Well, here's what Gerald Edelman knows about consciousness:

Competition for advantage in the environment enhances the spread and strength of certain synapses, or neural connections, according to the "value" previously decided by evolutionary survival. The amount of variance in this neural circuitry is very large. Certain circuits get selected over others because they fit better with whatever is being presented by the environment. In response to an enormously complex constellation of signals, the system is self-organizing according to Darwin's population principle. It is the activity of this vast web of networks that entails consciousness by means of what we call "reentrant interactions" that help to organize "reality" into patterns. The thalamocortical networks were selected during evolution because they provided humans with the ability to make higher order discriminations and adapt in a superior way to their environment. Such higher order discriminations confer the ability to imagine the future, to explicitly recall the past and to be conscious of being conscious. Because each loop reaches closure by completing its circuit through the varying paths from the thalamus to the cortex and back, the brain can "fill in" and provide knowledge beyond that which you immediately hear, see or smell. The resulting discriminations are known in philosophy as qualia. These discriminations account for the intangible awareness of mood, and they define the greenness of green and the warmness of warmth. Together, qualia make up what we call consciousness.

Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (Yale University Press, 2004)