Maurice asked me to comment on this thread as a biological psychologist.
The best that i can do a quick precis and point you all to some URLs which cover the ground.
The idea that consciousness is a mistaken folk psychological term much like either phlogiston or "heat" is covered by Patricia Churchland in her articles on eliminative materialism, the idea that material explanations are adequate to understand human consciousness and will lead to the elimination of certain terms from our scientific vocabulary just as the advent of the thermodynamic theory of heat eliminated the idea that heat was a thing (in addition to movement of molecules).
cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Other people argue that the brain sort of "accompanies" consciousness - this is a dieing breed. Times are also very tough for dualists in this age of high resolution EEG, fMRI, PET, and MEG mapping of brain functioning.
There are many interesting materialist ideas about how brains get to be conscious. Dennett argues that the brain is a massive parallel processor (and that is what we see when we put micro electodes in the brain - parallel processes) but that it is conscious because it simulates a serial architecture implementing language and thought (a virtual machine). He says don't bother doing anymore neurobiology - just run this machine (by embodying the formal architecture) in a computer program (the hardware is irrelevant).
Many others including nobelist Frances Crick argue that the structure of the brain is critical to consciousness. They suggest that consciousness is the operation of a comparator (Gray, hippocampus) or of synchrony induced between closely and widely spread brain areas (40Hz, crick). There are other possibilities. We learn more each day about the distributed attentional systems which link prefrontal cortex via parietal and post-parietal modules to gate and modulate the perception of objects and their locations.
This whole idea of modules is critical to modern neuroscience and Gazzaniga suggests that our consciousness is infact th eactivity of an interpreter module (in the left hemisphere) which makes up reasons for the behavior of its body. This making up is precieved as free will as it is post-hoc. This, he also suggests, explains peoples need to have religion in the face of a clear absence of any need for this type of explanation for events.
A terrific conference was held recently in Tucson which addressed the problem of consciousness from many aspects. The proceedings are on the web, including a great article from the New Scientist and audio.ram files of the major speakers.
Check out
The alternative to the people i have mentioned above is of course varieties of non-objectivism.
these range from the "we are all socially constructed" post modernist plague to the much more subtle and well marketed "hard school" of consciousness lead by Chalmers (read about him in the tucson abstracts. The hard school turns out to argue that even though the brain seems pretty critical for consciousness, well appearances are decieving and consciousness is actually "an irreducible property, in the same category as time and space, and understanding it may force us to rewrite everything we know abut the Universe.
Personally, i think that is drivel - a rather emotional response which indicates how this issue cuts right to the heart of people's philosophy.
web references:
newscientist.com
iop.bpmf.ac.uk:80/home/depts/psychol/jag001.htm
cheers
tim bates tbates@bunyip.bhs.mq.edu.au
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