Are Information or Data Patterns Correlated with Consciousness?

Scientific research on consciousness is attempting to gather data about therelationship between consciousness and the physical world. The basic procedure is tomeasure consciousness through first-person reports, measure the physical world andlook for correlations between these sets of measurements. While this work hasfocused on neural correlates of consciousness, it has also been proposed thatinformation states in the brain might be linked to consciousness. This paper usesFloridi’s distinction between dedomena, data and information to state this claimmore precisely and suggests that the best starting point for this work is thepotential correlation between data patterns and consciousness. Floridi’s method oflevels of abstraction is used to understand how data can be measured at differentlevels of abstraction in the brain and the paper examines a number of problems withthis work, which could make it difficult to prove that data patterns are correlatedwith consciousness.