Consciousness as a brain function

[Belacqua]

According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

I find Dehaene's reasons for dismissing the hard problem of consciousness to be too simple. 

First, he says that consciousness can be explained by the fact that "molecular machinery inside our cells forms a self-reproducing automaton." 

But how does an automaton give an individual subject conscious experience? The whole point is to avoid some kind of miniature homunculus which exists inside the brain, doing our experiencing for us. 

Then he says, "the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes." Which would be big if true. But the example he gives of how this is supposed to happen explains nothing: "current models of visual perception already explain not only why the human brain suffers from a variety of visual illusions but also why such illusions would appear in any rational machine confronted with the same computational problem." [p.314]

That the brain suffers from illusions in no way addresses the jump from sensory input through the nerves to experience.

So it may be a good book on the correlation between brain activity and consciousness -- in other words, "When we are conscious, this and this happen." But it doesn't address how electrochemical events in the brain are experienced by subjects. 

If he does a better job of this later on, maybe you can find it. I didn't.