Consciousness may be more than the brain’s output — it may be an input, too
A new framework suggests that bursts of neural chaos could be the fingerprints of a conscious mind at work.
by Conor Feehly
From a scientific perspective, studying consciousness is a bit like trying to describe the singularity inside a black hole from the window of a spacecraft in its gravitational orbit. We can see how the black hole warps and contorts the space around it: Superheated dust and gas spiral inward; radiation and strange gravitational waves emanate outward.
But from this outside view, observing the singularity inside the black hole is impossible. The event horizon blocks all attempts. Similarly, as outside observers, we cannot directly access the conscious experiences of other beings. When we focus our third-person scientific tools on the places we suspect our mental lives to reside — namely, our brains (and bodies, more generally) — all we see is the stuff of physical reality: electrical activity, neurochemicals, and bodily tissues. No feelings, no emotions, no love. Our own inner cosmos of intentions, beliefs, and dreams is knowable only to ourselves.
Modern science tends to see consciousness as arising from neural activity, like ghostly software conjured through the brain’s material hardware. A radical new theory suggests something different: The brain doesn’t only generate consciousness; rather, consciousness itself can influence the brain’s physical dynamics — and it leaves physical traces when it does.
The hardest problem in science
The contents of our mental lives and the physical fabric of the reality we are immersed in appear to belong to two distinct domains. Since René Descartes first articulated the mind-body problem in the 17th century, Western thought has been haunted by the question of how these two seemingly incompatible aspects of reality interact. This incongruity has led philosophers and scientists to collapse either of these worlds into the other, claiming that either “mind” or “matter” is more fundamental.
More recently, philosophers like Joseph Levine and David Chalmers have rearticulated this chasm between physics and feeling as the “explanatory gap” or the “hard problem.” At least on the surface, there seems to be a categorical difference between descriptions of the material and descriptions of the mind.
In spite of this gap, modern neuroscience has made significant progress mapping the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) — identifying patterns and brain regions that reliably track specific conscious states. But correlation, as we know, is not explanation. Mapping brain activity that is associated with conscious experience tells us neither why experience exists in the first place nor whether it plays any causal role in the physical world.
Contemporary theories of consciousness generally attempt to bridge this gap by equating consciousness with some measurable, physical property of the brain. But this move comes at a conceptual cost. It subtly replaces subjectivity with a quantitative measure of neural activity. Consciousness becomes analogous to a number, a structure, or a pattern — an abstract noun — and its defining feature, the first-person feeling, slips through our explanatory cracks.
If we take seriously the clues that nature has left us, as Descartes and others have alluded to, and we take the physical irreducibility of consciousness seriously, while not dismissing it as some sort of illusion, epiphenomenon, or projection, where does this leave us if we want to give a scientific account of consciousness?
Informational entropy
One promising frontier comes from examining informational entropy in the brain. First defined by Claude Shannon in 1948, informational entropy provides a mathematical way of measuring the uncertainty or unpredictability of information. Originally developed to improve telecommunications, Shannon entropy has since been applied to neural signals, where it provides a measure of the variability of neural activity across scales, from single neurons all the way up to brain networks.
Heightened levels of neural entropy — at the whole brain level — could be thought of as an unforeseen tropical thunderstorm rolling through the brain, indicating a richer, more chaotic, unpredictable state of neural activity. In contrast, the brain has lower entropy when the “forecast” is steadier and more predictable. Shannon entropy gives neuroscientists a way to measure the informational turbulence of the brain across time.
Applying information-theoretic measures like entropy to the study of consciousness isn’t new. In the 1990s, neuroscientists Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman used Shannon entropy as part of the foundation for their Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, which argues that consciousness is analogous to the integration and complexity of neural signals.
More recently, Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, proposed the Entropic Brain Hypothesis (EBH), showing that altered states of consciousness — from deep anesthesia to dreaming to psychedelic experiences — can be mapped to varying levels of neural entropy. Psychedelic states, for instance, are associated with high entropy, while deep anesthesia is marked by unusually low entropy.
A new framework, however, takes a different perspective: that punctuated spikes of neural entropy may not just reflect levels of consciousness but may actually be signs of consciousness exerting causal influence on the brain.
This idea is known as Irruption Theory, developed by Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Drawing on a number of contemporary neuroscientific studies, Froese points out that when we exert conscious effort — for example, when we’re trying to discern a feature of our environment, solve a pressing problem, or summon creativity — the brain shows measurable bursts of entropy that cannot be completely explained by physical, deterministic neural mechanisms alone.
“Cognitive effort, motor effort, effort of all kinds are associated with increased entropy production in the brain,” Froese says. “And so it’s already standard practice in a way to use both thermodynamic measures and information theoretic measures of entropy as signatures of mental work.”
