Thank you for sharing this. The question of consciousness has always fascinated me.

Chalmers, too, reports plenty of progress, telling Nature that the problem of consciousness “has gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.”

I think this is where I stand currently, even as a fairly strict materialist. The fact there is any predictive power in some of these developing models shows that progress can and will be made toward answering this question. It’s just a question of how much we can know and how quickly our models can evolve.