I am trying to understand what consciousness is, based on my basic knowledge of our senses, artificial intelligence (computer vision, specifically) and some philosophy. Here's my reasoning:

As far as I understand it from my Neural Network class, each eye captures the light and transmits it through electric signals to the brain. Each action potential can be seen as a binary 1, no activity as a 0.

This stimulates some of the neurons in the visual cortex, which allows our brain to interpret and understand what the eyes have captured.

In computer vision, this is where "sight" ends: the computer detects what's in the image, based on its knowledge base - its training set - and that's it.

So why does the human brain take the extra steps of combining both signals into an image - i.e translating the different waves of the electromagnetic spectrum into shapes, colors, etc -, turning it upright and displaying it to ourselves?

The same could be said, as far as I know it, about the other senses: hearing would be detecting vibrations in the air, but the brain also translate these into sounds.

Does this hint that Descartes' dualistic definition could be true, that our consciousness is separate from the brain? Or could consciousness be a sub product of the brain, a consolidation of what each one of its areas are processing, in order to better understand the world (as in Stanislas Dehaene's workspace neurons cognitive model)?