Personal opinion: I can imagine that the reason of how we <i>experience</i> consciousness might be unsolvable, much as the question how the color blue feels is hard to answer objectively.<p>However, I think there are a lot less fuzzy questions that are strongly connected with consciousness that I'm hoping can be find answers for - and that could shed some more light on what consciousness is and what it isn't. Such as:<p>- what are memories? Could we build some machine to extract or even manipulate them? Is it possible to compare memories of different people?<p>- what are dreams?<p>- different parts of our body are affected differently by our consciousness: Some things we can control directly, like hands, feet, speech, etc; some processes we cannot control but we do experience them, such as hunger or sleep; and some we neither control nor experience such as digestion, homeostasis etc, even though they are also regulated by the brain. Even more couriously, many of those autonomous processes <i>are</i> greatly affected by conscious thoughts even though we don't experience them as directly controllable - such as fear and arousal. Inversely, conscious actions often have autonomous "sub routines", such as walking.
So what what mechanism in the brain governs which processes are conscious and which are not?<p>- Suppose we could actually do brain transplants. Assume we put an adult human brain in a jar and connect it with some kind of VR. Could the brain learn to control a non-human body such as a spider? How about a human body with different proportions?