-processing system, researchers like Horace Barlow would use Shannon's formula for entropy to help decode the informational carrying capacity of single neurons, and to help untangle how neural circuits process sense data efficiently.

Applied at whole-brain scales, heightened levels of neural entropy can be thought of as an unforeseen tropical thunderstorm rolling through the brain — surges of electrical activity, rivers of oxygenated blood, flash floods of neurotransmitters. Whereas when the forecast is predictable and steady, the brain has low entropy. Specifically, Shannon entropy gives neuroscientists a way to measure the informational turbulence of the brain.

In the 1990s, Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman would carry Shannon entropy into the dense thicket of subjective experience. They suggested that the more richly entangled a system is — 'above and beyond the information generated by its parts,' Tononi explained — the more conscious that system is.

Equipped with a new wave of neural data from groundbreaking brain imaging technologies like EEG and fMRI, Tononi and Edelman would combine Shannon entropy and a measure of causal integration to define phi — a quantitative metric for consciousness. For Integrated Information Theory (IIT), consciousness pokes its head out somewhere in the swirling eddies between integrated order and entropic chaos. Consciousness thereby shifted from something debated by philosophers and spiritual leaders to something measured by neuroscientists.

In recent years, neuroscientist and psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris has also applied an entropic lens to the brain in an effort to relate neural activity to conscious experience. The 'Entropic Brain Hypothesis' (EBH) is based on the observation that different 'levels' or 'states' of consciousness correspond with different entropic measures of neural activity.

Imagine a spectrum of conscious awareness, from anesthetic-induced coma where we are completely unresponsive, through deep sleep, dreaming, normal wakefulness, and finally to the altered states we experience under the influence of psychoactive drugs. As we move up the scale, levels of neural entropy increase. For Carhart-Harris, the richness of conscious states is reflected by heightened levels of neural entropy in the brain.

Today, IIT and EBH are two of many neuroscientific accounts of consciousness. Yet despite their important role in breaking the taboo surrounding the serious scientific study of consciousness as a phenomenon, they both share a much deeper issue with many other modern descriptions of the mind: Namely, the tendency to equate first-person subjective experience with physical brain states. While both theories describe large-scale features of neural activity that are associated with conscious experience, neither account makes explicit why consciousness should be associated with the brain at all.

In what has now become a bedrock definition for consciousness, philosopher Thomas Nagel described it, at its most basic level, as 'what-it-is-like' to be. Here, this constellation of terms — consciousness, mind, experience — collectively refer to the quality of having a unified, internal, lived perspective. And when contemporary theories of consciousness reduce the mind to neural correlates or pure physical description, they circumvent the very thing that makes consciousness unique — experience itself.

For now, it's not obvious how phenomenological and physical levels of description — what love feels like versus how love is represented in the brain — could be married with current approaches for understanding the mind.

A new framework, however, is taking shape, one that honors the observational mystery of how we feel, while giving a scientifically approachable account of how our experiences causally relate to the physical facts of our brain and body. Instead of suggesting that Shannon entropy, this informational description of rich neural activity, is consciousness, we might ask whether it could be a sign of consciousness.

Shannon entropy applied to the brain may be an indication that consciousness is having a physical effect.

When the mind irrupts

We are only just beginning to sketch the full range of forces that determine the brain's behavior. There is still a lot we don't know, and a good chunk of the brain's unpredictability comes down to the brute fact of our ignorance. Our methods of measurement capture very little. The brain's chaotic dynamics, the fluctuating firing of neurons and networks, also means the system has some foundational level of uncertainty, or 'noise', in its functioning.

But what if, beyond the sporadic chatter of neurons, the brain appeared to flexibly drive up its unpredictability and variance? And what if this informational turbulence, hinted at through Shannon entropy, intensifies when we call on the very thing we can't seem to capture through physical description and measurement?

Through experimentation, several cognition research groups have been asking nature an important question — under what contexts does this neural weather surge in the brain? Consider, for instance, what it feels like when you are reaching for a moment of clarity, when an answer hovers around the periphery of awareness refusing to take form. An acquaintance's name forgotten, a distant melody, a pattern partially discerned. The mind, sensing the gap, stirs with possibility.

