An interesting piece. I was disappointed, however, that it completely ignored several thousand years of careful, rigorously controlled, introspective research on the question of consciousness conducted by Indian and Tibetan (and other) contemplatives. Their general conclusion is that consciousness is "unborn"--that it is somehow an implicit attribute of reality itself, and that the brain, whether our own or that of other species, "downloads" consciousness and experiences it in accordance with its own genetic predispositions and survival needs. And that the evolution of human language has given us the ability to conceptualize a separate self, an "I"--but that this is just a temporary mental formation, floating on a much deeper universal, unborn and undying consciousness. Jung had similar notions.