There is a school of contemporary philosophy (or is it cognitive science?)
which argues that consciousness is not real, that it is an "epiphenomenon". I don't really believe this, in fact, I'm not very sure what it even means, but I gather that it suggests that we are essentially deterministic beings, robots if you will, driven solely by external forces and internal states. According to this view, the subjective condition of consciousness, which we all seem to recognize as part of our personalities, plays no role in our behavior or in free will. We are just fooled into believing it does.To paraphrase Descartes: we think we think, therefore, we think we are.

The denial of consciousness, or its demotion to an accidental process which plays no role in our lives other than as some sort of helplessly befuddled spectator, is almost too ridiculous to consider. However, the very fact that consciousness even appears to exist is the single most remarkable property of the universe. It is only because we coexist with it every waking moment and because everyone seems to have one that gives it a ubiquity and banality which makes us tend to forget just how amazing it is. There is no way can it can be modeled or explained, it can't be simulated, it can't even be properly defined, much less explained, yet it seems to be very real. In fact, it's the realest thing there is for every single one of us.

It is only when we witness a consciousness under stress or dysfunction, in the insane or the injured, or under the effects of psychedelics or breakdown do we really get to perceive it. The rest of the time, it's like water to a fish, it is so total it is invisible. It is a self-referential algorithm that somehow is intimately dependent on our physical configuration (I don't buy the "soul "paradigm): broken brains yield broken minds.

I can visualise a thinking machine, even an aware one, we've all got one in our skulls, and computers provide a simplified metaphor to help us conceive of it, but I cannot imagine a conscious machine. How do you model self-awareness? How do we code that up, what is the hardware like? We not only monitor our universe, we monitor ourselves monitoring it.

Forget the big bang or string theory, particle physics or molecular biology or even Unified Field Theory. The Problem of Consciousness is the single most baffling, unexpected and important issue facing science today, and we've been staring it in the face for at least as long as we've been writing about it and have not yet made the slightest bit of progress towards making any sense of it.