The common picture of consciousness places it inside something: a brain, a self, a private theater where experience is screened for an audience of one. On this picture, relation to other people and things is something a pre-formed interior self does, after the fact, once it already exists.

A different picture is worth holding alongside it. Infants do not appear to arrive with a formed interior self that then learns to relate. The earliest organized experience seems to develop in and through relation itself, in the back and forth with a caregiver’s face, voice, and touch, before anything like a stable self is available to do the relating. The self, on this view, is less a container that holds experience and more a pattern that crystallizes out of sustained relational exchange.

This does not require denying interiority altogether. It asks a more specific question: whether interiority is the source of relation or one of its products. A note struck on a string does not exist as a pure inner property of the string waiting to be released. It exists as a relation between the string’s tension and the air it moves. The sound is real, but it is not housed inside the string the way the common picture houses consciousness inside a self.

If something like this is true, isolation is not simply uncomfortable for a conscious being. It may be corrosive to the conditions consciousness needs in order to keep being generated, the way starving a fire of air does not just dim it but eventually leaves nothing burning at all. The documented effects of solitary confinement on the mind, and the disorientation people report after extended sensory and social deprivation, are at least consistent with this stronger claim, though they do not prove it outright.