It is in these moments of searching before an answer is reached where we see something truly remarkable happen. Neural entropy swells. The brain suddenly tends towards variability and exploration, and away from expectation. Entropic brain states spike when we are faced with uncertainty, when we have a pressing problem to solve, or when we summon creativity. What ties these contexts together? The brain becomes more unpredictable when we focus, reflect, strive, and imagine — when we exercise conscious effort.

Because neural entropy measures the unpredictability of brain activity, when entropy surges it may indicate that something additional — an unknown source beyond our horizon — is having an effect on the behavior of the system. In this sense, it is as if we are tossing a coin over and over, except the coin continually lands on its edge. When an unexpected outcome starts to happen regularly, we might begin to suspect the presence of an external mediating force.

But instead of a coin showing unexpected behavior, in this case, it is the brain. Waves of neural entropy that temporally align with conscious effort, the equivalent of the coin landing on its side more often than chance should permit, might not just be a simple readout of the brain's chaotic dynamics, but a physical signature of the mind: A clue that consciousness is influencing the material substrates of our body, like a hidden magnet skewing the outcome of the coin toss.

This possibility has sparked to life a new perspective on consciousness. Irruption Theory, developed by Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), interprets these neural entropy spikes as the downstream ripples of the conscious mind interacting with the physical brain. He calls these bursts irruptions, derived from the latin irrumpere, which is to break, burst, force, or rush into.

Measurable surges of neural entropy that coincide with conscious volition, viewed through the lens of Irruption Theory, are evidence that consciousness has causal power in relation to the brain, and therefore behavior. While a framework like EBH positions levels of consciousness as synonymous with entropic measures of neural activity, Irruption Theory situates consciousness as a distinct, unseen force that can drive change and alter our physical bodies.

Consider for a moment that something quite radical is being said here. For Irruption Theory, the brain is a fundamentally non-deterministic system. Even in principle, with every physical variable accounted for, we would still be unable to predict the behavior of neural activity because of the unaccounted for influence of mental phenomena. If irruptions are an indication of the interference of something unobservable — a ripple of the conscious mind wading through the physical brain — then they offer more than just a clue as to the presence of a conscious, efficacious mind. They offer us a way in.

Just as we might come to know the wind through the swaying of the tree's branches, or the black hole through its gravitational distortions, in the same way, we may also come to trace the contours of consciousness via its effects on the physical world. And so we find ourselves drawn back to a puzzle that has haunted Western thought for four centuries — how do the physical and mental aspects of our being interact? Shannon's informational language of entropy may have unwittingly opened a new door into Descartes' age-old mind-body problem.

As modern neuroscientific approaches are gesturing us towards this interface, they are forcing us to reassess the assumptions that have shaped philosophical and scientific discussions of consciousness. Away from what it is, and towards what it does.

Consciousness as causal

The dogma that has not so quietly settled beneath the surface of modern neuroscience is that our conscious experiences are either equivalent to, or are an emergent property of, complex neurophysiological systems. "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions… are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells," famed geneticist turned neuroscientist, Francis Crick declared in his 1994 book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul."

This conventional wisdom exists for good reason. We know from a great body of experiments, surgeries, and unfortunate accidents, that when the brain is irrevocably damaged, the effects reverberate through our mental lives. We can also temporarily shift how we mentally represent the world by consuming drugs that alter our neurochemistry. What goes on in the brain, it seems, sets the stage for what is possible in the mind.

But what's important here is the assumed directionality of this causal relationship. When things change at the base physical substrate level of the brain, only then do the artifacts bubble up to the surface of experience. There is little, if not any account, however, for the inverse flow of information. Namely, how does consciousness itself exert a causative effect on the dynamic behavior of physical brain states, and more broadly, our bodies as a whole?

This pervasive view, that consciousness is secondary to the brain, and merely along for the ride, is seductive because it fits neatly within a physicalist, reductive view of reality. But if it is true that our experience is just a passive accompaniment to what's going on under the hood, with the mind being related to the body as a 'bell of a clock to the works', as pioneering biologist Thomas H. Huxley wrote, then we paint a strange picture of ourselves as haunted machines.

