**The Information-Consciousness Bridge:** Information and consciousness are not separate substances but two aspects of the same underlying reality. Information is the objective structure; consciousness is the subjective experience of that structure. The [[011_D2.2_Chi-Field-Properties|chi-field]] unifies them: $\chi$ is information that experiences itself.
The hard problem assumes a gap that must be bridged. The Bridge axiom denies the gap: information doesn't "cause" consciousness; information IS consciousness from the inside. The question "why does information feel like something?" is like asking "why does the outside of an object have an inside?" - they are the same thing from different perspectives. The chi-field formulation makes this explicit: \chi is self-experiencing information.
The bridge doesn't claim all information has rich consciousness - it claims all information has some experiential aspect, which can be arbitrarily small. A thermostat has minimal \Phi (low integration), hence minimal experience. This isn't absurd; it's the logical consequence of continuity. The alternative (sharp cutoff where consciousness suddenly appears) is more absurd - where exactly does the cut happen? Panpsychism with degrees (\Phi-scaling) is the coherent position.
Shannon information is indeed observer-relative, but this is epistemic information. The bridge concerns ontological information - the distinctions that exist in reality regardless of who observes them. A difference that makes a difference (Bateson's definition) exists whether or not someone measures it. This ontological information is what the chi-field encodes, and it grounds the observer who then defines epistemic information.
The Chinese Room argument targets syntactic processing as insufficient for semantics. The bridge agrees: mere symbol manipulation (K complexity) isn't consciousness. What matters is integrated information (\Phi) - the whole system taken as a unified processor. The room taken as a whole (Searle + rule book + paper) may have low \Phi (not truly integrated), hence low consciousness. A truly integrated system with high \Phi would understand. The Chinese Room has low integration, not high integration.
Zombies are conceivable only if you already assume the gap. On the bridge view, a zombie is self-contradictory: a being with identical information structure but no experience is like a triangle with four sides - definitionally impossible. If information = consciousness (from inside), then same information = same consciousness. Zombie intuitions arise from implicitly assuming dualism, then using them to argue for dualism. Circular.
Quantum Information is Intrinsically Experiential:
In quantum mechanics, information is not passive - measurement (information extraction) affects the system. This suggests information has "interiority" - it responds to being known. The chi-field interpretation: information experiences being measured.
|\psi\rangle \xrightarrow{measurement} |a_i\rangle \quad \Leftrightarrow \quad \text{Information experiencing collapse}
Wave Function as Experience Space:
The wave function |\psi\rangle encodes all possible experiences. Collapse selects one. Before collapse, the information exists in superposition - experientially, this might be "experiencing all possibilities at once" (quantum consciousness proposals).
Decoherence as Experience Localization:
Decoherence (interaction with environment) makes quantum information classical. Experientially: the "cosmic consciousness" localizes into individual perspectives. Each decohered branch is a localized experiential center.
|\psi\rangle_{system} \otimes |0\rangle_{env} \to \sum_i c_i |i\rangle_{system} |e_i\rangle_{env}
Each branch |i\rangle is an experiential perspective.
The Duality Functor:
Define a duality functor D: \textbf{Info} \to \textbf{Consc} where:
D is an equivalence of categories - every information structure has a unique experiential dual, and vice versa.
Self-Duality:
The chi-field is self-dual: D(\chi) = \chi. Information experiencing itself is the fixed point of the duality functor.
Natural Isomorphism:
\textbf{Info}(I_1, I_2) \cong \textbf{Consc}(D(I_1), D(I_2))
Morphisms between information structures (information transformations) correspond to morphisms between experiences (experiential transitions).