[Serious] What is the current best scientific evidence we have that shows that consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

I think the real issue with explaining consciousness is how, as a physical phenomena, it appears so different from other physical phenomena.  It appears non-physical, more like an abstract.

That's a good way to put it.  Consciousness is the brain's manipulation of abstractions.  So there is no need to reify consciousness at all.

That's the central point of control theories, that consciousness is or reports on a set of a useful abstractions.  Not an accurate view of the systems operation or components.  The simplest machine analogy (and something we know is actually a part of the system itself for a fact) being a body model bounding box.  A bounding box is not an accurate representation of the object.  The inaccuracy of a bounding box is not a glitch or a bug, either... but how it functions as a part of control in a body schema.  The buffer between your edges and a post.  It could be tighter..and if it were tighter you'd be more coordinated, less clumsy but also more prone to near misses.  This happens over the natural course of our lives as we develop from infancy into adulthood, but can also be hurried along by practice and..as ever, harmed by damage to the brain and by the natural degradation of the brain in old age.  At any point, we can get the margin wrong and find ourselves stuck struck or out of luck. In this, consciousness acts exactly like other physical phenomena..though the other physical phenomena it acts like was something we weren't aware of when we were staking all this out.

There are fun implications to this. For example, a mirror test may turn out to be an even more imperfect marker of internal content than we initially thought. It stands to reason that an inaccurate body model might not recognize it's accurate self in a reflection. If bodies can be modeled, can attention be modeled? Does this type of system architecture have multiple uses...and would those multiple uses present themselves as even more (and even more inaccurate) things? Why and how we get wrong what we get wrong is a very productive avenue for studying consciousness.