Noticing this discrepancy in how we position consciousness in relation to biology, influential philosopher of mind David Chalmers asked — why doesn't nature engineer mindless zombies? If it is only the physical brain, and not consciousness, that makes a difference when it comes to behavior, we might as well be blind to the world, operating as mindless automata, with nobody at home to think, feel, and experience. The mystery is not only that the physical brain gives rise to mental content, but why it should ever need to.

The existence of consciousness from an evolutionary standpoint, however, hints that our experiences have some role to play when it comes to how we navigate the world. We know, for instance, that the human brain has evolved within extremely tight energetic bounds, and yet it devotes large portions of metabolic resources towards our subjective capacities for mental time travel, perception, and focused attention.

And still, many great thinkers have positioned subjectivity as something of an epiphenomenal afterthought — a convenient illusion that gives us the impression our experiences causatively matter. It seems strange, however, that evolution, an optimization process geared towards self-persistence and reproduction, would generate an expensive, sophisticated phenomenon that has no effect on our behavior.

Why build an inner cosmos if the windows are shut? Another possibility is that they are open. The mind may be more than just a projection. Perhaps, sometimes, it can lean forward and touch the glass.

The adaptive mind

Irruption Theory, in the words of Froese, does not solve the hard problem of consciousness — this seemingly intractable chasm between physics and phenomenology. It does, however, take the existence of conscious experience and the physical world at face value, without collapsing one into the other as past metaphysical traditions historically have.

But perhaps most intriguingly, the implications of Irruption Theory make a compelling case for why living systems evolved to be conscious in the first place.

It's one thing to say that the mind introduces non-deterministic activity into the brain, but this spontaneous variability must also be adaptive. Randomness, after all, isn't always helpful. Someone constantly exploring a space of possibilities is just as likely to walk off a cliff as they are to find something new and useful.

The adaptive role of the mind, the foundation for why we do not resemble Chalmers' philosophical zombies, is to introduce variability and novelty into the system at critical moments. When we encounter a truly unique context — attempting to play an instrument for the first time, trying to solve a social grievance in a foreign country, or when discerning a mysterious new feature of the world — we observe a literal brainstorm. The brain as a whole becomes more chaotic, reflecting the injection of exploratory variance and potential solution pathways into its behavior.

The mind isn't there to override the deterministic processes that underpin a number of important neural functions, but instead exists to expand and enrich them. It cares less about where we have been, and more with what we need to do here and now. It is the concurrent timing of neural entropy bursts with moments of heightened mental effort that render them adaptive, and distinct from the noisy hum of the brain's background hive of activity.

In her inspired book, 'Life as No One Knows It', physicist and astrobiologist Sara Walker makes a similar case for the mind's role, arguing that it acts to expand the space of counterfactual states a system can represent and respond to. The more possible futures an agent can conjure, the more adaptive leverage it has when navigating an open, uncertain landscape. Entropy spikes observed during conscious volition may mark this very unraveling of possibility in the brain.

This pattern echoes something fundamental about what it means to be a living organism. Life's problem solving capacities are often defined by the ability to generate multiple solution trajectories, which are then filtered and constrained by context — our sensory input, memory, and embodied state. This closely mirrors influential psychologist William James' broad description of intelligence: "a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it."

The mind is like an invisible, creative chess player. When it's the mind's move, we see the pieces shift in new, unpredictable ways across the board. The space of possible moves, however, are still constrained by the rules of the game (physical laws) and layout of the board (biological architecture).

As living systems, we embody a kind of superposition. We rely on the structures of which we are built, our physical bodies, and we can only build those structures through a process of remembering — of drawing on what came before us. But we also need to be flexible and malleable. Our survival depends on being responsive to an environment in a constant state of flux. We cannot be completely beholden to the past. This is where the negotiation between the mental and physical aspects of our being is played out — flexibility and structure, openness and closure, variance and resolution, memory and change.

