I also haven't read the book, but at first glance, I strongly dispute the statement that consciousness "does nothing else". The "part" of consciousness, so to

I also haven't read the book, but at first glance, I strongly dispute the statement that consciousness "does nothing else". The "part" of consciousness, so to speak, that most troubles modern philosophers and neurologists and the like is the subjective experience that each of us has. My favorite example of how we know we experience subjectivity is the classic "inverted spectrum" puzzle: What if what I see when I look at a red apple is the same as what you see when you look at a green apple? What if the way I experience blue and yellow is opposite from the way you do, so that if my mind was somehow "swapped" with yours the sky and the ocean would appear yellow and canaries and cheddar cheese would look blue? Is there any way to know? Regardless of your answers to the above questions, the very fact that we can ask that question intelligibly demonstrates that we intuitively understand that I experience the world subjectively and so do you. A common conclusion of the puzzle is the idea that we can't ever know what another person's experience of color is because of course we aren't them; put another way, our experiences are inherently subjective. It's true that the light waves that our brains interpret as color objectively behave a certain way, but the actual colors that we see are the conscious experience of our brain's interpretation of the light waves.