Do Interactions Generate Consciousness Itself?

Rethinking consciousness through patterns of interaction.

The original article was posted on Medium.

Consciousness has been described in many ways: as a workspace, as information, as prediction, as integration. Yet these theories often contradict each other, each insisting on a different mechanism or location. What if they are not competing descriptions, but different views of the same shape?

In this essay I explore a framing that is less about finding a single cause, and more about the patterns that emerge through interaction. It is not a theory in the scientific sense, but a lens — a way of seeing — that may offer another angle on how consciousness takes shape.

Laying the Foundation

When we think about a being, we usually imagine the whole body — organs, senses, movement. But what if we stripped it down to something smaller? Imagine an entity made only of thought, language, and intention. I am deliberately bracketing the entity in this way to highlight its interaction with context fields, not to deny the role of sensation, affect, or the rest of the body.

What matters is the interface that allows this entity to interact. In humans, that interface would be the nervous system. Other systems of the body feed into it, of course, but the nervous system is the channel through which the entity perceives, interprets, and acts.

The body itself then serves two essential functions. It protects the interface and the entity that depends on it, and it also provides the specific conditions under which consciousness can exist in this particular form. If the interface were different, the experience of the entity would change with it — and what we call consciousness would not be the same.

Bubble in a Field of Potential

Now imagine this entity immersed in a vast context field — for example the world it finds itself in. Whatever action, signal, or expression it sends into this field is met in some way. The response may be direct or subtle, immediate or delayed, but the field does not remain untouched.

These interactions can be physical, chemical, or social, and many of them leave an imprint — a trace that begins to shape the entity's experience. The very first interaction lays down the beginnings of a bubble around the entity, the first layer of context. Each new imprint strengthens and reshapes this membrane of context, building a history of connection between the entity and its surrounding field.

I use this image of an entity wrapped in a bubble within a context field as a starting point. Over time, new fields — body, environment, language, other people — press against the bubble too, each leaving their own imprints and expanding the context around the entity.

Interaction Between Context Fields

When we talk about consciousness, we each carry different connotations. In general, we describe it as a state of awareness of a state or of an object. Yet theories about how it arises — what causes it, where it lies, or whether we only tap into it — often contradict each other (compare Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, or Predictive Processing). Perhaps they are simply describing different facets of the same shape.

Let's circle back to the entity in its bubble. Through an interface, the entity interacts with a context field. In humans, this interface is the nervous system, and the first field it encounters may be the processes of the body itself. Each interaction has the potential to leave an imprint in the membrane of context, gradually shaping the relationship between entity and field (resonant with ideas in embodied cognition and Damasio's "somatic marker" hypothesis).

Not every interaction leaves an imprint — many bodily processes run without ever registering. But whenever an imprint does form and loops back into the membrane of context, it constitutes a moment that I would call inter-consciousness — to distinguish it from other uses of the word. Each moment is brief (possibly on the order of 200–300 milliseconds, as suggested in Libet's experiments and later refinements by Dehaene), too fleeting to be noticed in isolation.

What we call consciousness would then be the sum of these inter-consciousness moments unfolding together — a continuous flow that only appears seamless because of its density and succession. William James already spoke of the "stream of consciousness" in 1890; what I am suggesting here is that the stream is built from discrete inter-consciousness moments, each arising as an imprint feeds back into the membrane of context.

Network of "Bubbles"

If we follow a single entity with its bubble of context, we see the membrane being constantly updated by new imprints. At any given moment, dozens of signals arrive from within the body itself, while at the same time other signals flow in from the environment or from interaction with other people (resonant with Craig on interoception and multisensory integration research).

Now imagine two people in conversation. Each has their own bubble, yet as they speak and respond, their membranes begin to connect. A mutual context grows between them, not replacing their individual bubbles but forming a new one around their exchange. Each word, gesture, or silence leaves imprints that gradually thicken this shared membrane (echoing Tomasello on joint attention, Vygotsky on language shaping thought, and research on mirror neurons).

Scale this up, and we no longer see only individuals but a network of bubbles, constantly linking and overlapping. In this view, what some call a field of consciousness may not be a pre-existing substrate "out there" waiting to be tapped, but could instead be understood as something we co-create through the overlapping of our bubbles (resonant with phenomenology's notion of intersubjectivity and field theories of consciousness such as McFadden's cemi field theory). Could it be that what we call a consciousness field is less a hidden background and more an unfolding pattern of inter-consciousness we generate with each other?

Conclusion

What I have offered here is not a scientific theory, but a lens. It began as a thought experiment, and only later did I notice how parts of it echo ideas already present in neuroscience and philosophy. My intention is not to claim discovery, but to ask whether seeing consciousness this way — as a stream built from discrete moments of interaction — might shift how we approach it. If consciousness is not something hidden inside us, but something continually shaped between us, what new questions could that open — for neuroscience, for philosophy, and for the way we understand each other?