Quietly, the tools of cognitive and behavioral science have been revealing a world rich in minds. Basic features of cognition we would usually consider to be necessary for conscious experience are now being meaningfully extended to living systems we once considered to be more like mindless machines than mind-bearing entities: slime molds, plants, and single-celled organisms. This extended search for the signatures of mind in unconventional entities has even inspired researchers to probe for forms of cognition in basic chemical systems. In the hope, perhaps, that we might come to better understand the origin of life by understanding the origin of minds.

From this new perspective, it increasingly appears as though the primordial seeds of mind arose as additional problem-solving mechanisms with the first living systems. We can see these examples in the minimal forms of cognition and awareness — learning, memory, and decision making — in self-preservational chemical systems that straddle the blurry life non-life divide. Throughout deep evolutionary time, these extended behavioral capacities would scale-up, and become interwoven into the fabric of life itself as consciousness.

Rather than consciousness emerging at some arbitrary point of sufficient complexity during life's evolutionary history, the rich inner worlds we experience can instead be thought of as resulting from a gradual elaboration on more ancient, precursory forms of cognition. Consciousness, it seems, is looking to declare itself where it can, in those entities that fight the good fight against the tendency of things in the universe to turn to dust.

By seeing the mind for what it does, rather than what it is, our private perspective on the world starts to look less like a contradiction we can't square with the physical and chemical laws of the universe, and more like the blossoming of a process that exists at the deepest levels of nature. When we take seriously the idea that having a mind has an effect on the physical world we can not only identify the suspect by its fingerprints, but we can also begin to construct a more plausible story regarding the origin of minds and consciousness on our planet.

Where might other minds exist?

Discovering kernels of mental qualities in entities without biological brains has sparked a rich, new search for minds in unconventional substrates. Among these possibilities, and perhaps the most pressing given their ubiquitous use across the globe, is the question of consciousness in artificially intelligent (AI) systems — a question that is complicated by the fact that they do not share our biological form.

Speculation regarding the potential for AI entities to possess any form of meaningful experience has often overlooked key insights that the embodied perspective has taught us about the nature of mind and consciousness. We often hear that 'scaling' current AI methods will lead to a generalised form of AI that closely resembles, or is equivalent to, human intelligence. In this scenario, it is thought increasing the raw computational power of these systems will lead to something like the genuine embodied intelligence of a living, breathing human being.

This picture, however, might be overlooking the important relationship between minds and bodies in biological organisms. For humans, the specific body we have shapes and constrains our mental experience of the world. Our physical brain sets the scope of our cognitive capacities, our senses determine which slices of reality we can access, and our embodiment determines how we can move through, intervene in, and manipulate the world around us. The way we carve up the world in our heads is largely defined by our embodied interaction with it.

Crucially, AI systems are composed of a completely different physical substrate than biological organisms. But perhaps more importantly, they lack a physical body through which they can move, tinker with, and disrupt the world around them. They are therefore categorically excluded, some thinkers believe, from building the type of meaning-laden intuitive intelligence that the human mind is built on — unless, perhaps, we decide to build bodies for them too.

While this might hold for current AI's ability to reach a specific, human-style level of generalised intelligence, this might not be the case when it comes to the potential for AI to have its own, unique form of mind. Sure, current AI lacks the type of embodiment shared by biological organisms. However, AI systems are still built on and rely on the processor-level hardware that underpins them. There is still a physical dimension to their being. And although they do not inhabit and move within the three-dimensional physical space of biological organisms, they occupy their own abstract linguistic problem space, where they have displayed capacities to creatively solve context-dependent problems that, at face value, require a basic sense of meaning and relevance.

Although we are aware of the algorithmic design and statistical programming that underpin AI systems and their ability to generate sophisticated linguistic responses, even the most advanced AI programmers still consider these systems somewhat 'opaque' — in the sense that they are able to generate genuinely surprising outputs that go beyond their pre-programmed behavioral design.

Here, completely ruling out the possibility of any kind of meaningful mind-like experience on behalf of AI by proponents of the embodied view of mind may be premature. By relying on armchair (although informed) assumptions about what it takes to have a mind, they may be making the same mistakes of past thinkers when denying the presence of mind in our biological kin. What's needed is a way to measure the presence of mind, across unconventional systems, from the outside.

