Consciousness

[GrandizerII]

As always, people using key words in different senses. There's consciousness in the functional sense (where it's basically information processing) and there's consciousness in the phenomenological sense (which is what I believe the OP is centered on).

From Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts by Stanislas Dehaene.

Different aspects of consciousness:
The subcortical conscious state (sleep, dreaming, waking).
Cortical/thalamic vigilance.
Attention, which is focusing on specific information. “Attention’s sieve operates largely unconsciously – attention is dissociable from conscious access.”
Phenomenal awareness, which equals qualia.
Conscious access, which is the information which enters awareness (genuine consciousness). “At any given time, a massive flow of sensory stimulation reaches our senses, but our conscious mind seems to gain access to only a very small amount of it.” While its potential repertoire is vast, at any given moment its actual repertoire is dramatically limited. It must withdraw from one item in order to gain access to another. Subcortical wakefulness, cortical/thalamic vigilance, and attention “are just enabling conditions for conscious access.” Scientists can study conscious access through a variety of methods, which the book details.

So yes, consciousness is complicated.

Sure, consciousness is complicated, the same with the human brain, and the same with the human body overall. And the same with a lot of other things in this world.

But there is one aspect of what we are labeling "consciousness" that appears to have a whole other layer of complexity, and it's the one to do with phenomenal awareness.

All these other aspects, as complicated as they may be, are relatively easy to come up with [at least plausible] theoretical/scientific explanations for. Even if neuroscience were still sort of in its infancy, we have already been able to unearth various mechanisms underlying these aspects, and if we haven't yet, we can at least conceptualize potential mechanisms to account for these aspects without needing to invoke something mystical. We can "reverse engineer" these aspects, so to speak, to the underlying physical/biological processes. 

We don't currently have this same luxury when it comes to phenomenological experience, though. The mechanistic explanation for this continues to elude us, even conceptually. Because the experience is nothing like other physical objects/processes we observe or study. It seems to not be physical and yet not be abstract either. When I feel an intense pain, it doesn't feel abstract, it feels real. And it's not real like a physical object is real or a physical process is real, it's real in some different manner. And it feels so contrary to materialism that some have even gone so far to argue it must be an illusion, that we must be mistaken about the one thing that we thought we infallibly knew existed.