Understanding Consciousness through prism of dreams

Abstract Despite decades of research, no consensus exists regarding the biological function that consciousness serves. Existing theories variously regard consciousness as integrated information, global broadcasting, higher-order representation, or an irreducible feature of subjective experience. This paper proposes an alternative functional hypothesis grounded in systems engineering and evolutionary biology. The central claim is that consciousness evolved not as intelligence itself, nor as an inevitable consequence of neural complexity, but as an adaptive feedback mechanism whose computational role is to validate whether the neural representations currently guiding behaviour are supported by external sensory evidence or are internally generated. As vertebrate brains became increasingly predictive, capable of imagination, episodic memory, planning, and simulation, distinguishing internally generated models from external reality became a new computational challenge. Consciousness is proposed to have evolved as the solution to this challenge. Dreaming is interpreted as a temporary reduction of this reality-validation process, explaining why internally generated events are accepted as real until awakening. The theory predicts that consciousness should scale with the sophistication of predictive internal models rather than with intelligence alone, and that future biological or artificial systems may employ alternative validation architectures. Consequently, human consciousness should be viewed as an adaptive evolutionary solution rather than a metaphysical necessity or the inevitable endpoint of evolution