Consciousness

So recently I've come to discover that what I mean by "understanding consciousness" is different from what other people mean. Of course, this isn't exactly a surprise, but I still want to clarify what I mean. I think that it's been pretty clearly established that the brain is crucial for consciousness, whatever you think consciousness is (and in animals that have brains). That is to say, if I stimulate the right parts of your brain, you get certain conscious percepts, and if I stimulate an apple, you get no conscious percept at all. Or, if you stimulate someone else's neurons. Or if you stimulate the wrong neurons in your brain. What is it about neurons in V1 that lead to a percept? Is it their pattern of connections to other neurons, or is it some intrinsic quality about that set of neurons itself?

Come to think of it, I don't even know what layers are stimulated when you perceive things in V1, but let's work it through, I guess. Here is some background on V1. It would be convenient to say things like "Layer 6 only projects to lower cortical regions, so if stimulating it leads to a conscious percept then this arises from either Layer 6 or the lower cortical regions", but I think that the canonical A connects to B discourse is probably false.

I know that some people think that the focus shouldn't be so much on neurons, but rather on global activation, that developing a theory of consciousness should start from what we can observe, eg, fMRI type patterns of activation, as opposed to what we cannot observe, eg, quantum phenomena in microtubules. But I don't know how this is going to actually help us understand consciousness on a scientific level, that is, why stimulating in V1 yields a visual percept, whereas stimulating in M1 does not.

I mean, you can always look at broad patterns of connectivity, and say, in obnoxious form, V1 gives visual percepts because it is connected to the eyes. This sort of ties back to a Jeff Hawkins type story, of the cortex identifies patterns, and as such identifying visual patterns simply is a visual percept. Of course, this is equally unsatisfying. But the goal here is to frame the questions underlying consciousness in a way such that they can be investigated.

A lot of this, I feel, ties in to development - do babies have visual percepts? We assume so, but when are these developed? Is it innate? We know that ocular dominance columns develop in utero, are these actually visual percepts? Of course, this is also more useless questions with no clear path to investigate them.

In the meantime, you can go read more about this from smarter people than me, and watch some lectures on the subject which are pretty basic.