Classic barometers for machine intelligence, such as the Turing Test, are being passed by large language models (LLMs) daily. Yet it remains unclear how we might determine whether our AI creations possess any kind of unique, or minimal form of experience. Could an AI agent feel and act on its own version of stress? And how could we possibly know? If experience itself leaves physical traces in the substrates of systems that possess it, as Irruption Theory suggests, the question of AI sentience may be a measurable one.

According to Irruption Theory, having a mind necessarily produces unpredictable dynamics in a system's hardware. If that variability consistently aligns with goal-directed behavior in novel contexts — then we may be able to detect the signatures of mind by identifying those very patterns.

Neural entropy signifies the injection of mental causation in biological brains — where the mind reaches into the physical body. However, since silicon-based systems are composed of a completely different material, it means we have to look elsewhere for the possible traces of mind. Instead, we might search for spikes in activation variability in the processing-level hardware that supports these systems — physical fluctuations that happen to coincide with goal-directed outputs in uncertain or exotic contexts.

This type of divergent behavior, the digital equivalent of entropy in biological brains, may signal when artificial systems step beyond their deterministic physical grounding, and into a state of open-ended agency in their own right. At that point, we might be compelled to ask — what is it like to be an artificial intelligence?

Unifying mental and physical

Beyond the capacity to measure for the presence of mind in alien systems, the hypothesis that conscious effort drives bursts of unpredictability at the level of neurobiology also charts a scientific path forward for understanding how our experiences and our physical bodies causatively interact. It makes a testable claim: that periods of increased mental effort will coincide with increased measures of neural entropy.

If conscious volition really is making a difference to the brain by introducing variability, we might then want to ask how different qualities of experience result in different 'flavours' of irruption. Being in a state of stress, for example, may shape the structure of neural variance — influencing the magnitude, or degrees of freedom. Conscious qualities, such as our emotional tone, complexity of thought, or attentional focus, could each meaningfully constrain how the mind stamps its presence on the brain's dynamic landscape.

The apparent contradictions of consciousness and agency, their resistance to being reconciled with a physical, deterministic view of reality, are not barriers to inquiry, but clues. They mark the edges of our understanding. The walls of the inward journey we take when trying to make sense of what we are, and whom we share the world with.

Some may see the positioning of an observationally hidden mind as having a causal effect on the physical aspects of our being as a backwards step into dualistic territory that the cognitive sciences have moved on from. Others may see it as recognizing the lingering mystery that sits at our centre, and as an honest assessment of where we are — at the beginning of our quest towards a science of consciousness.

Descartes cast mind and body as separate essential substances, but in doing so, he made them adversarial. They are, however, not in conflict. They are inseparably entangled in ways our categories and tools are only just starting to grasp. The synthesis of the mental and physical aspects of life reframes consciousness as a process of rhythmic interaction, a choreography shaped by a shared boundary.

The persistence of the mystery of consciousness results from ongoing discussions of what consciousness is — rather than what it does. We precisely lose our ability to describe the nature of mind by abstractly untethering it from the only thing in which it bears a causal relationship: the physical body!

Science seems comfortable asserting the existence of observationally hidden features 'out there'. Invisible forces that influence what we can see and measure. We confidently incorporate dark matter and dark energy into our cosmological models despite never holding them. We only infer them through indirect influence. Strangely, we seem more ready to dismiss the efficacy of consciousness, the thing we know more intimately than anything else, than the ideas we use to fill gaps in our physical theories.

Even when early physicists were sure of the theoretical justification for the existence of black holes, it wasn't until their unequivocal detection that they would be accepted by mainstream science. Likewise, we are each one of those early theoretical physicists, sure of our hypothesis — that our feelings, experiences, and conscious intentions matter. That we are capable of placing a rock in the flowing causal river of reality.

And now we face our scientific instruments inwards to chart the black hole within. We may only just be beginning our journey towards the singularity where mind and matter meet. From where we stand, we can see the way they warp each other, just as we see how the black hole bends its surrounding environment from afar. Shannon's informational entropy lets us trace the mind's ripples — while Irruption Theory asks us to reach out for the singularity within.