We often speak of consciousness as something the brain produces. The brain receives information, processes it, and somehow an experience emerges. The difficulty lies in explaining how the processing becomes experience: how neural activity comes to be accompanied by the subjective awareness of something.
Recent research into visual perception has brought this difficulty into focus. In macaque monkeys presented with competing images, researchers found that neural activity alternated rapidly between patterns associated with the image apparently perceived and patterns associated with the image suppressed from awareness. Both patterns were strong, even though the researchers inferred that only one image was consciously experienced.
The discovery does not explain consciousness. It does, however, invite us to reconsider what an explanation must account for.
If information about an image can be represented in neural activity without that image becoming an object of awareness, identifying the representation is not enough. We must also explain the difference between information that participates in conscious experience and information that does not.
Perhaps we should begin by questioning the assumption that consciousness can be understood by examining the brain in isolation.
The brain is not an independent entity to which an external world subsequently presents itself. It is part of a living organism, continuously engaged in relations with its surroundings. Neural activity participates in the organism's ongoing activity; perception is one aspect of that larger organisation.
This does not diminish the importance of the brain. It changes the question we ask about it.
Instead of asking only how the brain produces consciousness, we can ask how neural processes participate in the organisation of a living system whose activity includes perceiving, responding and experiencing a world.
The distinction is important. A neural pattern may carry information about an image, but its presence alone does not establish what that image means for the organism, or whether it becomes part of conscious experience. The relationship between neural activity and awareness is something to be explained, not something that can simply be assumed.
Consider what the experiment reveals. Two images are present. The brain carries information about both. Yet the researchers distinguish between the image associated with awareness and the image apparently excluded from it.
The difference cannot be explained merely by pointing to the presence or absence of neural information. Nor does the rapid alternation establish that the organism's experience alternates at the same rate. The relation between neural activity and conscious experience remains the central problem.
A relational approach does not supply an immediate answer. It offers a different starting point.
What things are, and what they can do, depends in part on the relations in which they participate. A neural process does not acquire its significance independently of the organisation of which it is part. To understand its contribution to consciousness, we must investigate how it participates in that organisation.
This perspective also cautions us against treating the organism and its environment as wholly independent terms. Perception is not simply the reception of a finished world by a passive observer. It involves an active, embodied relation between the perceiver and what is perceived.
That does not establish that the environment is constitutive of consciousness, rather than influencing processes within the brain. The experiment cannot decide between those possibilities. But it gives us reason to keep the question open instead of assuming that the brain's activity, described in isolation, must provide a complete account.
There is a further distinction to preserve. Explaining the neural conditions under which awareness occurs is not necessarily the same as explaining what conscious experience is. We may discover increasingly precise relationships between neural activity and perception while still needing to clarify what it means for a process to participate in experience at all.
The challenge is therefore not simply to locate consciousness, or even to identify the neural patterns most closely associated with it. It is to understand how those patterns relate to the organised activity of a living organism, and how that organisation relates to the world in which the organism lives.
The recent findings offer a useful starting point precisely because they expose a distinction that a simpler account might overlook. Information can be present without becoming conscious experience. Neural activity can change without our having established a corresponding change in awareness. In each case, the relation between a process and the phenomenon associated with it requires explanation.
Perhaps consciousness is not a further object to be found somewhere among the processes of the brain. Perhaps understanding it requires us to investigate how those processes participate in the life of an organism, and how that life is organised through its relations with the world.
This remains a question, not a conclusion.
But it changes the direction in which we look for an answer.
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