Consciousness as Uncommon Self-Knowledge: A Synergistic Information Framework
For consciousness researchers, this offers a formal, operationalizable definition of consciousness that could resolve long-standing debates between competing theories.
The paper proposes 'uncommon self-knowledge' (USK) as a formal criterion for consciousness, defined as synergistic information a system carries about itself that is destroyed by decomposition. The framework claims to separate consciousness from metacognition, resolve counterexamples to existing theories, and generate testable predictions, including a dissociation between consciousness and broadcast in Global Workspace Theory.
We propose uncommon self-knowledge (USK) as a candidate criterion for consciousness: synergistic information a system carries about itself that exists only in the joint of its subsystems and is destroyed by decomposition. Drawing on Gottwald's partition-lattice grounding of Partial Information Decomposition (PID), where redundancy corresponds to Aumann's common knowledge and synergy to the gap between separate and joint observation, we propose the synergistic component of self-directed information as a candidate formal signature for conscious processing. If correct, the framework would (1) offer a clean separation between consciousness and metacognition (synergistic vs. redundant self-knowledge), (2) provide principled resolutions to counterexamples that challenge IIT, GWT, and HOT, (3) be operationalizable via Partial Information Rate Decomposition (PIRD) with self-targeting, and (4) generate distinctive empirical predictions, the strongest being a GWT timing dissociation (consciousness correlates with pre-broadcast synergy formation, not broadcast itself) and a specific dissociation between self-report disruption and task-performance disruption under middle-layer perturbation in LLMs. The proposal is consistent with recent empirical findings that both anaesthesia and Alzheimer's disease specifically reduce synergistic information processing while preserving or increasing redundancy.