The medium is the message: How neurometabolic entanglement generates conscious experience

Abstract

Most neuroscientific accounts of consciousness assume that conscious experience is constituted by the information conveyed between neurons. The physical-chemical details of the metabolic and physiological processes that convey this information are correspondingly presumed to be relevant only insofar as they support the organization of information processes. We describe an alternative perspective that denies this presumed independence of the processing of neural information and the metabolic-physiological details of these processes. We call this alternative paradigm the theory of neuro-metabolic entanglement (NME). NME proposes that mental experience exemplifies the inseparability of the organization of neural information processes from the constraints imposed by the material-energetic properties of the neural medium itself. Central to this account is a recursive, Möbius-like loop of neural connections that entangles patterns of forebrain information processing with midbrain regulatory systems that modulate forebrain metabolism. This enables patterns of neural activity to indirectly modify the global distribution of metabolic resources underlying these information processes. It also constitutes a bottleneck that integrates diverse neural processes into an adaptively relevant unitary experience organized in terms of the global redistribution of metabolic support. Computational models of neural function cannot treat energy supply as a fixed background parameter; our proposed Möbius-like loop of neuro-metabolic entanglement offers a framework for future models in which neural activity is dynamically and recursively modulated by the network's own metabolism. Recognizing this entanglement is a first step toward dissolving the explanatory gap highlighted by the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.