Antti Revonsuofeasible, as anybody can log into the simulation and personally witness or live through the what-
it-is-likeness of the observed person’s phenomenal level. I call this the Dream-Catcher method
of future consciousness science (Revonsuo 2006).
The world-simulation view of consciousness has consequences for empirical research as
well. It has led to a new definition of dreaming as a world-simulation in the brain during sleep.
The world-simulation concept of dreaming, in turn, has led to new ideas about the function
of dreaming, called simulation theories. The first simulation theory is known as the Threat
Simulation Theory (Revonsuo 2000), and it argues that dreaming (especially bad dreams and
nightmares) is an ancient evolutionary program in the brain for the repeated, automatically
programmed simulation of dangerous situations in a safe place, in order to rehearse important
survival skills by facing dangers believed to be real while the dream experience takes place. The
theory is testable and there is already considerable empirical evidence supporting it (Valli and
Revonsuo 2009). Other simulation theories include the Protoconsciousness Theory (Hobson
2009) and the Social Simulation Theory (Revonsuo, Tuominen and Valli 2016a, 2016b).
Another empirical topic that BR has some relevance for is the conceptual and empirical
distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness. According to the BR conception of
consciousness as a simple inner presence of qualities, phenomenal consciousness is independent
of access. This conceptual distinction has led to an empirical line of research where we have pre-
sented evidence for the empirical separability of the electrophysiological correlates of phenom-
enal visual consciousness from those of access consciousness (see e.g. Koivisto and Revonsuo
2010; Railo, Koivisto, and Revonsuo 2011).
6 Biological Realism in Relation to Informational
Theories of ConsciousnessRecently, a major shift away from biological theories to informational theories of consciousness
has taken place. Influential philosophers (such as David Chalmers) and leading neuroscientists
(such as Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch) metaphysically anchor consciousness to information
rather than to biology. Interestingly, this shift seems to be motivated by the perceived inability of
the biological approach to rise to the challenges of the Hard Problem and the Explanatory Gap.
Koch (2012) explicitly confesses that he has switched from materialism to informational theo-
ries because he cannot see how phenomenal consciousness could emerge from neural processes.
The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) (Tononi 2008) is currently the most influential
informational theory of consciousness. The core thesis of IIT says that consciousness is inte-
grated information. Integrated information is a property defined by the internal causal intercon-
nectedness of a system. The amount of integrated information possessed by any physical system
can be quantified as its phi-value (Tononi and Koch 2015). A phi greater than zero means that
the system is conscious, and the degree or quantity of its consciousness is expressed as its phi-
value. The conscious human brain has perhaps the highest phi-value of any physical system, but
even simple physical and nonbiological systems have phi-values above zero.
It is important to be clear that the biological and the informational research program have
very different views on the fundamental nature of consciousness. Even though it is difficult to
give a general definition of “information,” one thing about the ontology of information of any
type is clear: information consists of abstract patterns, realized in or carried by physical systems.
Information is not a concrete physical entity like a DNA molecule, a neuron, or an action
potential is. Information has no physical or biological essence. Information is a second-order property.
Its identity is defined at the abstract level; therefore, it is not ontologically type-identical with
any particular physical properties.