Theory and Philosophy of Consciousness

This project started back in the 1990's as the PhD and Post-Doc project of professor Antti Revonsuo. Its continuing aim has been to critically analyse the philosophical basis of the science of consciousness and the various philosophical and empirical theories of consciousness.

The project has developed a naturalistic theory of consciousness called “Biological Realism” (Revonsuo 2006, 2010) that explains consciousness as an emergent level of biological organization in the brain: an internal “world simulation” that appears to us both during wakefulness and dreaming.

This approach is philosophically closely related to Searle’s “Biological Naturalism” (see Revonsuo 2018), but opposed to eliminative, illusionist, and reductive approaches to phenomenal consciousness that discard the subjective and qualitative aspects of consciousness, as well as rejecting the currently popular information theories and panpsychism, where consciousness is not regarded as a specifically brain-based or biological phenomenon at all (for a critical analysis of the current state of the field, see Revonsuo 2025).

Biological realism constitutes the background philosophy on which are based prof. Revonsuo’s and his group’s empirical lines of research on e.g., the nature and function of dreaming and the neural correlates of perceptual consciousness.