Is it possible to understand how individual neurons contribute to conscious experience? Cutting-edge optical techniques now allow us to manipulate neural activity with remarkable precision, but they come with an important limitation: they can only be used in animal models. This restricts us to behavioural readouts and prevents us from accessing the rich, first-person reports available from human participants.
In this talk, I outline the aims of my DPhil project, in which I will use all-optical methods to generate artificial visual percepts in mice. I will then turn to a central limitation of my work: how to infer conscious states from behaviour. My hope is that this talk will spark an interdisciplinary conversation in which philosophers and neuroscientists (including myself) can exchange perspectives and sharpen the questions we ask about consciousness.