The paper explores whether David Bohm’ s proposal about quantum theoretical active information, and the mind-matter scheme he developed on the basis of it, can help us to explain consciousness (Bohm and Hiley 1987, 1993; Bohm 1989, 1990 ; Pylkkanen 2007 ). Here it is important to acknowledge that other researchers in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies have also made use of the concept of information in their theories of mind and consciousness. For example, Dretske (1981 ) and Barwise and Seligman (1997 ) have explored the possibility that information in the sense of factual semantic contents (i.e. information as meaningful data that represents facts correctly or incorrectly) can be grounded in environmental information (i.e.information as mere correlation, e.g. the way tree rings carry information about age). For Dretske this was an important part of his attempts to give a naturalistic account of sensory experiences, qualia and consciousness. During recent years the notion of information has been used to explain consciousness most notably by David Chalmers (1996 ), as well as by Giulio Tononi and his co-workers (Tononi and Koch 2014 ; Oizumi, Albantakis and Tononi 2014 ). The strategy of this paper will be to first describe Bohm’ s mind-matter scheme, and then to briefl y consider Chalmers’ and Tononi et al.’ s ideas in the light of this scheme.
['Paavo Pylkkänen']
Can Bohmian Quantum Information Help us to Understand Consciousness