Why Consciousness Research Should Incorporate the Perspective of Landauer-Type Information Discard

Consciousness research has focused on how information is generated, integrated, and made available, but has paid less attention to how information ceases to be executable. This paper argues that a finite brain must also cause non-selected neural activity to lose its executability, forming a single present through ordered disappearance: losing signals disappear first, while the winning signal persists to organize perception and action. Conscious experience is not mere information processing; it becomes an event when one activity pattern temporarily survives as the body's organizer while competitors irreversibly lose their status. The paper calls for incorporating Landauer-type information discard into consciousness research, emphasizing that any theory must account for the irreversible disappearance of generated neural activity and the contraction of candidate space.

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Abstract

Consciousness research has developed primarily around information integration, global availability, prediction, recurrent processing, higher-order representation, and neural correlates. These approaches have clarified important aspects of conscious experience. Yet they tend to focus on how information appears, is processed, stabilized, or made available. They have paid less attention to the reverse side of conscious experience: how information ceases to remain executable. This paper argues that consciousness research should incorporate the perspective of Landauer-type information discard. The claim is not that Landauer-type information discard directly produces consciousness or qualia. Nor is it that every system that erases information is conscious. The claim is narrower: a finite brain cannot form a single present merely by generating, integrating, or sharing information. It must also cause non-selected candidates to lose their executability. At the physical level, candidates are not abstract objects. They are realized as transient patterns of neural electrical activity. Action potentials, synaptic currents, membrane-potential changes, and population-level activity patterns are generated, propagated, amplified, inhibited, weakened, and eventually eliminated. The crucial point is not simply that neural signals disappear. All generated neural signals eventually disappear. The crucial point is that they disappear in an order. In competitive neural processing, losing signals lose executability first, while the winning signal persists long enough to organize perception, attention, judgment, action, memory updating, and preparation of the next bodily state. This temporal asymmetry forms the physical skeleton of conscious presentness. The foreground exists because one activity temporarily remains. The background exists because competing activities have already lost executability. A single present exists because excessive possibilities have been closed into one bodily state. A single history exists because what occurred has been separated from what did not occur. From this perspective, conscious experience is not mere information processing. Processed information is not yet an event. Generated neural activity is not yet the present. Information becomes an event only when one activity pattern temporarily survives as the organizer of the body while competing activities irreversibly lose their status. Landauer-type information discard provides a physical framework for this transition. It does not reduce consciousness to heat. Rather, it asks how a finite physical system irreversibly contracts candidate space, eliminates executability from non-selected neural activity, and proceeds into a single history. Any theory that rejects this framework must provide an alternative physical account of the same process: the irreversible disappearance of generated neural activity, the loss of executability by non-selected candidates, the contraction of candidate space, and the formation of a single bodily present. The central claim of this paper is therefore straightforward. Consciousness is not established merely because information is generated, integrated, or processed. It is established when competing neural activities are reduced through ordered disappearance: the losers disappear first, the winner disappears later, and the body proceeds into one irreversible present.