From synergy to redundancy: An information-relation account of consciousness
Abstract
Research on the neural basis of consciousness has largely focused either on where and when neural activity represents conscious contents, or on the interactions through which distributed neural populations become integrated. We argue that these approaches can be connected by analysing information relations among neural representations. A perceptual content can be synergistic when it is carried by the joint state of multiple neural sources, or redundant when overlapping information about that content is shared across sources. We propose that these information-relations provide a common language for major theories of consciousness, linking irreducibility, recurrence, and global availability. Recent evidence suggests that conscious contents may be constructed through synergy-dominant interactions and subsequently stabilized through redundancy-dominant representations, with specific contributions by aperiodic and oscillatory activity. Together, this account reframes conscious content as a dynamically organized information structure, in which synergistic interactions construct nonseparable representations, and redundancy makes those representations stably shared across the system, thereby providing a common framework and an information-theoretical axis for relating major theories of consciousness.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{canalesjohnson2026from,
title = {{From synergy to redundancy: An information-relation account of consciousness}},
author = {Andrés Canales-Johnson and Daniel Rebbin and Borjan Milinkovic and Robin A A Ince and Martin Vinck},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/cz4bw_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cz4bw_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - From synergy to redundancy: An information-relation account of consciousness
AU - Andrés Canales-Johnson
AU - Daniel Rebbin
AU - Borjan Milinkovic
AU - Robin A A Ince
AU - Martin Vinck
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/04
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/cz4bw_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cz4bw_v1/
AB - Research on the neural basis of consciousness has largely focused either on where and when neural activity represents conscious contents, or on the interactions through which distributed neural populations become integrated. We argue that these approaches can be connected by analysing information relations among neural representations. A perceptual content can be synergistic when it is carried by the joint state of multiple neural sources, or redundant when overlapping information about that content is shared across sources. We propose that these information-relations provide a common language for major theories of consciousness, linking irreducibility, recurrence, and global availability. Recent evidence suggests that conscious contents may be constructed through synergy-dominant interactions and subsequently stabilized through redundancy-dominant representations, with specific contributions by aperiodic and oscillatory activity. Together, this account reframes conscious content as a dynamically organized information structure, in which synergistic interactions construct nonseparable representations, and redundancy makes those representations stably shared across the system, thereby providing a common framework and an information-theoretical axis for relating major theories of consciousness.
ER -