What is logic?

[Little Rik]

Easy answer to your question.  

The very reason why the scientific community has yet to give an answer to the question that you just put forward is because these people think that by studying the mind and the brain they can come up with the answer.
Unfortunately these folks never realized that the answer lie in the PRACTICE not in theories.

As far as these folks will keep on engaging in theories and not in practice they will never ever come up with understanding how the system works.
Yoga knew the answer 7000 years ago because yoga is 1 or 2% theory and 98-99% practice.

Unfortunately you and your professor will have to bang your heads hundreds or thousand of times  before you will do the right thing and get out the corral of dogmas in which you guys are.

Wow. Wow.

Do you honestly think that science gets done "only in theory"? Do you honestly have even the faintest idea of how scientists work? Do you know how experiments are designed? Do you know what a painstaking effort it is to validate the data that you get from observations? Do you know how hard it is for a study to pass peer review and get published by reputable sources?

A scientist's job is not to spew theories disconnected from reality. Scientists observe systems and with the data they get they make a model of how the system works. The model then gets tested again and again to corroborate and correct it. It's not theory, it's practice. WAY more practice than you think.

You obviously have grown up with the myth of the arrogant, know-it-all, aloof scientist, and it really does show in the way you approach scientific subjects.

Wrong again Luc.
Nothing to do with arrogant and all to do with practice.
Practice lead to the realization whether the theory is correct or not.
What you think is practice is not.
Consciousness is an abstract entity remember that Luc.
Scientists do not understand yet that to understand the abstract you got to use an abstract tool not a physical one and this is the very point that scientists still have to understand that is why they are not getting anywhere.