An international team of scientists from France and Canada has suggested that human consciousness is a by-product of the growth of entropy. In mathematics, the latter is equal to the amount of information that the system can contain. In the human brain, entropy is determined by the maximum possible number of configurations formed by neural networks. The research preprint is published in the arXiv.org repository.
The researchers modeled a network of neurons based on measurements of brain activity in nine patients, seven of whom had epilepsy. Scientists have determined the degree of synchronization between different groups of neurons, that is, whether nerve cells oscillate in phase with each other. We looked at two sets of data, one from a comparison of brain activity during sleep and wakefulness, and the other from seizures and normal conditions in epileptics.
It turned out that when the subjects were conscious, their brains were characterized by a high level of entropy. In other words, at this time, neural networks formed the maximum possible number of connection configurations. According to scientists, this indicates that consciousness is a product of a system that tries to maximize the amount of information it contains.