Instead of just seeing this rise in neural entropy as a result of increased heat due to brain metabolism, or as a result of not capturing all of the physical variables at play in the brain, Irruption Theory interprets these bursts of entropy as the “footprints” of the conscious mind acting on the physical body. We might not be able to directly see the conscious mind touching the physical brain with our scientific tools, but we can see the informational ripples of its influence, like gravitational waves emanating from a black hole.
“Froese’s Irruption Theory is a novel, innovative theory of consciousness that takes phenomenology seriously within ‘a robustly scientific naturalism,” says Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host of the show Closer To Truth, and creator/curator of the Landscape of Consciousness website, which catalogues and categorizes theories of consciousness.
“Irruption Theory recruits the latest theories of brain entropy, resonances, and stochastic fluctuations within a broadly enactive worldview of embodied mind and brain-body-world interconnections.”
Unlike Tononi’s IIT, which equates consciousness with a system’s integration and complexity, or Carhart-Harris’ EBH, which correlates consciousness with different levels of entropy, Irruption Theory suggests that consciousness itself introduces variability into cognitive systems, pushing the brain into new states that would not have been reached otherwise. In this framing, neural entropy is not a direct measure of consciousness itself but a measurable indicator of its causal influence.
“They [increased measures of neural entropy] only appear that way because we cannot observe through the material medium the values that are at play,” Froese adds. “Another way of looking at it is that there is a hidden aspect, something that is not accessible within the constraints that we can measure.”
Because we can’t access or measure consciousness in the same way we do with other physical variables, its causal influence on the physical substrates of our body appears as bursts of unpredictability (from a purely third-person measurement sense). And because that spontaneity coincides with moments when we engage our mind to affect the world, it provides an opening for understanding why we evolved to be conscious in the first place.
The idea that consciousness has causal influence over our body challenges the view — dominant since Francis Crick’s “Astonishing Hypothesis” — that conscious experience is merely a projection of the noisy hum of brain activity.
Instead, Irruption Theory positions consciousness as an active driver of behavior, with potential evolutionary benefits. Consciousness may have evolved not just as a passive byproduct of cognitive states, but as a crucial mechanism for injecting flexibility, novelty, and adaptability into biological systems under conditions of uncertainty.
The possible adaptive role of the mind, according to Irruption Theory, is to introduce variability and novelty into the system at critical moments. When we exert mental work, conscious effort, or volition, 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 physicist Sara Imari Walker argues something similar in her book Life as No One Knows It: The more possible futures a mind can imagine, the better equipped it is to navigate an uncertain world. Entropy spikes during conscious volition may mark this very unraveling of possibility in the brain.
Beyond biology
If consciousness leaves a physical fingerprint in biological brains, might we find similar traces in other intelligent systems? As AI and other silicon-based systems become more sophisticated, this question could become not just philosophical but measurable.
Do large language models or other AI architectures exhibit entropy surges that align with goal-directed outputs in novel contexts? Could these be the first measurable hints of artificial minds? Irruption Theory, at least in principle, offers a way to answer the question of an inner mental life from the outside.
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 causally relate to one another. 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 “flavors” 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.
Some may see the positioning of an observationally hidden mind as having a causal effect on the physical aspects of our being as a backward step into dualistic territory that the cognitive sciences have moved on from. However, rather than claiming that either mind or matter is more fundamental than the other, Irruption Theory proceeds by describing their causal relationship, which implies that both the mental and physical aspects of our being belong to the same fundamental reality.
The mental and physical features of the world appear distinct because of our perspective relative to them. The distinction between mind and matter, for Irruption Theory, is epistemological — how we relate to them — rather than ontological — what their underlying nature is. Just because we can’t observe the singularity at the center of the black hole from the outside, it doesn’t mean it belongs to a different fundamental part of reality.
“I really think that a lot of progress could be made in cognitive neuroscience and maybe biology in general if we accept that there are some things that make a difference but that are not directly measurable,” says Froese. “It seems like that is common practice in science anyway, there are many cases in physics where we have very indirect evidence of things making a difference like dark matter…ok great, and the same is true of consciousness, we can’t directly measure it, but our entire life world is based on the assumption that it actually makes a difference.”
As Froese mentions, the same could be said of dark matter or dark energy. We have yet to — and perhaps never will — directly capture these features of the Universe, as we do with regular matter. But that doesn’t mean they don’t play a role in the Universe, or exist in their own special category of being. They are a part of nature, just as consciousness is.
What was suggested to me by this article is the futility of trying to create true artificial intelligence. Math algorithms will never create the storms of neural entropy described here.